he ascribes to poetry is in the way it reminds one of the unfathomable excesses within “things”—that which goes beyond their conceptual “reality” as “dumb real objects.” The body itself would be just such a “dumb real object,” a “callous shell,” if it weren’t constantly interposed with associative sensations that prompt it to “talk wildly,” to adopt new models or playfully turn “traitor” to its typical habits of behavior, framed by a static concept of self. Instead, “Being” is found, Whitman says later, in a “villain touch” that extends beyond any concept, and that suggests a certain bodily liberty over conceptual models of self: “All truths wait in all things…. What is less or more than a touch?”103 What you see represented in Whitman’s poem is a manifold or categorical person, but what you feel and experience in the seeing of this “person” is an act of touching, a contraction of feeling and thinking that is part of the radical potential figured by the piece. As in Bradley’s Life, Whitman’s avatar figure can be viewed as an attempt at achieving a legible and outward-directed view of freedom within the increasingly restrictive context of “reformist interiority and middle-class institutionalism.”104 The cost of this legibility is implication in a system of possibilities that is not, strictly speaking, free in the most powerful sense of the word. “Both in and out of the game,” the avatar is a figure that exists avowedly with one foot in the rule systems or ideologies of its moment: in this case, the interiorization of culturally dictated identity categories, outward character as the representation of self, and a general drive toward human proceduralization that corresponded to specific forms of technological growth and engagement in the middle nineteenth century.105
Yet, as we have seen, both Bradley and Whitman’s representative interventions use these ideological poles as tools to leverage the agential, using legibility to imagine a parallel and tactically unpredictable ability. In Bradley’s game, players were encouraged to see matrices of traditional values as opportunities for crafting an accountable and publicly materialized individual agency. This agency was undoubtedly bounded by the underlying algorithms of the game, but these algorithms became the basis for strategic habituations that a player could transpose into a mathematically complex number of recombinations suited to different situations. Similarly, Whitman’s “Song of Myself” used ambivalent pronouns, repetitive syntax, and complex lists of “American” character traits to visualize the poetic speaker as a model for a self, an avatar that could legibly incarnate—“celebrate” itself even—and fully interact with the world around it without an assumed divide between thought and feeling. In Whitman, the recombination of known quantities, achieved by putting atemporal representations in contact with temporal realities, forms a basis for thinking through how a “someone” becomes an agent, how a “you” becomes an “I,” as well as how this process is both figured and given matter on the page—not just for writers but for readers as well. To read game and poem together is to disallow certain all-too-easy erasures of dimension, to remain focused on elements of media interaction that were a part of everyday life, and to take seriously the idea that authors and readers were aware of these dimensions. The construction of self and avatar was indebted not only to conceptual or grammatical innovations but also to the cognitive environments that gave a body to these innovations.
Before developing these embodiments further in the chapter that follows, it’s worth reinforcing that Bradley and Whitman, examined in parallel, give us considerable insight into the specific range of resources being employed to reimagine agency in the mid-century moment: fixations on the graphic affordances of visual media, attempts to materialize the potentials and limitations of categorical forms, and deployments of interactivity used as a way to constitute social bodies both near and on paper. In both Bradley and Whitman, it is clear that the important value may not be whether you win or lose but how you play the game. Yet in both it is equally apparent that no matter how we may wish it, we never play alone—the question of “how you play” is given shape by materials outstripping any individual. Teasing out the implications of this operative social agency, an “individualism” conditioned and incarnated, if not fully dictated, by nonindividual interactions, requires a move into the less celebratory, more darkly lit territory of confidence men and transformation games.
CHAPTER 2
A Fresh and Liberal Construction
State Machines, Transformation Games, and Algorithms of the Interior
Well, I see it’s good to out with one’s private thoughts now and then.
Somehow, I don’t know why, a certain misty suspiciousness seems
inseparable from most of one’s private notions about some men and
some things; but once out with these misty notions, and their mere
contact with other men’s soon dissipates, or, at least, modifies them.
—Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man (1857)
Anything but a private man, the bumbling Peter Coddle is the star of a most enigmatic nineteenth-century narrative—a misty lack of information characterizes his every turn in the text. Succumbing to fatigue midway through his journey from fictitious rural Hogginsville to New York City, he returns to his carriage for some rest and recuperation: “I put my quizzing glass away, laid back in my seat, and took a good snooze, with a cup of coffee for a pillow.”1 Alternatively, “I put my quizzing glass away, laid back in my seat, and took a good snooze, with a quart of caterpillars for a pillow.” Moreover, there is some doubt whether it was “a quart of caterpillars”; the pillow could have been “an Irishman” as well. Or “a Dutch farmer.” Or “half a dozen doughnuts.”2
These variations are not the result of printer’s error or editorial dispute over final authorial intention. They are, in fact, an integral part of the story; any one of them (and many others) might be correctly substituted. This is because Peter Coddle’s Trip to New York (1858) is both a short narrative and a self-described “Game of Transformations,” the nineteenth-century equivalent of what we today are most familiar with as Mad Libs (Figure 7).3 Using premade cards containing various article-noun combinations, players would fill in the blanks to produce readable (if absurd) sentences, creating a slightly different story every time they played. In this game, William Simonds—a Boston-area newspaperman and printer who moved into the children’s-book trade under the pseudonym “Walter Aimwell”—had produced a “Literary Puzzle” that conceived of the text as a kind of equation, with words in the place of numerical constants and syntactic blanks in the place of algebraic variables. The “misty notion” of a narrative outlined by this form was made concrete in the manifold moments of player “contact” that made up the game—literalizing the nearly systematic interplay of anxious absence and confident social contact that is equally essential to Herman Melville’s notorious “problem novel,” The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). Making no pretensions to high literary art, Simonds’s game nonetheless provides an important technical perspective on the operations and operators at the core of Melville’s text, with its patchwork of dubious characters, like undefined algorithms, “modifie[d]” by a revolving door of masquerading avatars and accompanying arguments.
Figure 7. Peter Coddle’s Trip to New York. Boston: Gould & Lincoln, 1858. Courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York.
Initially embedded within the youth-targeted novel Jessie; or, Trying to Be Somebody, the reading game of Peter Coddle’s Trip crystallized a functional perspective on story making and character that suffused the work, as
