Loving Literature

A Cultural History

Deidre Shauna Lynch

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780226598390, 9780226183701
• eBook ISBN: 9780226183848
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

One of the most common—and wounding—misconceptions about literary scholars today is that they simply don't love books. While those actually working in literary studies can easily refute this claim, such a response risks obscuring a more fundamental question: why should they?

That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have played a vital role in the formation of private life—that the love of literature, in other words, is deeply embedded in the history of literature. Yet at the same time, our love is neither self-evident nor ahistorical: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history.

While never denying the very real feelings that warm our relationship to books, Loving Literature nonetheless serves as a riposte to those who use the phrase "the love of literature" as if its meaning were transparent. Lynch writes, "It is as if those on the side of love of literature had forgotten what literary texts themselves say about love's edginess and complexities." With this masterly volume, Lynch restores those edges and allows us to revel in those complexities.

PART 1

Choosing an Author as You Choose a Friend

CHAPTER ONE

Making It Personal

It is not enough to admire. Admiration is a cold feeling.

HUGH BLAIR, lecturing to his students at the University of Edinburgh ca. 1760–62

Machiavelli, whom Milton admired, reasoned that a prince who was feared would survive longer than one who was loved. Literature does not work that way.

GARY TAYLOR, “Milton and Shakespeare: Battle of the Bards,” Time Magazine, May 15, 2008

Thanks to mediation, we are surrounded with communication situations that are fundamentally interpretive rather than dialogic. Only the Lonelyhearts of the world expect a personal reply from the movie, phonograph record, or radio program. Or to be more precise, we are all Lonelyhearts inasmuch as we “interact” with books, pets, infants, or distant correspondents.

JOHN DURHAM PETERS, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (2001)

“THE PROPERTIES . . . OF FLESH AND BLOOD”

In the early twentieth century, the original designers of the home telephone took pains to give it an anthropomorphic appearance, meaning thereby to ease the transition to prosthetized speech. The candlestick phone’s bodily presence—the rounded contours, which accommodated beholders’ efforts to see in it a resemblance to the human form, the positioning of the transmitter, which obliged those placing or taking calls to engage the instrument “face” to “face”—helped to reassure the new technology’s users, who still hesitated to equate electronic sounds transmitted across wires with real human voices. “One is not alone or speaking to oneself; the instrument, ‘like’ a human figure, stands before one’s eyes, responding to one’s gestures, listening with its own ear.”1 The twenty-first century has had reason to repeat those lessons in personalization, coping with the various computational creatures that have been designed to interact with humans sociably and elicit humans’ attachments. Robotic pets such as Tamagotchi, for instance, present themselves as objects with whom we might relate and might even exchange tendernesses. Nowadays, accordingly, computer scientists’ discussions of “aliveness” involve more than assessments of robotic intelligence and competence. They also involve experiences of robot connection and of ethical commitments to robot well-being.

Sherry Turkle comments that now that we have begun to share our emotional lives with these “non-biological” “relational artefacts,” it is high time that humans pondered seriously just what “loving” has come to mean.2 I believe such sharing and pondering have gone on longer than Turkle acknowledges. For in the eighteenth century, a comparable kind of anthropomorphizing numbered among the several transformations that led to the emergence onto the cultural stage of literature in the modern sense of the term. This century witnessed various projects intended to affirm the humanity that was lodged in the artifacts of the book market and thus to close some of the gaps between the living world and the paper world. “Literature” owed much to new stories about authors, about the figure of the literary genius particularly, and to hermeneutic procedures that attached writing to a self-expressive, original, outsize personality—as opposed, say, to casting it as an imitation of the best models, or a reiteration of favorite stories, or a citation from a Book of Nature conceptualized as an intertext of multiple correspondences and connections. Literary biography helped produce among print’s eighteenth-century consumers the sense of a passionate human presence, a supererogatory something lying behind certain books that made them something more than repositories of disembodied words. Taken as a group, biographies (especially collective biographies such as Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, whose reception history focuses this chapter’s second half) worked to establish that in their private lives too the authors were a breed apart—a proposition that served to buttress the claims of literature in that new, narrowed sense of the term. And by the early nineteenth century, the biographical writers’ and biographical readers’ determination to individuate authors and personalize writing had helped bring about a consequential transition. The old literary “lists”—the most apt rubric for the hybrids of authorial dictionaries and catalogues of worthies that had appeared on the scene in the seventeenth century—gave way to something more demanding and deserving of emotional investment, a literary canon.3

Trying out a thought experiment in which the history of the love of literature figures as part of this larger history of nonbiological relational artifacts, I am not, of course, contending that before literature assumed its modern meaning in the eighteenth century, readers of poetry and narrative had no regard for authors.4 The seventeenth-century catalogues I just mentioned are evidence to the contrary. Nor do I mean to suggest that we will get a handle on the love of literature simply by determining the number of authors the category comprehends and then tallying up the amount of affection that readers expend in their love for each of them. A more complicated calculus is at issue in this affective economy. Since the eighteenth century, the love of literature has been shaped, in addition, by newly nationalized concepts of the cultural heritage, new concepts of home and home life, adaptations of the old liturgical calendar, and modern concepts of historical distance, the historical period, and of nostalgia—as my subsequent chapters will indicate. But throughout this book I am presupposing a close relation between, on the one hand, the rearrangements and reclassifications of discourse that produced literature as a distinct category and, on the other hand, an emerging consensus that the transactions that would count as literary would involve heart-to-heart relations. They would involve, as well, what was most individual in the reader’s individuality.

Our bookish activities need not always be a forum for interpersonal relations. Michel Foucault reminded us of this fact in an essay that has been seminal for many self-reflexive investigations of the discipline of English. Whereas, following the seventeenth century, the authority of scientific discourse would increasingly be a function of that discourse’s facelessness and detachment from particular biographical entities, the reverse happened with “literary discourse,” which, Foucault proposed, “was acceptable only if it carried an author’s name.” In those texts we now call literary, individuals take possession of language and make it express their selves. In another essay on authorship, Leah Marcus thinks analogously about how strangely cacophonous early modern books can look to modern eyes, thanks to their first users’ habit of converting books’ margins and blank pages to discrepant purposes and of binding together unrelated, multiply-authored materials between the covers of a single volume. She comments that in the Renaissance “the bound printed book” was conceptualized less as a “surrogate body of the author” and more “as a storage unit”—like, she proposes, a portfolio file or a computer disk. Of course, there was also, in the Renaissance, a countervailing tendency to understand the book as a surrogate self of its author, as Marcus concedes. This “hybridization between the human organism and technology” (a term Marcus uses when discussing John Milton’s understanding of authorial presence) gained ground with time.5 In 1759 a contributor to the Critical Review declared accordingly that “we are desirous of attaching esteem to the person of an ingenious writer; we love to compare the lineaments of his mind with the features of his face.”6

This chapter investigates certain eighteenth-century readers’ accounts of the benefits and obligations that followed when, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge later put it, “poems . . . assume the properties of flesh and blood.”7 Throughout I emphasize the resistances that made the emergence of an account of literary reading as a personal matter an uneven process. The traces that those resistances have left in the writings of the eighteenth-century architects of English deserve a higher profile when we historicize our disciplinary object. Their neglect has sustained, and been sustained by, an understanding of reading as a straightforward process of acculturation and of readers as passive receptacles: I contend, however, that just that understanding needs to be contested if we are to see how the literary affections have a history. Following an overview that builds on and redirects some recent analyses of the eighteenth-century making of the English canon so as to foreground this issue, the first half of this chapter investigates descriptions of literature as a gift that genius bestows on posterity and corresponding descriptions of the love of literature as a grateful love. With the mobilization of the author function, literary reading became subject to new expectations of affective obligation and dilemmas of affective entanglement. Accordingly, talk of what it meant to love literature was necessarily in dialogue, as I will show, with the period’s discussions of freedom and constraint and equality and hierarchy: discussions in which gratitude was a burden to be carried, as well as an emotional state engendered spontaneously.

In its second half, this chapter turns to Johnson’s Lives and Boswell’s Life of Johnson and highlights in these texts Johnson’s expressions of discomfiture over the very arrangements for biographical reading that he himself had advanced, suggesting that he also mistrusted these arrangements as an occasion for emotional profligacy. Johnson can sometimes look to be convinced that any amount of love for an object that cannot reciprocate one’s affections is already a case of loving too much. I tack between his uneasiness with the way that readerly transactions with poetry were being pressured by the imperatives of a new age of sensibility and the sometimes explicitly anti-Johnsonian modeling of the role of the lover of literature undertaken by Anna Seward, who disagreed with Johnson about how a subject ought to conduct herself in relationship to aesthetic objects.

I want, however, to begin at some distance from these case studies in how “aesthetics” lines up with “ethos” and “philia” in the era of the man and woman of feeling, and so I begin a little earlier in the eighteenth century. Let us start by marking some eighteenth-century instances in which the proposition that aesthetic experience was a scene of personal congress gets belied just where we might expect it to be credited.

USING, ADMIRING, LOVING

It can be disorienting, for instance, to look at printed collections of poetry from the early eighteenth century—the ancestors of the multivolume anthology of English verse for which in 1777–81 Johnson produced his Lives of the English Poets as prefaces. These earlier collections are not really about authorial achievement at all. Falling short in the anthropomorphizing department, they thwart our wish to see in them the sources of more modern habits of literary appreciation. Take, for instance, from 1738, The British Muse, or a Collection of Thoughts Moral, Natural, and Sublime of Our English Poets. The editor of this compilation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse, Thomas Hayward, arranged for his books’ contents to be arrayed “according to the Order of Time in which [our English poets] wrote.” That format, of course, remains fundamental to the discipline’s presentation of “literature”: it is partly in becoming an object with a past that literature comes into visibility in the discursive field. At the same time, the announced motive for Hayward’s choice of organizational scheme, which is “to shew the gradual Improvements of our Poetry and Language,” evokes an unfamiliar account of how that past unfolded as a story.8 The determination that chronology should reveal “Improvement,” and so poetry’s perfectibility, might seem to us wrongheaded. (For later antiquarians smitten with medieval romances, among many others, it would instead be axiomatic that literature by its nature could not conform to the linear shape of a progressive history, and that instead genius flourished most in the earliest stages of society.) Even odder is the framework to which this chronological presentation is subordinated in The British Muse. The three volumes are in fact arranged alphabetically, and the letters of the alphabet are the finding aids that one uses to discover not authors’ names but poetical topics. Thus volume 1 commences with Abbeys. Under that heading Hayward arrays, moving forward through time, excerpts of Shakespeare’s drama and verse by Samuel Daniel and others. Next comes Absence: a sequence that makes it seem, evocatively, as if the anthologist were rehearsing the history of the Reformation and of the passing of the faith of his fathers, a loss that had also been referenced in the first passage found under the Abbeys heading, from a source identified as “Shakespeare’s Cromwell” (i.e., Henry VIII, that favorite of eighteenth-century playgoers). Under Absence, one finds verse by (in chronological order) Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, John Donne (represented by “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” though, disconcertingly, not in its entirety), Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, and Sir John Suckling. The first volume, having taken us from A through F in the alphabet, ends with the heading Friend. Though it features the same authors, this eighteenth-century proto-anthology reads less like the textbooks professors of English assign in survey classes and more like an overgrown index.

A later example of this phenomenon, The Beauties of Poetry Display’d, from 1757, documents the contemporary scene, rather than documenting poetry’s past and paying homage “to neglected and expiring merit” as Hayward had twenty years earlier.9 However, it shares the format of its predecessor, likewise embracing the impersonality of alphabetical order in a way that seems to make poetical images and sentiments float free of the people who are poets. The definition of language as a self-expressive medium that will inform later accounts of literary genius, the presupposition that literary texts might be read biographically for hints of the history of feelings that they vouchsafe to a sensitive reader: these are accommodated badly by this book. Having opened The Beauties of Poetry Display’d, the reader begins with the heading Abandoned, illustrated by a long extract from Alexander Pope’s Sappho to Phaon and also an extract from a poem of Mrs. [Aphra] Behn’s. Then one moves to Age, golden, iron, etc. and encounters a specimen of “Wharton’s Virgil” (the edition prepared by Joseph Warton); thence to Animaculus—represented by James Thomson’s The Seasons—and to Astonishment—Hamlet and Julius Caesar; and finally to Autumn—a poem by “Mrs.” [Mary] Leapor. Next up is the letter B.

These poetry collections register an unfamiliar understanding of English poetry as existing to be used, rather than existing to be read and appreciated.10 In his overview of “All of the Collections of This Kind That Were Ever Published” that he contributed as a preface to the third volume of The British Muse, William Oldys mentions Edward Bysshe’s The Art of English Poetry (first published in 1703 and by the 1730s in its eighth edition):11 the latter is a book in which the “Collection of the most Natural, Agreable, and Sublime Thoughts . . . . that are to be found in the best English poets” ends up placed cheek by jowl with “A Dictionary of Rhymes.” That reference to Bysshe thus confirms how from a certain angle these collections resemble how-to manuals. They also resemble ready-made commonplace books, their digests of the poetic tradition easing the work load for the would-be collector of commonplaces. For the books not only preselect poetic flowers and nuggets of meaningfulness. They also set out in advance the headings that a reader should use in tabulating these.12 Such motives had for some time shaped the editorial practice of the booksellers and compilers who mediated between poets and publics. In,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: At Home in English
• part 1: choosing an author as you choose a friend
• part 2: possessive love
• part 3: english literature for everyday use
• part 4: dead poets societies
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index