much more than one of recording their occurrence. Through its field of reference, this literature profits from a human willingness to perceive objects, and to perceive media in particular, as being beyond human control.
From Marx to Media Theory
I have drawn in the spirit of this argument on the strong tradition of Marxian critics, from Lukács and Horkheimer and Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Axel Honneth, critiquing the tendency to ascribe objectivity to history and technology; to assume a passive relationship to its unfolding. Jameson, for instance, has always distanced himself as a Marxian critic from a particular brand of technological determinism. Critiquing historians of media, he argues:
nothing is further from Marxism than the stress on invention and technique as the primary cause of historical change. Indeed, it seems to me that such theories (of the kind which regard the steam engine to have been the cause of the industrial revolution …) function as a substitute for Marxist historiography in the way they offer a feeling of completeness comparable to economic subject matter, at the same time that they dispense with any consideration of the human factors of classes and of the social organization of production.41
The efforts of eighteenth-century writers to imagine print as more powerful than they are reinforce Jameson’s point about this way of thinking as a teleological error. Texts referencing the proliferation and power of print cannot simply be read as evidence of these facts. In Jameson’s terms, to do so is to overlook the social and class-based conditions of a book’s existence. This means, however, that a book that turns reflexively to these conditions qualifies as part of the human struggle to claim ownership of them. While I am entirely sympathetic to this possibility, I have discovered in the course of writing this book that theories placing literature on the side of Marxist historiography, and against technodeterminism, do not quite capture the phenomenon that makes mid-eighteenth-century texts operative as knowing objects.
Some frameworks I have found more helpful in understanding eighteenth-century cases are those developed by media theorists to explain the imaginative appeal of media in renouncing control over the things we have made. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, for instance, describe the simultaneous awareness and forgetting that modern audiences experience through what they term “remediation,” a process that calls one medium to mind as a human construction while insinuating another as the purely technological venue for this reminder.42 This framework offers one way to describe how books representing aspects of writing, such as manuscript production or the economic struggles of authors, accomplish a certain invisibility for themselves as human productions. Gitelman’s description of the development of a twentieth-century “tendency to naturalize or essentialize media—in short, to cede to them a history that is more powerfully theirs than ours” also turns out to be relevant to an earlier period.43 Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (2006), focuses on the phonograph and the worldwide web at their inaugural moments because, Gitelman argues, it is when a medium is new that it is negotiated and contested, thereby providing a site for the “the ongoing and vernacular experience of representation as such.”44 Once people are won over to a new medium, they accept its authority as an instrument for the collection and storage of data, and this initial moment of consciousness about representation dies down into discussions of content that, regardless of tone, grant authority to the medium. This analysis is helpful in pinpointing what is happening in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, where the culture of self-consciousness worked-up through literary production targets the means, rather than the content, of print representation, but quickly helps characterize these means as unavoidable.
In a different vein, I have found inspiration in Bruno Latour’s insistence on the false distinction between nature and society, subject and object. For Latour, the human tendency to attribute objectivity to certain phenomena while defining others as purely social characterizes all modern, social scientific enterprise. With forms of critique and indignation premised on the idea of nature and society falsely encroaching on each other, he argues that we are impeded in recognizing the quasi-objects that are in fact constitutive of our existence, entities that have a life of their own although they originate in the social, or that rely on collective human practice even though they originate in objective reality. Latour includes as such objects IBM, the laws of gravity, global warming, and the computer. These things are our own doing and yet they feed, though our own desire to separate the natural from the social, either into our experience of a world that is beyond our control, or into our belief in there being a purely social dimension. In this separation, their quasi-objectivity is lost to us.
The books in this study can be seen as earlier versions of such quasi-objects. Discursive constructions that loom over their readers and authors as evidence of print and its circulation being outside their control, material objects compromised in their autonomy by the discourses to which they refer and on which they rely for their existence, their being makes it inappropriate to describe them either as social constructions or as autonomous objects. As paper and print, they do have a physical constitution, but this life is not nearly so distinct from their intentionality as their authors would have us believe. Lloyd’s “Powers of the Pen,” which bemoans the way inscription technology drives modern literary production, is typical of the literary climate we must describe. Rather than taking Lloyd’s description of literary production at face value, the challenge is to consider the way the poem projects forward a wry understanding of itself as printed product, thereby helping to create the sovereignty for writing, and the disenfranchisement of the writer, of which it appears most critical.
CHAPTER 1
Powerlessness as Entertainment
Intrusive Narration
In the years before and immediately after Tristram Shandy appeared, a significant number of lesser-known but equally self-conscious novels were published. Most of these contain only moderately interestingly romances, adventures, and life narratives. But they are framed and delivered by well-characterized narrators possessed of the disarming power to describe the flaws of novel writing and to reprimand and banter with fictional readers. The narrator of one of the more successful fictions of the period, the anonymous History of Charlotte Summers, the Fortunate Parish Girl (1750), comments in this spirit on the interpretive activities of those reading the novel. His intrusions include addresses to “Miss Censorious,” who is told not “to run too quick upon a malicious Scent,” and to readers who are permitted to “yawn a little” while the narrator rests to “smoak a serious Pipe.”1 In the second volume, the “numerous Tribe of Criticks, who may find materials sufficient in this work to employ their malicious talents” is hailed as a force from which the author must be saved (2:52). Charlotte is introduced as a character to be “dressed and presented” and installed within the papery mansion of the book, where readers are invited to visit her (1:13).
As such gestures illustrate, the entity that fictions like Charlotte Summers appear to know best is a reader whose mood oscillates between boredom and frustration. “You are much obliged to me,” claims the narrator of The Temple Beau or the Town Coquets (1753) in justification of an abridgement, “if I cure you of that impatience, which many Readers are seized with, to know the End of a Story.”2 More specifically, these fictions anticipate a reader in the physical throes of reading or of mishandling a text. The brazen narrator of Edward Long’s The Anti-Gallican; or, The History and Adventures of Harry Cobham, Esquire (1757) flags the hardship of reading a bad novel by advising that “if, after traveling through half a dozen Pages, you find your senses gradually declining into a heavy Torpitude, halt directly, and advance no further without the repelling Aid of Tea or Coffee.”3 In John Kidgell’s The Card (1755), the narrator claims to have included an illustration of the ten of clubs, on which a message is written, in order to increase the chances of his novel being rescued from its fate as waste paper by a child’s seeing the illustration:
as probably the labourious compilers of the History
