midst of an evolutionary engagement over the issue of repurposing and embedded use. Rather than being the passive deployment of supposedly neutral instruments, such “use” was instead a variety of insistent experimentation within an interleaved topography of body and medium. Whether it be Whitman’s redefinition of character as choice making on and across the page (use as the rehearsal of personal judgment), Melville’s iterative staging of social confidence games (use as manipulation), Barnum and tangram players’ exploitation of the thresholds between text and paratext (use as limited reinvention), Phelan and Hawthorne’s representations of dispositional change through targeting practices (use as site of perspectival potential), or Anne Abbot and the later Milton Bradley’s emphasis on social entanglement and waiting (use as generative waste), the perpetual use of at-hand cultural materials became a central mode of self-making in an era when traditional ways of adjudicating character were being left by the wayside.
This was not a self made but a gerund-y and insistent making; it was a historical moment when, as Scott A. Sandage writes, “A rising ‘business man’ embodied true selfhood and citizenship: the man in motion, the driving-wheel, never idle, never content.” The requirement of constant change was accompanied by the persistent risk of failure—of inventing a business, a technology, or a self that failed to live up to its promise, by failing to resonate with the social body as a whole.60 The rise and importance of the games addressed in Slantwise Moves speaks to a desire to plot such failures on a continuum, to enable inventive change despite the (often profound) human risk associated with each move this change necessitated. The works discussed here prefigure a need that advances into our own time, when critics call for reconceiving “associations as sites of inventive alternatives … and not simply as reflections of preexisting or predetermined values.”61 While the rhetoric of “invention” has attained the valence of a dead metaphor (a replacement for “creative” or “imaginative”), tactically critical and locally embedded use was staged by way of both formal and material mechanisms in nineteenth-century games, and often, as I argue, in literature as well. This project continues the work called for in the conclusion of Bercovitch’s Rites of Assent, where he contends, “We will never properly understand [American writers’] force of enterprise, speculation, and invention until we set this firmly within a history of American enterprise, speculation, and invention in the nineteenth century.”62 Supplementing the local comparative work done by individual chapters, Slantwise Moves situates major authors of the mid-nineteenth century within a history of invention by looking at procedural amusements as an interface between the representational and the mechanical, refusing to see writing and reading as immaterial practices. If Bercovitch’s imperative carries at least the faint suggestion of an impossible or purely metaphorical span between the abstract figural inventions of “writing” and the physical inventions of “history”—history as a forensic “context” emanating explanations for the literary—then one aim of my book is to trouble that distance and do the work of tracing the intermediaries native to writing, bodies, and things. The goal is not homology (or not only homology) but a flattened look at the conditions through which certain social practices, social habits, and social bodies are produced around and with media.
Examining the figures and forms of mid-nineteenth-century games in the United States allows us to understand literature in conversation with a complex and evolving commercial marketplace of things, a conversation that facilitates one of literature’s core functions as historical repository. To find meaning in literary objects, critical scholarship must reconstruct the social environments that allow(ed) them to signify; yet it has often proven difficult to track a set of associations that are based on motion and spatiality and operational possibility using what are assumed to be nonprocedural forms (that is, novels, poems, autobiographies). As a result, critical methodologies fixate on the immobile, the institutional, and a historiography of increasingly obliterated time. These perspectives are crucial, and yet they risk leaving out the temporal local activities of daily life that are enacted and reiterated by gameplay and reading. Here timing, movement, and sociality were always, and often explicitly, at issue. For those seeking a deeper understanding of the interactive medial shift that was occurring across the nineteenth century—corresponding to a shift in the possibilities of the literary—games offer models of emerging procedural grammars, drawing attention to the increasingly algorithmic structures enabling the civic agencies that have been represented by American literary studies. The consequence of pairing games and literature allows us (to repurpose a phrase used by Gerry Canavan and Priscilla Wald) “to track both a shift in the formative terms of an ideology and the means by which that shift occurs.”63 In short, it allows us to create new ways of reading and to imagine old ways of playing that have important bearing on literary history, as well as literary critical practice and pedagogy.
CHAPTER 1
Both In and Out of the Game
Reform Games and Avatar Selves
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.
—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1855)
In the summer of 1860, as the owner of the only lithographic press in western Massachusetts, Milton Bradley undertook creating a standard reproducible image of Abraham Lincoln. Bradley was a capable draftsman who previously had made a living by sketching detailed patent drawings for the early inventors of the American industrial boom. Now he saw an opportunity to turn his political passion for Lincoln into a profit: working from a photograph, he sketched a painstaking likeness of the candidate’s distinctive, clean-shaven face and pressed enough copies to populate every home in New England. For a time they sold incredibly well—but Lincoln’s beard changed all that. Biographer James Shea writes, “Bradley could not believe it. But … no one wanted a lithograph of a beardless Lincoln. Some even wanted their money back.”1 Frustrated but not defeated, Bradley turned his disappointment with the scheme into a renewed energy to produce and sell a game he had invented just a few months earlier, The Checkered Game of Life (Figure 4).2
On the colorful game board, Bradley created a likeness of nineteenth-century American life—conspicuously, adult male life, though the players were assumed to span a wider demographic—that placed new emphasis on timing and decision rather than the traditional ideals of place and avocation. Play consisted in accumulating points by moving around a freeform sixty-four-square checkerboard, encouraging “a frequent choice of moves involving the exercise of judgment.”3 More than a roll of the dice, character in Life was framed as a position from which to make public and materially registered decisions; it was something you acted out as well as watched. In an urban society composed of interactions among relative strangers, publicly visible decisions—from fashion and conduct to the pointing out of sites, objects, and newspaper articles—were quickly becoming the foundation of social selfhood.4 And indeed Life’s capacity to stage a complex “exercise of judgment” on the cognitive space of a single “page” of pasteboard may account for the game’s immense popularity. When Bradley first traveled to New York City to determine interest in the game, his supply of merchandise lasted only two days; within a few months he had sold forty thousand copies.5 Clearly, this kinetic mixture of bright red ink, brass dials, and layered decision making presented a model of life that the public was eager to practice.
