The Things Things Say

Jonathan Lamb

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691171258, 9780691148069
• eBook ISBN: 9781400840083
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

One of the new forms of prose fiction that emerged in the eighteenth century was the first-person narrative told by things such as coins, coaches, clothes, animals, or insects. This is an ambitious new account of the context in which these "it narratives" became so popular. What does it mean when property declares independence of its owners and begins to move and speak? Jonathan Lamb addresses this and many other questions as he advances a new interpretation of these odd tales, from Defoe, Pope, Swift, Gay, and Sterne, to advertisements, still life paintings, and South Seas journals.

Lamb emphasizes the subversive and even nonsensical quality of what things say; their interests are so radically different from ours that we either destroy or worship them. Existing outside systems of exchange and the priorities of civil society, things in fact advertise the dissident obscurity common to slave narratives all the way from Aesop and Phaedrus to Frederick Douglass and Primo Levi, a way of meaning only what is said, never saying what is meant. This is what Defoe's Roxana calls "the Sense of Things," and it is found in sounds, substances, and images rather than conventional signs.

This major work illuminates not only "it narratives," but also eighteenth-century literature, the rise of the novel, and the genealogy of the slave narrative.

PART ONE

Property, Personification, and Idols

CHAPTER 1

Owning Things

Bags without people don’t make sense.

—Notice on municipal river transport plying the Brisbane River, Queensland, Australia

Spinoza thought that volatility of the human mind and the velocity of things were largely remedied by justice, “a fixed intentment to assign to each person what belongs to them” (Spinoza 2007: 203). This would slow the passage of property and calm the emotions. Hume was not so sure. Although distributive justice certainly hindered the rapid movement of things from hand to hand and caused a corresponding drop in turbulence of mind, there were plenty of events capable of disturbing “the stability of possession” (Hume 1978: 491) and precipitating “looseness and easy transition” among things (488). Invasions of property from outside, in the form of theft or war, could do it; or disturbance could come from the inside in the form of caprice, madness, and death. In such cases, three distinct factors would affect the tenure of property: first, the fixedness of possession would be disturbed; second, the continuity of the consciousness of possession would be interrupted; and third, a thing would be freed from the dominion of an owner, moving with varying degrees of impetus toward another, or toward independence. In the event of these contingencies, the fugitive qualities of minds and things characteristic of a state of great scarcity are restored: the food of humans flies at their approach (485), and they themselves recur to “that savage and solitary condition” that Hume always wanted to call a fiction, “a mere philosophical fiction,” “an idle fiction” (496, 493, 494) but which here defines for him the uncertain tenure of property. In the wilderness outside the city limits of Athens, the effects of such uncertainty are exactly noted by Robin Goodfellow:

Their sense thus weak, lost with their fears thus strong,

Made senseless things begin to do them wrong.

For briers and thorns at their apparel snatch;

Some sleeves, some hats—from yielders all things catch.

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.2.26–30; 1994: 190–1)

In this chapter I mean to chart the change from fixed possession to the looseness of things, and from calmness to passion, by way of introducing the manifold transformations that will be the theme of the rest of the book. But in anticipation of its eighth and tenth chapters, I want to suggest also that there is a kind of fixed tenure possible outside the government of civil society to which authors and intellectual property may jointly aspire. I have already outlined in the Prologue how sudden emergencies capsize the hierarchy of things and people, elevating the former to the condition of gods and depressing the latter to the condition of animals. These emergencies seem to arise from two antithetical motives. On the one hand, we find that the desire to fix property contractually beyond the faintest likelihood of truancy is a sure method to make it delinquent; and on the other, it is plain that to gain property without contracts is a state of war, in the course of which passions are stirred and all sorts of things take flight. The chief example I shall give of an overweening attachment to property is entail, a late innovation in the law of feudal tenure which appeared to allow an owner to own a thing forever, posthumously and without limit. I want to show how this attempt to glue things to the person was counterproductive. As for the state of war, it is useful to consider Nestor’s characterization of the man addicted to battle as cursed and outcast, “void of law and right,/ Unworthy property” (Homer 1959: 166 [IX, 63]), together with Aristotle’s comment on “the war-mad man” as one who is “like an isolated piece in a game of draughts . . . the figure of a man as an amputated hand is the figure of a hand, but neither enjoys the condition of man or hand, and is thus another thing” (Aristotle 1992: 60). I hope it will appear that as humans become more like things, things acquire the serene self-sufficiency typical of all personifications, in representing only what they are and nothing else. These personifications are the consummate agentive form of loose things, under whose dispensation human figures are so confused and passive that they can scarcely begin a history of their subjection unless they learn a thing or two from those very things, so secure in themselves.

PROPERTY

Mankind labours always in vain, and to no purpose . . .
because it does not know the limits of possession.

—Lucretius, De Rerum natura

When Blackstone said that the owner of property enjoys “that sole and despotic dominion, which one man exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the rights of any other individual in the universe” (Blackstone 1773: 2.2), he summarized a tendency in the theory and practice of property-owning that had been growing stronger since the Reformation and became explicit by the seventeenth century. Basically this tendency involved a weakening of the feudal conception of property as a conditional right, held within a network of political and social obligations, and a corresponding strengthening of an impulse toward the unconditional and exclusive appropriation of what Blackstone calls “the very substance of the thing” (2.4). The desire of such absolute possession was destined to revise the feudal division between chattels real (land and the privileges belonging to its occupier) and chattels personal, such as clothes and ornaments. Under the system of feudal tenure, the latter were considered ephemeral and relatively unimportant because they fell outside the law of seisin, which by the end of the middle ages referred solely to property recoverable in real actions—real estate in short. You could be seized in a fee—tenure of an estate—but you could not be seized in portable property. The ancient law-books, says Blackstone, “entertained a very low and contemptuous opinion of all personal estate, which they regarded as only a transient commodity” (1773: 2.384). This explains why medieval law never mentioned ownership as such, concerning itself rather with the details of the fee, which embraced rights and restrictions deriving from an original act of homage to the king extending to embrace the future line of heirs to whom the real estate would descend (Simpson1986: 41, 116, 61). This distinction between real and personal property was buttressed by a paradox. The quality which rendered tenured land real was not just its immobility but also its incorporeality, for even though it subsisted in houses, fields, and streams, these were the clothing of a set of ideas about duties and rights which cohered under the general heading of tenure. Advowsons, views of frankpledge, fee-farms, escheats, reliefs, rents, and reversions—the litter of invisible entitlements and duties that constitute the estate of Shandy in the marriage contract of Tristram’s father in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, for example—distribute fiefs as abstract entities throughout political space and genealogical time. Contrariwise it is the mere materiality of chattels personal that renders them inconsiderable and evanescent. They are no more than the weight in your hand at the moment of holding them: the substance of a thing lasts no longer than that.

The opposition between the high value of the incorporeal real and the low value of the ephemeral substance was destined to alter. Blackstone observed that the extension of commerce and trade brought mobile chattels, or personalty, almost to the level of realty. Merchants and stockjobbers took the private possession of the substances of things very seriously, having greatly augmented both the circulation and the value of articles such as “animals, household stuff, money, jewels, corn, garments, and everything else that can properly be put into motion” (2.387). What Blackstone calls “possession absolute” (2.389) comprises both right and occupancy resulting in that sole, despotic, and exclusive dominion exercised by an owner over the substance of a moveable thing; and this is owing to the elevation of personalty from its precarious status under feudal law into its robust modern form of the exchangeable commodity. As that division of property strengthened, so realty weakened, never having been susceptible to absolute possession. Various adjustments were made to laws of tenure to deal with the problem. The terms forinsec and intrinsec were coined in order to distinguish inalienable feudal duty to the crown from subinfeudation, a bargain struck over subsidiary grants and fees that were carved from the original feud (Simpson 1986: 5). Blackstone calls this the difference between proper and improper (or derivative) feuds, the former being founded on military obligation and honor, the latter being “bartered and sold . . . for a price” (2.58).

The most improper feud of all was an entail, although it masqueraded as a return to the feudal ideal of real estate as immobile in space and indivisible in descent. By means of an entail, the holder of an estate nominated a line of inheritance, usually through the males (tail male), although it could be devised for females (tail female) or for either gender (tail general). James Boswell and his father quarreled over the entailing of the Auchinleck estate, whether it should be secured for the succession of heirs general or heirs male (Boswell 1980: 666). In three important respects entail departed from the concepts on which the abstraction of real estate was founded; and in another it seemed to sustain them. What it sustained was the physical integrity of the estate, which had to descend undamaged from heir to heir; and in this it seemed to provide a guarantee for the imperishability of realty. But in the case of entail there were no heirs in the feudal sense of the term, for each succeeding occupant was in fact a tenant for life, a steward of what was only held in trust for another tenant, and so on down the line. The fee simple was lodged forever with the original donor, long dead, and each succeeding tenant was obliged to trace title not from the previous occupant of the estate, but from that first donor, leading to tangled and improbable lines of descent which made less and less sense in human terms, as Mrs. Bennett remarks in Pride and Prejudice (Simpson 1986: 61; Macpherson 2003). Johnson believed that entails ignored the change of times and opinions, adding, “I know not whether it be not usurpation to prescribe rules to posterity, by presuming to judge of what we cannot know” (Boswell 1980: 668). With regard to the tenants, there were limits set on feudal penalties for failure of service because they were not vassals: for an act of treason the entailed estate could not be forfeit beyond the life of the traitor, and after that the entail resumed. It was clear at least to Blackstone that the originator of an entail was intending to defeat three principles of feudal law. The first was continuity of blood, for if it was impossible to attaint an heir in tail, there was no true genealogical line of descent. The second was the axiom of common law that all property must cease at death:

For, naturally speaking, the instant a man ceases to be, he ceases to have any dominion: else, if he had a right to dispose of his acquisitions one moment beyond his life, he would also have a right to direct their disposal for a million of ages after him; which would be highly absurd and inconvenient. (2.10)

Yet this immodest aim impels an entailed estate through all the odd traverses and casualties of successive tenancies. In the motive for the immortality of a fee simple lies the third breach of feudal law, namely, the transformation of realty into personalty, the metamorphosis of a conditional into an absolute possession. Blackstone assigns responsibility for this innovation to noble families who wished to keep their estates intact within the family (2.112). Brian Simpson thinks it more likely to have been the ingenious plan of savvy parvenus, particularly lawyers, who, having purchased land, took steps to prevent its subsequent alienation by exercising a special form of despotic dominion over it (Simpson 1986: 209, 235). In any event, under entail immobile property began to function as if it were mobile, but not by means of the contracts and bargains which stimulate the rapid movement of commodities. Instead, the absurd ambition of a dead person endowed an estate with a kind of autonomy. It moved from hand to hand by virtue of its never being thoroughly owned at all, although the impulse that actually set it free was the human ambition to own its substance fully and without limit.

Blackstone says that, as a result, entails “were justly branded as the source of new contentions and mischiefs unknown to the common law” (2.116). Lord Hailes thought them an encroachment upon the dominion of providence (Boswell 1980: 673). Lord Kames called entail the idolization of property, a “swollen conception” that transgressed nature and reason (Kames 1788: 4.449). The breaking or barring of an entail could be accomplished only by means of fictions as absurd as the ambitions of those who, as Lord Nottingham said in his judgment upon the Duke of Norfolk’s case, “fight against God, by effecting a stability which human providence can never attain to” (cited in Simpson 1986: 226). These were fictions of entry, recovery, and settlement, by whose means a tenant collaborated with his heir in the pretence of occupying and then alienating the estate from the defunct owner of the fee, who was now no longer in a position to object to the injury. Alternatively, there were ways of mortgaging the estate almost to its full value, and then buying another (Simpson 233; Blackstone 2.117). Effectually a fiction of immortal and absolute possession is confronted by a counter-fiction of sudden occupancy and usurpation, proving (if any proof were needed) that the thing in contention, the real estate, was more “real” than the methods of owning it.

FICTIONS OF THE CIVIL STATE

How the wit of man should so puzzle this cause to make civil government and society appear a kind of invention and creature of art, I know not.

—Lord Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour

If this was happening at law, what was happening in the zone of political theory? In 1646, feudal tenures were abolished by Parliament, followed three years later by the execution of the king, an event that put a decisive end to the continuity of royal succession on which the concepts of feudal tenure necessarily depended. The incorporeality of realty and the rights of personalty required radical redefinition, and this was largely supplied by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in their rival theories concerning the origin and structure of civil society and the nature of property. These were developed against a background of Continental thought concerning natural and civil law whose chief architects were Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf. The premise guiding the work of all these thinkers was that the state is constructed by human beings for their own advantage: that it has a distinct point of origin in an agreement to unite in a commonwealth, and that its history is an account of how the ends proposed by its foundation, chiefly self-preservation and the securing of property, are fulfilled in action. At the core of every discussion of civil society is the conjectural transition from the state of nature to the amenities of civil life, when some form of contract or covenant is supposed to have been ratified between the people as a whole and the representatives of the government to which they submit. In order to establish this point of origin in the history of rights, it was necessary to invent an account of the state of nature, a condition of life that was unrecorded and unremembered. Rather like the breakers of entails, then, theorists of civil society made their approach to the real by way of a fiction.

Not surprisingly, these fictions varied. Both Pufendorf and Hobbes believed the state of nature to be one of extreme privation, both savage and uncertain, although Pufendorf allays the horror of it by claiming a limited kinship among its inhabitants (Pufendorf 1991: 119). Hobbes makes no such concession, maintaining that there is no natural right, especially the right to property, that can be vindicated in such a condition, which he calls a state of war: every man against every man. Grotius, on the other hand, dates the human dominion over nature from this period. “From hence it was, that every Man converted what he would to his own Use, and consumed whatever was to be consumed; and such a Use of a Right common to all Men did at that Time supply the Place of Property, for no Man could justly take from another, what he had thus first taken to himself” (Grotius 2005: 2.420–421). Locke is not so hesitant, declaring that whatever thing is taken from nature and converted by labor into the means of self-preservation is a property, and so inalienably ours that it can be no one else’s except by a singular breach of natural law (Locke 1963: 328; 314–15 [2.11.25; 2.26.1–18]). Moreover, the development of property from articles of present use into materials stored against future emergencies, and thence into commodities at first bartered and then exchanged for money, is a process consistent with a state of nature. Civil society, as far as Locke is concerned, comes about by an act of free will on the part of each individual, not as a compact forced upon creatures fearful for their lives, “For Truth and keeping Faith belongs to Men as Men, and not as Members of Society”’ (Locke 1963: 318 [2.14.20]). Of the four versions of the state of nature, Locke’s aims to be the least fictional because the transition from a natural to a civil state is a continuum involving a consistent self and an unrestricted right to the property necessary for its preservation. What is real now was real then; there is no fictional beginning—a proposition tested by Defoe in one of the earliest English novels, Robinson Crusoe (1719) and found (at least by a majority of its readers) to be true.

In their histories of the establishment of property Hobbes and Locke are therefore diametrically opposed. During the war that persists in a state of nature, there is, according to Hobbes, “no Knowledge of the face of Earth, no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society” (Hobbes 1996: 89). There is nothing one can call one’s own, or even remember, until a property is made. So histories of the self and nations begin only when (as Hobbes says again) “every man [has] his own”: for “where there is no Own, that is no Propriety, there is no Justice” (Hobbes 1971: 58). And to those like Locke who might say that property is acquired and justice maintained in the peaceful conversion of natural things to use, he puts this devastating rhetorical question: “How gottest thou this Propriety but from the magistrate. . . . We would have our Security against all the World, upon Right of Property, without paying for it. . . . We may as well Expect that Fish and Fowl should Boil, Rost and Dish themselves, and come to the Table; and that Grapes should squeeze themselves into our Mouths, and have all other Contentments and ease which some pleasant Men have Related of the Land of Coquany” (Hobbes 1971: 66). When Locke says that the venison that nourishes the American Indian “must be his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it” (Locke 1963: 328 [2.26.14–18), in Hobbes’s opinion he is dreaming of a utopia or a romance, where deer offer themselves to be eaten, just like the grapes, nectarines, and peaches in Marvell’s The Garden. In Hobbes’s narrative of the transition from a state of war into a state of civil peace, the problem of self-preservation withou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Part One: Property, Personification, and Idols
• Part Two: Persons and Fictions
• Part Three: Authors and Nonpersons
• Bibliography
• Index