Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style 9781503627970

Citation preview

NOTEWORK

STANFORD

TEXT TECHNOLOGIES

Series Editors

Ruth Ahnert Elaine Treharne Editorial Board

Benjamin Albritton Caroline Bassett Lori Emerson Alan Liu Elena Pierazzo Andrew Prescott Matthew Rubery Kate Sweetapple Heather Wolfe

Notework

Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style

SIMON READER

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanfor d U niv e rs ity Pre ss Stanford, California ©2021 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free, archival-­quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Reader, Simon, 1981- author. Title: Notework : Victorian literature and nonlinear style / Simon Reader. Other titles: Text technologies. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2021. | Series: Stanford text technologies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020046341 (print) | LCCN 2020046342 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503615267 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503627970 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Authors, English—19th century—Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc. | English literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Literary form— History—19th century. Classification: LCC PR468.N66 R43 2021 (print) | LCC PR468.N66 (ebook) | DDC 820.9/008—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046341 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046342 Cover design: Kevin Barrett Kane Cover image: George Gissing’s Commonplace Book (page 25). The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in 10/15 Spectral with Fira Sans display

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Notework: An Introduction

1

PA RT I . U S E L ESS N ESS

1 Styles of Inconsequence: Charles Darwin 

29

2 Thinking Pieces: George Gissing and Roland Barthes

58

PA RT I I . CO L L ECT I V E

3 Gerard Manley Hopkins and Microsocial Form 4 A Computer Program Called “Wilde”

95 126

PA RT I I I . SW E L LS

5 Unrecovering Vernon Lee 

155

Conclusion: Asymmetry 

186

Notes  195 Bibliography  217 Index  229

This page intentionally left blank

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Through its own nonlinear development, this book had the benefit of guidance from wonderful people. I am deeply grateful to Audrey Jaffe for helping me reinvent the project with the exact brilliance she brings to literature and criticism alike. My work has been lifted by Deidre Lynch’s mind and heart, and inspired by her calibration of the two. Leah Price gave tremendous support and witty readings of the first draft. Christine Bolus-­Reichert and Heather Love returned invaluable encouragement and suggestions on the same. Joseph Bristow and Rachel Sagner Buurma offered crucial direction at the right moments. Alex Eastwood always saw the best in the writing and in me. I am obliged to Olivia Loksing Moy for her acuity and enthusiasm about the later drafts, and for her courage. This research led me through several cities where I needed, and was lucky to find, the support of thoughtful minds. In Toronto: Alan Bewell, Tina Young Choi, Jessica Duffin Wolfe, Alex Howard, Patrick Keilty, Tom Laughlin, Joseph Perfetto, Alpen Razzy, Cannon Schmitt, vii

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

and Danny Wright. In Cambridge: Ann Blair, Nicole Nolette, and Niko Vicario. In New York: Matt Brim, Rosanne Carlo, Jillian Hess, Owain Lawson, Naomi Levine, Paul Moreno, Molly Reed, Lara Saguisag, Talia Schaffer, Sarah Schulman, Jonah Siegel, Michael C. Singer, and Mimi Winick. Early encouragement came from Elisha Cohn, Diana Maltz, and Richard Menke, and timely course corrections from Jonathan Grossman and Anahid Nersessian. Leslie Higgins provided a priceless introduction to Hopkins’s manuscripts as well as an image from his Dublin Notebook. Jonathan Sachs lent his counsel and joie de vivre. Any good in these pages owes something to the Department of English at Concordia University in Montreal, especially Stephanie Bolster, Jason Camlot, Mary Esteve, John Miller, and Omri Moses. Jeff Miller and Sara Spike held up mirrors when I most needed them. The confidence of Craig Desson, Sarah Johnson, and Sean Thibault has been a gift. Shawn Micallef got me thinking about social notebooks years ago. Gerard Cohen-­Vrignaud is a kindred salty spirit. I owe an ineffable debt to Davesh Soneji. Several organizations enabled this research. I would like to thank in particular my home department at the College of Staten Island, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Center for 17th-­ and 18th-­Century Studies at UCLA, and the Department of English at Harvard University. At CUNY, The Faculty Fellowship Publication Program and the Research Foundation provided time to work and funds to finish. Thank you to the editorial team at Stanford University Press for guiding this book to publication in difficult times, especially Elaine Treharne and Ruth Ahnert, Erica Wetter, Faith Wilson Stein, Jessica Ling, my copyeditor Marie Deer, as well as the anonymous readers. Versions of these chapters had the benefit of feedback from the organizers and participants of P19 and the History of the Book Seminar at the Mahindra Center, as well as the English departments of The University of Tennessee, CUNY Graduate Center, UCLA, and Columbia University. Several libraries have been welcoming to a humbling degree: Special Collections and Archives at Colby College, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature in New York, and the utopian William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in West Adams,

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Los Angeles, where I am lucky to know the infamous Scott Jacobs. For his noble hospitality down the street I thank John Kurtz of Gramercy Park Homestead. Permission to reproduce images of manuscripts or visual art was generously granted by the Rev. Dr Nicholas Austin, SJ, of Campion Hall (with special thanks to Prof. Peter Davidson), the Clark Library, the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, ArtResource, Bridgeman Images, the Berg Collection, and Jane Gissing. Kathy Borgogno provided meticulous assistance in securing the use of these materials. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in The Journal of Victorian Culture, and a portion of chapter 3 appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture. Andrew Blackley: you hit me like a meteor and became my rock. All my love to Jade Rox for decades of unwavering faith and comedy. A special thank you to my family: Pauline, Nicole, Oliver, Holland, the DeVidis, and Jim. Nothing would be possible without the charm and intelligence of my parents, Geraldine, Grant, and Marion. This book is for them.

ix

This page intentionally left blank

NOTEWORK

NOTEWORK 

AN INTRODUCTION

E V E N T U A L LY M Y O W N N O T E S H A D T O B E C O M E A B O O K —­an

irony, since the whole point was the value notes have without becoming one. I wrote it believing that there are many people who enjoy reading and writing them for reasons other than collecting data, transmitting information, or working toward a finished product. They buy slick index cards, fill their desk drawers with pristine blank books, fill those books with handwriting, cover their walls in Post-­Its, all to chase what Roland Barthes calls the “drive, physical pleasure taken in Noting Down.”1 The critical motivation for the study came from my sense that students and instructors of literature have a limited vocabulary for speaking about what notes do aesthetically. We unfold deft and elegant readings of the free indirect style of Emma or the sprung rhythm of “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” but the mainstream of the discipline is not equipped with intricate ways of describing notes and notebooks as literary art. Just to the side of the weighty novels and luminous poems that fill our syllabuses lies a messier 1

2

NOTEWORK

world of paper we generally ignore. As a student of Victorian literature, my attention often drifted away from monumental fictions and toward the unpublished materials of famous writers, where I found an errant thrill in seeing their language in disarray. This book encourages us to do more of this drifting in order to defamiliarize these texts and our readings of them. I advance a simple argument: the writer’s notebook encloses a genre equal in importance to the novel, poem, drama, or essay. I call this notework, and the chapters that follow present notes alongside, but in contradistinction to, these more familiar genres. I aim to pluralize what we count as form and style and at the same time offer a nineteenth-­ century counterpoint to the kinds of fragmented reading and writing we do online today. This book builds on and honors the work of those editors who invest countless hours transcribing handwritten materials and tracking references so that readers such as myself can access them. Those labors also depend on archives and special collections that invest large sums acquiring such materials and working to preserve them. These endeavors intersect with the international traffic of private collectors and auction houses, where famous notebooks can sell for enormous sums. In 1994, for instance, Bill Gates purchased Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester (a 72-­page manuscript) for 30.8 million dollars at auction.2 More recently, a notebook belonging to the twentieth-­century mathematician Alan Turing, and which contains entries on notable mathematicians and also a tantalizing “hidden dream journal,” sold for a more modest 850 thousand dollars.3 Yet despite the great value placed on notebooks and similar materials by institutions and individual buyers, something about the contemporary nature of literary study holds them at bay. In our field, the appreciation for polished totalities runs deep, perhaps most famously in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s definition of “the sense of Beauty” as that which “subsists in simultaneous intuition of the relation of parts, each to each, and of all to a whole.”4 This continues through the work of the New Critics, who in the words of Cleanth Brooks focus on “the problem of unity—­the kind of whole which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of the various parts to each other in building

AN INTRODUCTION

up this whole.”5 While Coleridge arguably savored the formal energy of loose and unconnected writings at different moments in his life, Brooks and other like-­minded critics consistently relegated the text surrounding or preceding works of literature to the sidelines as they undertook to reveal the intricate harmonies and paradoxes of poems and fictions. The accounts of organic literary form offered by Coleridge and the New Criticism have been challenged in more ways than I can list here, but their opponents often focus on breaking the halo of the literary and the aesthetic rather than widening it to encompass the kinds of supposed dross Brooks and others thought beneath their regard. I believe that our twenty-­first-­ century moment urges us to develop a wider-­reaching formalism, and that by generating such an account we can better understand the way in which contemporary textual technologies organize and disorganize our attention. Notes are not read as much as they are used. Scholars invite them to the table for certain conversations, for example to supply information about where or when a writer landed on a particular idea, or what books they consulted, or to tell us about their state of mind at a given point in time. But we leave them out of other discussions, for example about affect, networks, description, queerness, debates on different kinds of reading, and form—­all topics that they can push in different directions and which I pursue in what follows. It would be senseless to deny that notes are pressed into service in other genres (again, I hope this book is an example), but I wish to consider how they can play a leading role in our thoughts, following Ann Laura Stoler’s influential call for scholars to turn from the “archive-­as-­source to archive-­as-­subject.”6 This book intercepts notes before they are (or are not) reworked in other genres, in order to pose new questions: What if we read notes as ends in themselves? What if we looked upon them as doing work other than producing finished books? What would come into view, paradoxically, if we let them be more opaque, more distinctive, rather than an inchoate version of something we already know how to look for? Before offering answers to those questions, I also wish to distinguish the arguments of this book not only from the prevailing tendency to overlook notes in literary studies, but also from the specialized practices of

3

4

NOTEWORK

bibliography and textual criticism as they are often practiced today. Alongside the mainstream focus on finished, published texts, there has been in the last several decades a prolific expansion of textual and bibliographic criticism. As I have already mentioned, there are highly skilled scholars who pay carefully, methodically detailed attention to manuscripts. For notes to become useful as clarifications of an author’s personal life, or as the X-­rays of a creative process, the current consensus requires robust and thorough critical editions, and such editions do of course make frequent appearances in the pages of this book. Yet as we shall see, these editions from the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries displace a previous moment in which Victorian notebooks might be published in excerpted or redacted selections, in the midst of modernist publication practices. For example, one of the very first publications of New Directions, famed publisher of the poets William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, was Selections from the Note-­Books of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which staged those notes as imagistic poetry avant la lettre, for example: “Moonlight hanging or dropping on treetops like blue cobweb.”7 Charles Darwin’s granddaughter, the naturalist Nora Barlow, used selections from Darwin’s Beagle notebooks in a free manner that emphasized their aesthetic qualities, yet only as a hook to the “main event” of her edition of Charles Darwin’s Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle.8 Rather than ignoring these incomplete selections and early editions, this book makes equal use of them for the different editorial consciousness they bring to light, and to show that a marginalized but important aesthetics of the note connects the writers in this book, their earliest editors, and the kinds of reading I suggest we do. Charting a new course between a mere lack of interest, on the one hand, and a documentary exhaustiveness, on the other, Notework aims to highlight their formal pleasures and availability to interpretation. By teasing out the formal characteristics of notes we gain a new account of style. I use the term nonlinear style to refer to the expressions of notework. The chapters that follow present manifestations of it in the writings of six Victorians, all of whom collect and value seemingly insignificant and unordered observations. Their notebooks act as what I call shelters of inconsequence, structures that enable the accrual of writings

AN INTRODUCTION

about minor or fleeting things that do not necessarily yield a subsequent genre beyond themselves. Yet they nevertheless add up, albeit in a counterintuitive way: through the incremental collection of documents, these note-­takers generate heaps of what we might now call personal data. Taking collections as implicit visions of collectives, I explore how these textual spaces reflect desires and fantasies of social relation. Each chapter poses questions about our affective entanglements with information and our self-­documented lives. For then as now, people extended themselves into the world through script, constructing records of their observations, thoughts, and experiences. This book presents episodes in the lives of what Suzanne Briet calls “homo documentator,” a species whose members practice the “cultural technique” of rendering themselves and their objects of interest in documentary form, whether it be the announcement of a birth, the discovery of a star, or the arrival of an antelope at a zoo.9 This will take us from Darwin gleefully scribbling down his impressions of a starlit sky on the HMS Beagle in 1831 to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence nearly a hundred years later, where Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) records her body quivering in front of works of art in real time. We will see Oscar Wilde distilling philosophy in lapidary theses to prepare for his Greats examinations at Oxford, where he initiates quixotic connections between vastly different thinkers, and Gerard Manley Hopkins describing dynamic interactions between natural forces such as sunset clouds and Alpine waterfalls. George Gissing will find solace in the most useless details of everyday life, while Samuel Butler styles himself as a professional but private note-­taker attempting to renounce the world of print capitalism in favor of a textual life to come. These studies are experiments in a strange kind of intimacy. I have found Victorian notes to be records of something deeply personal and yet at the same time distinct from biographical information. For one thing, reading materials in or close to the hands of these canonical figures involves getting close to their bodies and how they carried them. The most striking example of this would be Vernon Lee, who lists the “palpitations” of her body as she stands before works of art in Italian museums and galleries. Examples also crop up in less expected places. For many

5

6

NOTEWORK

years, Darwin kept his notebooks with him at all times, as Janet Browne informs us: “Wherever Darwin went, one of these books went too, ready for catching elusive thoughts, for making notes in libraries, or recording useful conversations after a good evening’s talk. He surreptitiously worked on them during boring scientific meetings. Out they came in the carriage going home.”10 Like printed books, these bear the traces of the hands and pockets that carried them, covered in the fingerprints of their users and bent in different directions. The form blurs the boundaries we usually wish to keep between an author’s life, their works, and ourselves. We will often feel their inchoate, exuberant, excessive thoughts, following the skips and jumps of their handwriting. I don’t read notebooks as confessionals or to sequence dates, but rather as imprints of style. I follow Marielle Macé and other theorists of style in considering it as a phenomenon of pattern, movement, and a way of being that exists apart from the mere facts of a life.11 Style is the shape or rhythm of lived existence. Indeed, despite its often singular and uniquely personal qualities, it may actually help a person refuse to be understood according to biographical narratives. It can facilitate disappearance, offering a way of giving up the conventional routines of selfhood in order to claim new territory outside sanctioned parameters for personality. Style therefore traffics with the socially inconsequential. In this sense, I draw inspiration from D. A. Miller’s conception of style as “the utopia of those with almost no place to go.” It may include “spending an inordinate amount of time on a trifle” or an effort to evaporate the self into a “sterling insignificance.” As Miller goes on to say, this kind of marginality must be understood as separate from the kind that society imposes upon the most vulnerable people living within it. Style by contrast represents what he calls a “deliberately embraced project,” namely the “activist materialization of insignificance.”12 The people in this study are all deliberately stylish outliers, each in their own way. Readers may find some of their scrappy work off-­putting, or simply difficult to square with our habitual ways of approaching the Victorians. Many of the quotations that I analyze in these chapters are not just unfamiliar but unpolished, littered with invented punctuation or wild syntax.

AN INTRODUCTION

They can often sound more like Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons than the decorous prose of realism, and in fact all the figures featured here have at one time or another been thought of as anticipating a modernist aesthetic future. Here is Darwin, for instance, making a record of listening to a choir: “I grant that the thrill, which runs throug every fibre, when one behold the last rays of & & or grand chorus are utterly inexplicable.”13 Or here is Hopkins on the aurora borealis: “At night northern lights beautiful, but colourless near the horizon in permanent birch-­bark downward streaks but shooting in streamers across the zenith and higher sky like breath misting and then being cut off from very sensitive glass.”14 I think of this disarming strangeness as an aesthetic virtue and a pleasurable feature, one that we more readily associate with avant-­garde experiments by writers in other literary periods. Part of why I have devoted so much attention to these writings is that they provide another way to loosen up the Victorians, as it were, revealing that some of them already express themselves in the style of “the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure” that Virginia Woolf would associate with the modernists who sought to reject their predecessors.15 To read their notes is to put these groups in closer company, and to show what twists the nineteenth century gives to their shared formal knots. Victorians are generally known not for celebrating fragmented and errant forms, but rather for systematic thinking and long, sequential works of science and fiction. Some were downright suspicious of note-­taking in particular. To take a paradigmatic example, George Eliot’s characterization of Edward Casaubon of Middlemarch cautions her readers (and, implicitly, herself) against taking aimless notes without a plan to integrate and synthesize them. Middlemarch figuratively seals off his notes from our consideration. Readers do not get to see inside Casaubon’s books, and receive only mocking, secondhand reports of their contents. They amount to nothing but a heap of documents indexing “erratic mythical fragments” and the “tossed ruins of the world.” From Ladislaw’s perspective, Casaubon’s notes seem like nothing more than “helpless embryos,” examples of a “long incubation producing no chick.”16 Through this representation of Casaubon, Eliot stamps note-­taking for its own sake with

7

8

NOTEWORK

the mark of sterility, uselessness, error, and death. If Casaubon’s notes, queerly sterile as they are, have no future, the novel assures us that Eliot’s own prolific note-­taking does, and the proof is the novel itself. (For all we know, however, Casaubon’s notes may be more interesting than Dorothea or Ladislaw acknowledge.) Of course, with the benefit of access to the massive research endeavors that supported Eliot’s novel-­writing made available by editions of the Quarry for Middlemarch, the separate Middlemarch Notebooks, and Daniel Deronda Notebooks, these somewhat sad portrayals of Casaubon’s notes failing to crystallize publicly seem to reflect Eliot’s own fear of going to seed. Eliot’s biases may have inflected our studies more than we care to admit. More than one critic perceives in Casaubon an anxiety about the scholarly pitfall of research without end.17 The metaphor that Eliot uses to label her most famous notebook, a quarry, immediately suggests mining and raw materials hewn from elsewhere to be used in a new building. For the nineteenth-­century collector of information, then, the novel presented a most felicitous destination for blocks of data taken from various sources. Indeed, the novel is so ascendant in discussions of the period that it is difficult to catch textual glimmers of the kind I wish to put in view. It is thus in contrast with the feats of other genres that notework comes to light. Familiar works, including novels, appear in these pages: On the Origin of Species, Gissing’s New Grub Street, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Hopkins’s “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” and diverse essays by Vernon Lee. Yet I reverse the formal priority in my approach to these, treating the author’s notes as primary while still considering the achievements of these other works. In other words, the form of the notes becomes essential to understanding the content of the novels, poems, and essays, rather than the other way around. My readings of the traditional genres featured here reveal the surprisingly intense emotions these authors feel about collecting and processing information. Even as they try to bring coherence to their “raw materials,” each author imagines a space for what exceeds or subverts the structures and systems that do such work: Darwin’s useless organs float peacefully in the midst of the evolutionary struggles described in the Origin; Dorian

AN INTRODUCTION

Gray’s “novel without a plot” ironically contributes to his own narrative of hedonistic annihilation; Harold Biffen’s “Mr Bailey Grocer” contains nothing but undramatic and useless notations about the everyday life of a produce vendor. Many of Hopkins’s poems coalesce against the backdrop of kaleidoscopic documentation that we find in his notes, a plenitude that shrinks as his lyrics surrender personal information to an omniscient God charged with the task of synthesizing it. In multiple cases we see the potentials and powers of the note resituated by the more familiar genres, without their vibrant aimlessness disappearing altogether. Notes court sterility. When Eliot describes Casaubon’s “long incubation producing no chick,” she marks notes as the queer element in a system of organic textual growth, shamefully unproductive when it does not graduate through proper stages of textual Bildung. This configuration of textual production frames our everyday ways of understanding an author’s textual life, but also persists in more elaborate critical methods. Genetic criticism, practiced by Dirk Van Hulle, Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and others, reinforces this model when it aims to explain “the genesis of the literary work” in a way that “accepts a teleological model of textuality.”18 By insisting on evaluating notes in terms of the telos of other genres, we lose out on the kinds of feelings, activities, and insights they may engender apart from their conscription in a narrative of development that must inevitably produce a socially accessible object. In a moment, I’ll explain how these bio-­teleological metaphors underlying accounts of formal emergence could stand to be refined precisely in light of the Darwinian information, the terms of which provide an ample account of the roles that minor and secondary forms play in the world. In resisting an account of composition that prioritizes familiar genres, however, I wish neither to overstate nor understate the utopian aspects of note-­taking. Its difference from other genres does not betoken a radical politics that will free us from the confines of those genres. I take seriously Anne-­Lise François’s account of how post-­Enlightenment thinkers, in their rush to recover and promote anything branded “minor, nugatory, unworthy, insignificant, unreal,” can “elevate the infinitesimal to the status of an impossible and absolute ideal, making the release from heroic, goal-­oriented

9

10

NOTEWORK

energies conditional on a call to permanent vigilance and ever-­readiness.”19 These chapters do emphasize and celebrate the pleasures of nonlinear style, its intellectual and sensuous play. However, they do not approach it as a boundless or chaotic energy that somehow promises our salvation. I wish to show instead that many of the subversive and utopian meanings that critics associate with fragmentary and nonlinear forms are themselves formal features of the genre of notework. By elucidating these as form, rather than formlessness, we can better understand the way they can be articulated, explored, defined, and, perhaps most importantly, exploited. Work

The term notework is meant to call other words to mind, most obviously artwork, since I treat notes as such throughout. I also employ it in order to gain some conceptual distance from the physical notebook itself. While every text depends upon its material contingencies, this point has been made so strongly in arguments about literature’s relationship with material culture that it can occasionally be difficult to perceive the imaginative and even fantastical dimension of what minor forms are saying textually as well as materially. This project would not have been possible without a large body of scholarship, mainly drawn from book history and the history of science, that continues to expand our understanding of note-­taking in its historical contexts through analyses of commonplace books, almanacs, field notes, and weekly planners. Scholars such as Ann Blair, Richard Yeo, William Sherman, Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, David Allan, and others generally describe these as utilities enabling a modern organization of information by individuals in a rapidly growing economy of information from the Early Modern period onward.20 The present argument differs from these, however, in emphasizing textual styles that are palpable in multiple media and that are not necessarily directed to utilitarian outcomes. For notes ramify over blank books but also on index cards, slips, and digital formats, all of which can be re-­mediated through printed transcriptions and online databases. While Darwin’s actual papers lie in state at the University Library in Cambridge, you are more likely to encounter

AN INTRODUCTION

them in the large volume Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–­1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Inquiries.21 That volume itself draws on a series of booklets that presented unreconstructed versions of Darwin’s alphabetized notebooks in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Digitization enables the re-­transcription of these materials into online text, which appears alongside photographs of the handwritten originals on the Darwin Online website. This is a way of saying that unless otherwise indicated, my use of the word notebook in these pages should be taken as a shorthand for the generic contours I aim to specify as notework, drawing upon these diverse materials as evidence. There is of course a wide array of blank forms, from ledgers and waste-­books to day planners, formatted diaries, and graphing books, many of which are being explored in lively ways by others, though statistical details bearing on the manufacture and sales of such objects are extremely difficult to find.22 As for this book, it is not a material history, but a lateral literary criticism that turns a formalist eye upon texts that have been hiding in plain sight. Consequently, it may seem that I am running fast and loose with the material record, since my focus swerves away from the archival objects with which it is ostensibly concerned and toward the posthumous editions in which these notes have been transcribed, selected, and annotated. While this arises out of necessity (writing a book about notebooks held in distant special collections will often require the use of mediated and edited forms), that very parenthesis is a goad to think of different mediations as evidence of the plural meanings the texts within them offer: the excesses and imperfections of the material record travel more widely and at higher resolutions in the digital age and can be read as a series of variations that make for good reading and good thinking. It’s not news that different editions of texts foreground the value of different things, but my hope is that the argument respects material contingencies while at the same time showing what is possible when we allow for the innovation of concepts that range over the material substrate with a lighter touch. For it is the very lightness of notework that we should take seriously, even as the word is also meant to suggest labor. Running through the chapters is the notion that what may have seemed like the absence of work in

11

12

NOTEWORK

the nineteenth century, a mere drift of imagination and thought, has rapidly and strangely taken on the aspect of concrete work in the twenty-­first. What people might have read as a disinterested montage of sundry pieces of information in previous decades today constitutes an important site for the generation of wealth and recirculation of power. Our age demands that we transmit ourselves in documents and that we relinquish these willingly in order to be visible as citizens, a process Ronald Day calls the “transformation of persons and texts into documentary representations within broader-­based indexing systems.”23 There are increasing numbers who believe that online citizenship of this kind should be compensated, given that it generates value in the billions of dollars for corporations but leaves users with only vague promises of exposure, the development of personal brands, and “connections.” The labor undertaken by these nineteenth-­century figures takes shape in ways that will seem both familiar and strange. First, they contain observations that seem trivial, fanciful, or of minimal consequence, even and especially to the authors themselves. Notework offers not only an epistemological outlook on the small and seemingly insignificant but also an architecture in which to document—­and therefore preserve, however tenuously—­fleeting and potentially useless notations. This often looks less like toil and more like errant idleness, what Maurice Blanchot calls désoeuvrement (“worklessness”).24 Notework seems like it’s not work: for Blanchot this characterizes literary activity in general and fragmentary writing in particular. With the possible exception of Vernon Lee, these writers did not expect financial compensation for their note-­taking, and in many cases what sponsors their output is external financial support and the leisure time that comes with it. Darwin is a paradigmatic case, since he had the opportunity to circle the globe as a geologist and “gentleman’s companion” for the captain of the HMS Beagle, paradoxically working at something that would be, in his uncle’s words, “useless as regards his profession.”25 Darwin is therefore more than simply another case study here, and he appears first in the sequence of chapters because his early journals exemplify this sense of release from useful outcomes while they record more and more precisely the existence and often vibrant activity of nonfunctioning

AN INTRODUCTION

organs. These include, for example, the peacock’s tail, the apparent result of sexual selection, but also the appendix or the mole’s blind eyes, which remain “fluctuating elements” in his system for as long as they do not become particularly useful or harmful. They are nonfunctional but energetic in the production of differences. His theory gives us the unifying principle of natural selection but he also generated utterly new and positive ways of thinking about the nonworking work of minor forms, such as the one that brought his major discoveries into focus: apparently useless organs ungoverned by selection and given to excess. This frequently neglected but essential aspect of his theory has long inspired recuperations that place the focus of interest on precisely those aspects of plant and animal life that have nothing to do with metaphors of struggle but rather with the generation of sheer difference. These recuperations picture Darwin as by turns decadent, vitalist, a lover of playful difference, a value-­aloof wanderer, and an inattentive schoolchild.26 Yet while his notebooks have generated substantial interest, shedding light on working methods and the history of science and supplementing the work of literary critics, there has yet to be a book that takes the formal quality of his notes themselves in all their exclamatory drift as a point of departure for literary criticism. It would be impossible to claim a direct line of influence when it comes to notework specifically, since Darwin’s unpublished materials remained so during his lifetime, but nonetheless Gissing, Hopkins, Wilde, Lee, and Butler all read his works and write in the cultural aftermath of the Darwinian revolution. As I hope to prove, the preoccupation with uselessness and inconsequential variation is uncannily reiterated in the works, but most surprisingly in the notes, of these future writers. It is in that context that they gain a new and original warrant for writing in a playful, variable style that needn’t eventuate in socially purposive genres. As I’ll explain in greater detail in a moment, the formalist uptake of Darwin’s theories of inconsequentiality finds expression in these late-­nineteenth-­century writers, but also persists into the twentieth century and the core of Russian Formalist theory. To speak of influence and uncanny reiterations is to raise the question of the apparent isolation of the notebook from social functions and

13

14

NOTEWORK

readers (at least during the lifetimes of the authors), which might suggest that each one is entirely idiosyncratic, even hermetic. This is partly true, but it is a principle of this book that any collection of notes reflects desires for collectivity. It is a fundamentally plural genre. There is almost never just one note in an otherwise blank book; there are always notes (with, of course, the exception of the many notebooks we have all begun with great expectations only to abandon them the next day). The seeming exemption from work visible in the notes of Darwin and others yields an assembly of information not necessarily organized toward a particular end, but in which conjunctions and harmonies of a different sort can emerge in documentary space. Hopkins, for example, uses his notes to build a network of unsystematic but harmonious links. He works at imagining connections between apparently isolated actors in the world, finding points of integration and fluidity between, for example, the sun and the clouds or the different branches of a tree. Twenty-­first-­century scholarship tends to consider networks from the top down, for example in Franco Moretti’s influential Graphs, Maps, and Trees or in the many social scientific projects that analyze the massive amounts of data generated on social networks.27 Networking appears here as a highly subjective projection of relations, closer to Patrick Jagoda’s notion of a “network imaginary,” which treats networks as figures and objects invested with fantasy and desire.28 Most of these notes would not appear in public until well into the twentieth century, and some of them still await publication or critical editions. I will have more to say about the loopy temporality of this genre below, but here I wish to emphasize that within the novels, poems, and essays I explore there may appear characters, personae, and forms that experiment with the idea that the kinds of labor outlined here might be staged in public. In spite of the loose chronology of my chapters, they do point to the emergence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the paradoxical figure of the public note-­taker, often legible as an alter ego of the author themself. Thus Violet Paget uses her pseudonym of Vernon Lee to distribute her essays, which she recurrently refers to as her notes and sketches. Gissing’s character of Ryecroft in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft styles himself as a creator of mere notations, and Lord

AN INTRODUCTION

Henry Wotton in Dorian Gray seems at times to speak and behave like a Twitter celebrity. I will examine Lee in particular as a case of a writer who imagines a new form of authorship along these lines, one who forsakes control over the final meaning of her writings and views them as atoms to be scattered in the works of future writers whom she may not live to read. Unformed

Understanding notework as aesthetic labor also makes it legible as a genre, a term I understand (following others) as a socially catalyzed act of recognition, having less to do with taxonomy than with the “collective, spontaneous, and dynamic” ways that communities decide how to orient themselves toward their objects of study.29 Yet there is a long history of literary and philosophical writing imbuing nonlinear style with the power to break free of convention and roam naked in the woods of meaning. This book at once departs from and amends this tradition. From a certain angle it might seem as though collections of piecemeal writing of the kind we find in notebooks might elude generic conventions entirely, partaking in the tradition that August and Friedrich Schlegel helped inaugurate in the Athenaeum journal between 1798 and 1800 and that Novalis pursued in his Das allgemeine Brouillon (“Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia”).30 In these experimental works, the rhetorical deployment of fragments promises escape from confining systems, of which genre is a primary example. Thus Friedrich Schlegel uses Fragment 60 to disrupt existing generic categories: “All the classical poetic genres have now become ridiculous in their rigid purity.”31 Just beside studies and accounts of genre since the eighteenth century hovers a domain of paradoxically broken forms that become central to many strands of anti-­systematic thought in the twentieth century, from the Frankfurt School to queer theory and book history. Theodor Adorno often proceeds as though “the whole is the false” and, like his colleague Walter Benjamin, upheld the revolutionary power of fragmentation.32 Late in his career, Roland Barthes called fragmentation his “current idol” because of the way it seems to decline arrogance and cultivate pluralistic thinking.33 And first-­generation queer theorists such as Leo Bersani and

15

16

NOTEWORK

Lee Edelman explored this potential in their conception of queerness as an ethical project that “shatters the fantasy of imaginary unity.”34 Nonlinear style is often conceived as a realm of authenticity and a deeper reality, more loyal to the “true” nature of the external world, the psychic inconsistencies of subjectivity, and the self-­directed productions of Romantic genius. It is also, as Nicholas Dames has argued, the “disciplinary allegory” of book history, whose practitioners often view the fragmentation of media as a stepping-­stone to democratization.35 Yet rather than valorize notes as a way out of form and systematic thinking, I want to examine the ways in which this very way of attributing potentials to nonlinear style may be a fantasy motivated and structured by the genre itself. As a mode of reception and a social creation, genre says as much about the priorities and desires of those who care about it as it does about the objects under study. Caroline Levine critiques the tendency of much recent literary criticism to overinvest in what she calls “formless or antiformal experiences.” She argues that “the field has been so concerned with breaking forms apart that we have neglected to analyze the major work that forms do in our world.”36 This book aims to reveal how densely the seemingly formless is saturated with fantasy, not just in terms of its content but in the very gestures it makes from one page to the next. Surprisingly, some formalist theory makes provisions for the generic properties found in the everyday styles of the note. One might assume that notes would not fall within the charmed circle that Russian Formalists call “the literary,” but belong instead to the unglamorous sidelines of everyday life, or what the Formalists call byt.37 This is the realm that art endeavors to make strange in Viktor Shklovsky’s famous account of defamiliarization. Yet Shklovsky, along with his colleagues Boris Eichenbaum and Yury Tynyanov, offers an incipient theorization of the formal qualities of marginal genres. These thinkers leverage a Darwinian vocabulary to generate a mobile and flexible account of form. They don’t offer a dissection of specific genres but rather understand it as part of a process of alternating privilege and neglect. When it comes to individual genres, “all attempts at a single static definition will fail,” for the very reason that these are dynamic and fluid entities given to change and transmutation,

AN INTRODUCTION

on analogy with biological life-­forms. “As a system, therefore, genre may fluctuate. It arises (out of exceptions and vestiges in other systems) and it declines, turning into the rudimentary elements of other systems,” writes Tynyanov in “The Literary Fact.”38 While the Formalists are often critiqued for imagining genre in the bellicose terms of Social Darwinism, that is, as a field of cutthroat competition and a struggle for survival, their absorption of evolutionary thinking includes more subtlety than many acknowledge, specifically when it comes to the attention they pay to rudimentary and vestigial variability. No genre remains “the dominant” forever. Shklovsky coined the term “canonization of the junior branch” to describe what happens when a dominant genre begins to recede from prominence. Tynyanov expands on this idea, describing a system wherein forms rise and fall depending on their success in achieving whatever goals individual writers and readers set for them. When a genre falls from grace, he writes, “a new phenomenon floats in to take its place in the center, coming up from among the trivia, out of the backyards and low haunts of literature.”39 The genre of the letter serves as his prime example of a minor, everyday form that increasingly took over the functions of the lyrical ode. He also enlists journals, almanacs, nonsense language, and fragments as genres acquiring aesthetic patina in the moment he is writing, the early twentieth century. The fragment serves him as an apposite instance of how generic categories can mutate in the eye of an observer: It is interesting how the concept of genre fluctuates in cases when we are faced with a passage from a work, or a fragment. A passage from a poema [long poem] may be perceived as a passage from a poema, that is, as a poema; but it may be perceived also as a passage, that is, we may be conscious of the fragment as a genre.40

For Tynyanov, genres come into being from the sidelines, out of the rudiments of quotidian life. Indeed, a succeeding generation of formalists recently coming into view gave increased attention to these once-­secondary forms. The split between everyday and aesthetic language that so obsessed the first generation, and

17

18

NOTEWORK

upon which they based many of their most enduring ideas, broke down in the hands of their immediate disciples. Some of them sought to undo the distinction between these domains and experiment with forms that combined them. Lydia Ginzburg, for instance, explored and celebrated notes and notebooks as genres more suited to capturing the conditions of life in the twentieth century. In her study on Ginzburg, Emily Van Buskirk shows how this “most talented student of the Russian Formalists” developed a practice and a theoretical account of the note as a genre unto itself. She sought to place a wide distance between her own practices and those of the realist, psychological novel that had of course been dominant throughout the latter nineteenth century. Living in the “catastrophic twentieth century” demanded the emergence of new writing styles and literary forms that could capture the fragmented character of existence under the exigencies of modern life. The novel seemed to her obsolete, and while she used to describe keepers of notebooks as “‘impotents’ lacking in ‘positive ideas,’” she eventually came “to favor the incompleteness of the jotting and note.”41 In Ginzburg’s practice, what had seemed to belong to the realm of everyday realities develops into a more ethical means of both representing and coordinating individual and social life after the nineteenth century. As we’ll see in chapter 1, Darwin’s use of the notebook anticipates these complex formal gestures, showing how it generates playful variation without the requirement of assuming a useful shape. Note Time

Drawing on Darwinian frameworks to advance their arguments about mutable hierarchies of genre, theorists such as Tynyanov suggest that literary kind is bound up not just with the question of what, but also of when. Genre is a matter of timing. Literary categories depend on formal characteristics, but also on audiences placing value on those characteristics in particular moments, perhaps in ways their makers did not intend. Approaching genres as “socially realized sites and segments of coherence,” scholars such as Lisa Gitelman, Virginia Jackson, Yopie Prins, and Justin Sider have taken this approach in their analyses of forms such as the document and the lyric.42 It is through orienting ourselves toward

AN INTRODUCTION

these objects of study that we call them into being as modes of expression and reception that matter to us. In a traditionally historicist vein, then, I do argue that the genre of notework coalesces as an expression of aestheticized inconsequentiality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing strength from Darwin’s novel account of variation without purpose disseminated in this period. Yet this argument also takes shape in a digitized twenty-­first century in which once-­secondary forms have increasingly come to seem important in ways the Victorians could not have foreseen. The notes that feature here are therefore untimely, and they necessarily alter our sense of historical context and the periodization of genre. Written in the nineteenth century, they are printed and read in the twentieth and the twenty-­first. In many cases, particularly those examined in the third section of the book, reception by unforeseen audiences with uncertain intentions was precisely what they intended. Notework extends and complicates the normal sequence of production, publication, and reception. In many cases a full century passed before they became accessible to readers in any fashion—­a process that is still in no way complete. Gissing’s “Commonplace Book” appeared in a non-­critical edition in the 1960s. Wilde’s “Notebook on Philosophy,” the focus of chapter 4, lay in a private collection for decades before being acquired by the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in 2004. Samuel Butler’s writings suggest that he was perhaps somewhat more self-­conscious about the genre and even meant for them to exist in posterity. At his death he left five volumes of typed notes for his friends to find, but without instructions for what to do with them. Paradoxically, then, understanding the notebooks in their historical context also requires us to see the ways in which some of these authors embraced the fact that their notes might have completely obscure purposes or destinies, and composed them in that spirit. Butler states this clearly in his notebooks: “As no one can say which egg or seed shall come to visible life and in its turn leave issue, so no one can say which of the millions of now visible lives shall enter into the afterlife on death, and which have but so little life as practically not to count.”43 His use of the “afterlife” here does not refer to heaven but to a posthumous existence

19

20

NOTEWORK

that was not his to determine. Taking to heart one of the central insights of Darwin’s thought (despite his fierce disagreement with him on other matters), Butler suggests that the enduring value of our present actions can only truly be decided by a future we will not live to see. In this sense, staying loyal to the historical specificity of Victorian notework seems to authorize and even invite anachronistic interpretations. Some will certainly see such tendencies in Notework, particularly when I bend it toward presentist concerns having to do with social media and the Internet. And some may find fault with the book on grounds that it is what Alan Liu might call a “back to the future” study about the digital world, in that it turns to old objects and shows that what they did in the past is what the Internet does now.44 As I hope this introduction has shown, however, that digital world may have spurred my thinking in these directions, but it is the difference and peculiarity of the writings from this period that I wish to foreground. This book goes “back to the future” in another way. I wrote it over a ten-­year period that began with the luminous rise of social media and ends with it having established a presence in our lives at once indispensable and rife with problems. If you are reading these words, it may not even be in the form of an electronic book, let alone a paper book, but through a cropped screen capture from Google books on Twitter in between Zoom meetings. As many have pointed out, social media specifically targets the kinds of marginal information many people are happy to generate for free, information that seems all too disposable but that we might look at differently. What François calls the creation of “not-­for-­profit experience” in the writings of inconsequence, for example, has been turned to massive profit since her Open Secrets was published.45 Consider Jack Dorsey’s account of where the name Twitter came from: “we came across the word ‘twitter,’ and it was just perfect. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds.’ And that’s exactly what the product was.”46 Yet when all of the marginal and fragmentary bits and pieces come together from different quarters, they accrue enormous amounts of value. Users of such media are now in the strange position of having to take their inconsequential notations very seriously. No longer do these elemental texts

AN INTRODUCTION

have to wait for some posthumous future in order to be received. We offer them up as filaments of community in the present. This brings me to a final point I want to make about time, form, and notes. It is not news that there is a sharp discontinuity between what people do on social media and what gets done with that information on the other end of the network. This is not the place to elaborate on the useful work by scholars such as Evgeny Morozov, Siva Vaidyanathan, and Shoshana Zuboff that reveals the exploitative side of social media technologies.47 But I do wish to highlight this discontinuity as a formal asymmetry of a kind that informs some of my readings here, in the background of some chapters and the foreground of others. Reading notes as noncontinuous with other genres liberates a set of stylistic energies and affective qualities that we would not necessarily notice if we were only reading them as the germs of fiction or poetry or as biographical chronology. I illuminate these qualities in order to show, paradoxically, that they are precisely what social media so successfully conscripts. Notework therefore takes a different point of departure from much of the research in computational humanities, in that I approach the digital as an existential question that takes shape for billions of people in flashes across their phones and laptops. Overview

Opening someone’s notebook often means contending with a scatter of potential insignificance and trivia: stray marks, illegible words, observations that lead to nothing, little calculations recorded on the side or on back pages, doodles of a top hat or a snake. Part I, “Uselessness,” explores such excesses in the notebook, showing how the space of its pages accommodates and stylizes details of minimal significance. Reading the notes of Darwin and Gissing means stepping into a refuge from the social, one that frees the writings within from the obligation of generating value for other people. For both these men, as for many others in the world, this leads to pleasure of the kind that Roland Barthes describes in the quotation I included in the first paragraph of this introduction, a sheer pleasure in the act of taking down a sentence on the world that can explode on arrival. Barthes puts it this way: “I don’t want to play

21

22

NOTEWORK

down the inconsequentiality of notation . . . this isn’t real (weighty, muscular) writing, but that doesn’t matter.”48 For Darwin, this kind of pleasure grows in his early adulthood and seems to taper off late in his life. For Gissing, the textual record suggests a movement of a different kind, as he turns to the refuge of the notebook in the most productive years of his career as a novelist. Chapter 1 considers Darwin as a stylist of the inconsequent. While his notes are among the most widely read of any nineteenth-­century writer, they are nearly always interpreted teleologically, in terms of the light they shed on his scientific achievements. This chapter upends this approach by treating his early notebooks as rich, aesthetic objects whose purposes are not exhausted by his published works, and whose value in fact depends on their stark difference from them. In these early writings, Darwin sustains a style of playful social inconsequence, collecting observations without regard to their usefulness or any expectation of exhibition. He risks error and irrelevance in scattered but deeply felt fragments, while also homing in on ephemeral and seemingly nonfunctional elements in nature, from the male nipple to the vestigial wings of the kiwi. In On the Origin of Species, the thrill of the notes falls away, though he still accommodates useless parts and feelings with care, building limits into his theory of natural selection that preserve their sovereignty. Chapter 2 considers George Gissing’s cynicism about the social utility of the novel and his desire for unordered observations that can float outside narrative systems. In New Grub Street, he mocks the ethical novelistic impulses of his character Edwin Reardon, while imagining a form of plotless writing via the imaginary “Mr Bailey, Grocer,” a work by the otiose Harold Biffen. Drawing on Barthes’s theories of notation, I show how notes seem to offer a way of staying tethered to life amid decaying ethical ideals, if only in the drift of the present that may not be headed anywhere and may not add up to anything. This drift is particularly visible in Gissing’s “Commonplace Book,” with its rejection of political engagement that nevertheless finds solace in the trivial and minor details of everyday life. In The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, he re-­fictionalizes these practices, casting them as part of the ethos of a literary character rather than his own.

AN INTRODUCTION

What is gained when we make an author’s notes public? What is lost? In his own notebooks, the French writer Joseph Joubert writes that “here I am outside of civil things and in the realm of Art.”49 Like Darwin and Gissing, he imagines the space of the note as one of refuge from publicity, and yet in the twenty-­first century we have unprecedented access to the unpublished writings of these figures and many other authors besides. Part II, “Collective,” takes a counterintuitive approach to the question of the social notebook. I explore the way in which notebooks are already technologies for imagining and enacting visions of collectivity based on documentary capture and interaction. When we think of how the contents of a notebook “come together,” we do not have to rely on the New Critical account, in which a poet “develops his sense of the whole, the anticipation of the finished poem, as he works with the parts.”50 I want to suggest that the parts already come together without needing to be reprocessed for a different genre. The question I pose is not “how did all of these ideas get cooked into a novel or lyric poem,” but rather, what kind of attachments and sociality do these forms suggest in and of themselves? As I have said, this book assumes that all collections project collectives. Yet the harmonies imagined in the space of the notebooks I examine in this section do not last—­in both cases the aimless play of information is rerouted through literary genres, where its energy is attenuated and often treated with suspicion. Chapter 3 focuses on the journals Hopkins kept between 1867 and 1875, when he foreswore writing poetry yet persisted in describing the natural world in a strange style as he undertook Jesuit training. Taking seriously his rejection of poetry in this period, I don’t read the notes as rudimentary poems, but instead argue that they represent efforts to compose a networked world through acts of small-­scale, incremental documentation. In the seven to eight years when Hopkins is not composing networks of sonic relation in his poetry, his attention turns outward, as he gathers things together in his descriptions. His word for the harmonious relations he detects is haecceity, which for him names the rotating collective forms that appear most strikingly in the natural world: snowdrifts, ponds, paintings, people’s bodies, and clouds. A version of mobile and plural haecceities

23

24

NOTEWORK

also occurred to the twentieth-­century micro-­sociologist Harold Garfinkel, whose vision of the social relies on a similar account. When Hopkins returns to poetry, however, the formal energy of the notebooks gets routed into metrical patterns. The content of the poetry also reflects a drama of personal data, in which Hopkins imagines God as a divine processor of the kinds of inconsequential material he recorded in his notes. My next chapter rethinks Oscar Wilde’s aphoristic style in light of his notebooks kept at Oxford. While Dorian Gray, for instance, treats aphorism as a pernicious medium weaponized by the amoral Lord Henry Wotton, Wilde’s archival materials offer another context for understanding his use of small pieces of language. Based on primary investigations of Wilde’s “Notebook on Philosophy,” this chapter suggests that Wilde saw how aphorism enables an energetic form of scholarly communication that renders pieces of information as actors, rather than as facts to be conscripted by existing methodologies. The notebooks reveal that Wilde draws inspiration for this stance from Francis Bacon, the early modern scientist, essayist, and aphorist. In exploring forms of undirected social assembly, Wilde’s notebooks also present a version of utopian intellectual social life. Yet this notational style receives a harsh critique in Dorian Gray, where it degenerates all too easily into the dissolute rhythms of hedonism and the heaping up of pleasures that never mature. Wilde suggests that scholarly communication of this kind inches closer and closer to sloganeering and pernicious narcissism. Just where we might expect to find the express affirmation of this form, then, we find critique. Part III, “Swells,” finally, argues for the emergence of a professional note-­taker at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Styled as intentionally flawed and incomplete, this dandy or “swell” of the note seeks the collaboration of future readers and writers that they may never meet. In this case, the future life of the note matters, not because of its potential placement or use in a work of their own but because it is imagined as joining a future community of reception in which it may take on very different meaning. Its value for these authors is precisely that it prefigures a textual life in which the genres of the late Victorian period may no longer matter. Vernon Lee and Samuel Butler both relinquish

AN INTRODUCTION

sovereignty over their own ideas as they tilt them toward destinations for which they are not responsible. These writers self-­consciously leverage Darwin’s account of rudiments explored in chapter 1, which introduces important changes to literary style: first, they conceive of the temporality of reception in unique terms. They understand that one’s intention may never be what is transmitted, and that readers will be increasingly disposed to make what they will of the writings that drift into the future. Second, they find a way of occupying marginal textual space as a reservoir of future power. In chapter 5, I consider Vernon Lee, a figure of perennial “recovery” for scholars of Victorian literature and aesthetics. I consider Lee’s marginal stance in a different light, as an intentionally cultivated style. Referring to nearly everything she writes as notes or sketches, she positions herself at an oblique angle to the norms of publication of her time. Her preoccupation is the public circulation of aesthetic response, which in her notorious “Gallery Diaries,” kept in the 1890s and 1900s, takes the form of overexposed and intimate notes about her physiological responses to art. I argue that her “Gallery Diaries,” along with many of her essays, forgo attempts to win literary prestige but instead serve to project her own aesthetic responses into the public sphere and to encourage others to do the same. As such she finds a public destination for notes without sacrificing their powers of fragmentation, playfulness, intimacy, and idiosyncrasy. I conclude with a reading of her 1923 work of literary theory, The Handling of Words, which values literature primarily as a storage device for containing and transmitting diffuse impressions and recollections. In a brief conclusion I consider the ethics of publicizing and interpreting once-­private documents. What does it mean to disperse oneself in documentary fragments, and to have others read them? The posthumous life of authors’ notework has been intensified by technology. Digital media enable the circulation of these once-­cloistered materials at a pace and scale unimaginable to their producers. Yet the very inconsequence of these documents leaves them vulnerable to extraction, use, and interpretation by future critics and readers. I address these issues by considering the film Ex Machina and its relation to the work of Samuel Butler, who foresaw

25

26

NOTEWORK

both the rise of artificial intelligence and the takeover of everyday life by more and more sophisticated technologies. Over the course of his life he also increasingly withdrew from the world of publication in order to explore the pleasures of keeping notes for their own sake. Butler enjoyed writing without a sense of destination, placing the responsibility for the redemption or fruition or any use of his work into a future that might (or might not) follow long after his death. Butler is also famous for his science fiction novel Erewhon, in which he foresees the rise of the personal computer and the advent of artificial intelligence; he shows that these tools could easily interfere with and conscript humans to their own purposes rather than the other way around, and that machinery is a crucial site at which Darwinian processes become highly relevant. His notebooks represent another paradox. On the one hand they represent the reserve of human creativity; on the other hand it is just this kind of style that our own machines and makers are using for their own, distant purposes. The gleaming future of redemption that Butler imagines meets an unforeseen and pernicious possibility that he himself foresaw in the uptake of more elementary, mechanical inventions.

C H A P T E R 1  S T Y L E S O F I N C O N S E Q U E N C E Charles Darwin

as much unpublished material published as Charles Darwin. By now generations of editors have preserved, transcribed, scanned, and made accessible nearly every extant scrap of paper he ever touched with a pen or pencil. The project of making such materials publicly available began early, when his granddaughter, the scientist and historian Nora Barlow, published an edition of Charles Darwin’s Diary of the Voyage of the HMS Beagle in 1933.1 In 1960, Gavin de Beer published many of the alphabetically ordered “Transmutation Notebooks,” one by one, in the form of bulletins from the British museum.2 To these were added Notebooks M and N in 1974.3 The alphabetical notebooks were collected and supplemented with other unpublished materials in 1987 and released as Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–­1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Inquiries. The smaller pocket-­books initially inspected by Barlow were eventually republished as Charles Darwin’s Notebooks from the Voyage of the Beagle in 2009. More recently, FEW WRITERS HAVE HAD

29

30

CHAPTER 1

digital endeavors have aimed to make images of his manuscript materials available. Darwin Online, a massive and open undertaking tethered to the Darwin collections at Cambridge, displays its holdings through the transcribed and digitized images of the originals. Add to this the output of the equally ambitious Darwin Correspondence Project, which collects, transcribes, and digitizes all letters Darwin sent and received, and a vast supplementary corpus comes into view. There is an obvious rationale for publishing these materials, both in print forms and online. They are useful for revealing the process that led to the development of the theory of evolution by natural selection. We can track what Darwin read and when he read it (though he did not date his early entries), identify the course of his observations and speculations, trace his network of colleagues and informants maintained through constant correspondence, and in the process learn about the nature of scientific discovery and the development of an intricate theory. Approached this way, certain notes have become famous unto themselves: the “tree of life” image from Notebook B gets reproduced not only in books and articles but on T-­shirts, mugs, and posters. Another nearly canonical sequence, from Notebook D, preserves Darwin’s reading notes on Thomas Malthus, in which the idea of a “struggle for existence” first crystallized.4 Yet alongside these moments in the notebooks marking insights and epiphanies, details appear that seem decidedly less significant, at least from a scientific standpoint. We get fragments of text that do not evidently contribute to the telos of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection: his “sublime” feeling watching a frog leap about, for instance, his impression of the stars, or the way sunlight hits a tree. Furthermore, the recent digital reproductions of his scribal objects made possible in the twenty-­first century generate material signs in excess of their conceptual content, granting access not only to his textual speculations but also revealing the grain of the paper, the color of the ink, and the shape of the handwriting in its Twomblyesque scrawl. His notes offer something more than his scientific footprints or a map of his reading. They disclose Darwin’s practice of putting the world on paper. What kind of writing tarries with illegibility, more concerned with representing the rush and

STYLES OF INCONSEQUENCE

jumble of sudden images than with the task of organizing the stream? What kind of reading does this form of script invite us to perform? How should we configure the relationship between notes and published forms? I am interested in Darwin’s notebooks as autonomous writings, that is, in reading them as forms that are fundamentally different from his published works. The fact that he only kept notebooks between the years of 1831 and 1844 suggests that they were technologies that served him in a particular way and for a limited time, during which he had yet to fully consolidate his theory of transmutation. After this period, he devised other methods of organizing his information, primarily through the use of subject portfolios.5 I focus specifically on the collection of fifteen small notebooks published as Charles Darwin’s Notebooks from the Voyage of the Beagle (1831–­1836) and several of the “Transmutation Notebooks” (1836–­1844). Across these writings, Darwin cultivates a style of social inconsequence, collecting observations without regard to their present usefulness or their contribution to future, published forms. The notebooks are instruments that paradoxically resist instrumental thinking, allowing his thought to drift, remaining in pieces and socially inert. In their contents, Darwin’s notes reflect his interest in the apparently inconsequential organs within nature, and his blank books serve to document seemingly inoperative structures in animal and plant bodies, the “useless organs” (such as the blind eye of a mole) that fulfill no apparent function but are “highly variable.”6 Organ, from the Greek ergon, means “tool” or “instrument.” As we will see, Darwin was just as interested in the organs that do not work as he was in those that do. The “Transmutation Notebooks” record this fascination at the same time as they enact its principles: lively, variable, but written “for the drawer,” they perform the purposeless play of ludic change that he finds in those elements in organic structures that do not serve evident purposes in their environments.7 The notebooks shelter styles of inconsequence. In the Origin, uselessness emerges as the Other of natural selection, lying outside of the selecting process that amplifies the serviceable qualities generated by a species and diminishes the harmful ones. The canonical definition of natural selection offered in that text encapsulates this: “The

31

32

CHAPTER 1

preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection, and would be left a fluctuating element.”8 A category of organ, “neither useful nor injurious,” then, lies beyond the interest of natural selection, which fixes the uses of organs and expels variations that actively constrain or damage the organism. The assertion of the presence of “tools” that do nothing but fluctuate ran against the centuries-­old notion that every part of the body served some purpose preordained by God. Darwin extends surprising care and tenderness toward what seems to have no use, refusing to insist upon its future redemption yet leaving open the possibility of change. He extends this care, in the final count, back to those notes (“The Old and Useless Notes”) that he did not incorporate into his own arguments in The Origin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. This chapter thus proposes a new formal method for connecting his notes to finished forms, not by tracing the sources and origins of particular ideas in his arsenal (although that does occasionally happen in the pages that follow) but by showing how the collection, retrieval, and preservation of individual notes creates a picture of textual collectivity resonant with the theory as a whole. Indeed, the stylistic qualities we find in the notes, such as suspended utility, paratactic shifts of focus and register, and gleeful play, differ substantially from the stylistic qualities that critics have illuminated in the later prose and for which they claim a literary or quasi-­literary value. Arguments for reading Darwin’s works as literature or closely alongside literature, in particular On the Origin of Species, proliferate in the field of English studies. These works, or sections of them, have been successfully installed in the canon of Victorian prose and recognized as a significant influence on nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century literature. The foundations for many of these arguments were set down in Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots, which confronted “some of the problems Darwin faced in precipitating his theory as language” as “he sought to appropriate and to recast inherited mythologies, discourses and narrative orders.” Indeed, “reading The Origin is an act which involves you in a narrative experience,” claims

STYLES OF INCONSEQUENCE

Beer, arguing further that “how Darwin said things was a crucial part of his struggle to think things, not a layer that can be skimmed off without loss.”9 By 2011, George Levine could begin a book titled Darwin the Writer by calling Origin “the most important book in English literature written in the nineteenth century.”10 And these books are of course just one trailhead of numerous paths into the humanistic response to Darwin. Literary criticism engaging his works reached a recent high point around 2009, the bicentenary of his birth and the sesquicentennial of his most important book. At that moment academic and popular culture were inundated with monographs, special issues of scholarly journals, articles from literary and cultural studies, and even a Hollywood film (Creation), foregrounding Darwin’s status as a thinker with deep relevance to the humanities.11 Although he didn’t paint or write novels, the suggestion goes, we should group Darwin not only with his contemporaries, such as Charles Lyell or Alfred Russel Wallace, but with Leonardo and Isaac Newton, great thinkers who conjoin imaginative thought with empirical observation. These interdisciplinary studies teach that Darwin was influenced by and in turn influenced narrative structures, that he manipulated metaphor and analogy to great effect, and that such metaphors produced ambivalent consequences.12 We know now that he took in Milton with verve, read Adam Bede with his family, and cared about beauty, feeling, and myriad phenomena that humanists would usually claim as their domain. We learn that his writing style resonated with others of his moment. Indeed, critics have identified his entanglement with nearly every one of his contemporary poets, novelists, or artists. It is often extracts from literary anthologies that connect Darwin’s writings to literary studies. There are canonical excerpts: the exquisite passage about the “tangled bank” from the conclusion to the Origin, with its memorable phrase about there being “grandeur in this view of life”; or the passages from the Descent dealing with sexual differentiation and secondary sexual characters, which provide ideological nuggets about Victorian notions of gender and “the present inequality between the sexes.”13 As Leah Price argues, practices of excerption help “readers to pace themselves through an unmanageable bulk of print by sensing when to skip and where

33

34

CHAPTER 1

to linger.”14 Yet if Price is correct when she argues that “extracts underwrite the discipline of literary criticism as we know it,” there doubtless remains a great deal of Darwin’s writing that could generate new lines of thought. In Middlemarch, there is a moment when the narrator wishes to turn attention away from the novel’s heroine, asking “Why always Dorothea?” 15 Part of my goal here is to ask “why always the tangled bank?” My contention is that in its effort to reveal the entanglement of scientific and humanistic thought, literary criticism with a Darwinian bent has missed out on one of the most stylistically formidable aspects of his writing. I do not wish to bridge a supposed gap between disciplines.16 My interest lies instead in the way the notes—­vessels for Darwin’s observations, queries, and feelings—­represent powerful aesthetic objects in their own right, not just technologies for scientific research but canvases for recording the complex emotions and reflections that attended his desire to keep information in a state of tumbling, atomistic play. By centering his notes as primary objects for literary study, we can begin to trace a very different artistic legacy for his work that we will follow through the subsequent chapters in this book. He gives a new license and meaning to rudimentary writing, freeing its authors to produce energetic differences without a destination. Darwin’s notebooks model a literary and intellectual space for ideas not automatically bound for publication, and even (importantly) serving as a refuge from the battlefields of the printed word. Useless Undertaking

Darwin’s notational style developed while he was serving aboard the HMS Beagle, from 1831 until 1836, a voyage that he would later call “the most important event” of his life.17 What motivated his decision to embark on that voyage? It was a journey that led him away from the course of the gentlemanly life that was valued by his family and social milieu. It is well-­known that Darwin was a mediocre student as a child and young man. The education available to a man of his social class, namely classical education, and the careers that would follow such an education (medicine, scholarship, or the clergy, for instance) failed to seduce him. While at the University of Edinburgh, he turned down the standard schedule

STYLES OF INCONSEQUENCE

of lectures and courses, pursuing whatever he liked and following the drift of his own whims to the consternation of his family, which his sister Susan makes clear in a letter supposedly representing the interests of their father: I have a message from Papa to give you, which I am afraid you won’t like; he desires me to say that he thinks your plan of picking and chusing what lectures you like to attend, not at all a good one; and as you cannot have enough information to know what may be of use to you, it is quite necessary for you to bear with a good deal of stupid & dry work: but if you do not discontinue your present indulgent way, your course of study will be utterly useless.18

In order to avoid being “utterly useless” and to find out “what may be of use,” he is told to make peace with and endure an series of inane lectures he has found desiccated and tedious. He faces a crisis of utility at this moment in his life. On the one hand, he is inundated with “negative” uselessness in the form of a moribund course of study his parents wish him to pursue, while on the other hand he enjoys the ludic uselessness of pursuing his studies in a scattershot style. For Darwin, the available forms of education held little appeal. The traditions of humanism seemed to him empty. In his “Recollections” of 1876, he writes of attending Shrewsbury School before Cambridge: “The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank,” he writes, as it was “strictly classical.” The tasks of memorizing Homer and Virgil he calls “utterly useless.” At Cambridge he similarly took very little interest in the classical curriculum. “During the three years which I spent at Cambridge my time was wasted,” he writes, adding the exception of his reading of William Paley’s Natural Theology. Studying Paley’s work, he felt, “was the only part of the Academical Course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me.” He spent much of his time at Cambridge collecting, specifically gathering up samples of different kinds of beetles. Indeed, his passion for taking in the natural world around the campus became literal: he relays an anecdote of having to put a beetle in his mouth because his hands were so full of other beetles.19

35

36

CHAPTER 1

After his course of study, an opportunity arose by way of John Henslow, a professor from Cambridge, who introduced Charles to the possibility of joining the crew of the HMS Beagle under the command of one Captain Fitzroy. Predictably, his father reiterated his usual utilitarian concerns, fearing the journey would be a “useless undertaking.”20 His uncle, however, supported the venture, listing several reasons in support of Darwin going on the expedition: “The undertaking would be useless as regards his profession, but looking upon him as a man of enlarged curiosity, it affords him such an opportunity of seeing men and things as happens to few.”21 And so Darwin sailed away from the conventions of home with his bundles of blank notebooks in tow. In addition to his journals, he took fifteen books’ worth of notes over the course of the journey, each one of which has been subsequently named by editors for the locations he visited when he kept one volume or another: the Falkland Notebook; the Rio Notebook; the Galapagos Notebook. Many of the entries he made in these books were expanded in his journal, which eventually became the basis of The Voyage on the Beagle. Darwin’s early notebooks were small and portable, easily slipped into his bag or coat pockets. “As far as I can judge of myself I worked to the utmost during the voyage from the mere pleasure of investigation,” he wrote later, and the notebooks reflect precisely this pleasure of disorganized investigation and documentation unfolding for its own sake.22 They were, as Richard Darwin Keynes notes, “his equipment.”23 What kind of technology is this? In 1933, Lady Nora Barlow examined the “eighteen little pocket-­books” as part of her research for her edition of the Beagle diaries, the first substantial publication of Darwin’s manuscript materials. She considers them in her preface as a curious source of aesthetic plenitude, a record of scattered affects and descriptions. She notes that these pocket books were his “constant companions on the island expeditions.” Not a journal per se, they present a disordered frenzy of script running at all angles across the pages. “The rapid pencil writing is often illegible,” she writes, “and the stream of impressions rushes past, disclosing in its course a jumble of sudden images.” Barlow, like many commentators on the notes, is obviously charmed, yet she does not dwell

STYLES OF INCONSEQUENCE

on these little books filled with sudden images, turning instead to the more orderly diary in which Darwin expanded the “strictly scientific portions” of the “rough notes.”24 She leaves the “rough notes” unaccounted for. How should they be read, in their near-­illegibility? The editors of the 2009 edition introduce each notebook by pointing out the germinal passages that Darwin later built up in his journal or in his published writings. Alongside these notes with a future, however, there exists a kaleidoscopic array of other notes that do not become significant in Darwin’s “literary” corpus. Barlow ends up using quotations from the “little pocket-­books” as a hook for her introduction to the “strictly scientific” diary. She teases the reader with a few excerpts from the early rough notes, passages that she glosses as “general descriptions.” Here are a few: “Our dinner eggs & rice . . . Arrived at our sleeping place about 9. Sand & swampy plains & thickets alternating—­passed through by a dim moonlight:—­the cries of snipe—­fire-­flies—­& a few noisy goatsuckers.” “Started at 5 o’clock: the sky became red & then the stars died away & then the planets. . . .” “Twiners entwining twiners,—­ tresses like hair,—­ beautiful lepidoptera,—­silence—­hosannah;—­Frog

habits

like

toad—­slow

jumps,—­Sublime devotion the prevalent feeling.”

25

Barlow mixes notes together that are separated in the actual notebook. The phrase “sublime devotion the prevalent feeling,” for example, appears several pages after Darwin makes his observation about the jumping frog.26 I read this unexplained choice as an indication of her desire to make them serve as evidence for the aesthetic and creative dimension of the notebooks, making of them a rich text of impressions that Darwin eventually put to use as theory. The fanciful use of these writings as a hook to draw the reader into more serious work highlights their aesthetic quality. They appear at the beginning of the edition as a collection of epigraphs, or lyrical poems manqués, Romantic texts more in line with, for example, the notes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Dorothy Wordsworth.

37

38

CHAPTER 1

It is certainly easy to pick out other notes from Darwin’s time on the Beagle that support this reading. The word “sublime,” for instance, is notably absent from every edition of On the Origin of Species and The Expression of the Emotions, and appears only once in The Descent of Man, yet it recurs again and again in the Beagle Notebooks. It is indeed the “prevalent feeling”: “View at first leaving Rio sublime, picturesque intense colours blue prevailing tint” “entered a magnificent forest: sublime” “spent the whole morning in thus rambling in the forests. sublime devotion the prevalent feeling: this days delay was owing to Mr Lennon going to visit his estate . . .” “delightful walk reflecting how many hundred years has been. how many will be without tree sublime or animal excepting Guanaca” “the very quietness almost sublime even amongst mud banks & gulls sand hills & solitary Vultures”27

All fifteen of the Beagle Notebooks sustain affects of sublimity and wonder that do not eventuate in objective “facts,” and this effect colors not only the more passionate passages, but also the moments of greater scientific value, as well as the stray descriptions that seem to bear little relation to either category. Darwin’s early note-­taking reflects a style centered on the collection of details and descriptions that strike him emotionally. Rather than remarking on what seems significant, or creating a classificatory apparatus for his findings, he amasses experiences, facts, and feelings that do not announce themselves as significant apart from their provocation of intense emotions. While the publication of the notebooks seems to invite a reading of them as quasi-­lyrics, my intention is not to aestheticize them in the sense of reading them as poems. Their aesthetic quality exceeds stray ejaculations about beauty or sublimity: the notebooks model an aesthetic of the stream of fragmented and scattered existence, one that does not stop in the pleasures of beauty or sublimity but that just keeps adding items to a

STYLES OF INCONSEQUENCE

pile. “The most beautiful kosmos is a pile of things poured out at random,” wrote Heraclitus, an aphorism Darwin seems to follow.28 His notes flash over a vast archive of details, impressions, and feelings, all of which seem quite useless as regards moral or ethical development. Yet he slips them into his blank books all the same, and their collection represents, I suggest, its own style, at a distance from where literary critics usually look for such things. There are of course precise descriptions of geological phenomena, for example of the “diluvium angular gneiss in red clay.”29 His observations about the natural world resemble a rapid collection of photographs or hasty sketches. But among these faint documents we also find Darwin tracking sublime affects, as Barlow noticed early on. He is making a beautifully disorganized collection. While he certainly goes on to do something with them (i.e. write and publish journals, theories, autobiographies), the notes as they are hover in a state of potentiality, undecided about their destination. Aestheticizing them by imposing a lyrical frame, or a retrospective reading from the finished works, merely places them on another teleological textual path. But these documents reveal Darwin’s intense desire to keep his findings in a state of potentiality and play, hanging together without his insisting upon their systematic integration or their future redemption, and without arresting the movement of his mind by stopping at any single point. Many exegetes remark on this aspect of his notes: their “vertiginous freedom,” as Beer puts it, or a playground for “imaginative theorization and fanciful language,” which Devin Griffiths observes.30 However, like Barlow, these and other critics honor this aspect of the notebook writings as an aside on their way to other critical perches. If we pan out from one of the “sublime feeling” fragments in the notes, we can see this emotion jostling against other apparently nonaesthetic impressions and feelings. Darwin leaps from thing to thing without stopping, piling up a whole assortment of documents. The following is an unedited stream from the Cape de Verds Notebook: No monocotyledon plants ants nearby 3 feets high 2 thick with a tube at bottom Lichen, mosses

39

40

CHAPTER 1

Terns & Noddy on trees alight beautiful pink flowers on the top of mountain on trees vitreous feldspar & tufa alternate & dykes—­white soil form bed Solitude on board enervating heat comfort: hard to look forward pleasures in prospect: do not wish for cold night delicious sea calm sky not blue31

Latin names, insects, beautiful flowers, his feeling of enervation, a lack of optimism: descriptions and subjective reflections jostle up against one another without being marked as separate kinds of thought. Everything runs together for him. The detail about the difficulty he has looking forward to pleasures is significant. While sublime feelings and the experience of the beautiful occur to him on his journey, he is also dealing with the misty emotions incited by the surrounding uncharted waters, both figurative and literal. In the Beagle Notebooks, he records the changing coordinates of the ship, marking their latitude and longitude as the ship switches direction or course. The paratactic shifting from a description of a plant, to a feeling, to nautical coordinates exemplifies the rhythm of the notes as whole. They produce a paradoxical sequence of inconsequentiality and of minor details heaped up out of order. They amount not only to a record of a sensitive mind experiencing the beauty of nature but also to an idiosyncratic “practice of the disparate.”32 Transmutation

After he returned to England in 1836, Darwin’s note-­taking expanded to include more reading notes on the work of other natural historians.33 In the alphabetical “Transmutation Notebooks,” which he kept until 1844, his central argument begins to surface in a virtual, emergent sense, like a liquid just beginning to freeze. In Notebook B, he sketches the now-­famous “tree of life” image that reveals the descent of many species from a common ancestor, as well as the necessity of extinction: “Absolute knowledge that species die &. others replace them.” He considers the reason for the existence of death: “Why does individual die, to perpetuate certain peculiarities, (therefore adaptation).” References to the “Creator”

STYLES OF INCONSEQUENCE

continue to drift in and out of his notes as he tries to determine the laws that govern selection and adaptation: “this might be made very strong, if we believe the Creator creates by any laws, which I think is shown by the very facts of the Zoological character of these islands [the Galapagos].”34 As time advances, the feelings associated with the “Creator” change as he critiques other people’s closed-­mindedness on the subject of what God could be: “Has the Creator since the Cambrian formations gone on creating animals with same general structure.—­miserable limited view—­.” Eventually, Darwin’s own humility goes hand in hand with the critique of the divine genesis of species: “If I be asked by what power the creator has added thought to so many animals of different types. I will confess my profound ignorance.” Alongside wonder, playfulness, and curiosity, humility is one of the central emotional experiences the notes both record and evoke. There is an admirable lack of arrogance in Darwin’s transmutation writings, and his particular brand of humility appears unmixed with penitence or piety but is rather alloyed with excitement and exclamation. “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work. worthy the interposition of a deity, more humble & I believe true to consider him created from animals.—­”35 He does not merely make scientific insights and flee the scene. Emotions accompany every fact, helping him to navigate the world and his own thinking. Yet even as the theory begins to take an adumbrated form, Darwin’s thoughts remain in a state of flux as he sustains a baroque, sprawling style of collection and inquiry. He continues to write in brief fragments of prose aimed “for the drawer,” as the editors of the “Transmutation Notebooks” put it, yet the energy of the notes goes hand in hand with this withdrawal from publicity and his aloofness to the possibility of being read at all. As Darwin reflected later, “I did not care much about the general public.”36 This was a performance intended for the writer alone and was largely, at this point, a socially inconsequential endeavor. In their study Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, Howard Gruber and Paul Barrett describe the detachment of the notebooks from the methodical procedures of the later formulated theory: “The pandemonium of Darwin’s notebooks and his actual way of working, in which many different

41

42

CHAPTER 1

processes tumble over each other in untidy sequences—­theorizing, experimenting, casual observing, reading etc.—­would never have passed muster in a methodological court of inquiry.”37 This willful inconsequentiality, which continues unabated for several years, does not seem easily explainable by virtue of Darwin’s commitment to accuracy, or by the “refusal of fame” as Levine might describe it, but can be ascribed rather to Darwin’s desire to keep his thinking in pieces, to enjoy the riot of notes without forcing them prematurely into publishable and public form.38 Gruber’s and Barrett’s exquisite comparison of the notebook to “pandemonium,” the city of fallen angels in Paradise Lost, marks an instance where a collection of notes is likened to an anarchic social space, an analogy that will recur here and in the later chapters of this book. The “Transmutation Notebooks” preserve the affects of sublimity, wonder, and awe that textured the rough notes kept on the Beagle. There arise, alongside the notes crucial for the development of this theory, other impressions and observations that reveal the gleeful state Darwin must have inhabited as he wrote down the world. He records strange, haywire incidents: “When in National Institution & not feeling much enthusiasm, happened to go close to one & smelt the peculiar smell of Picture. association with much pleasure immediately thrilled across me.”39 His eccentricity shines through. This man runs through public institutions sniffing artifacts when he gets bored of just looking at them. It is hard to imagine him finding a way of including such a note in any of his publications, even in The Expression of the Emotions, which directly addresses the question of art and its relationship with biology. There, he famously dismisses the significance of art’s contribution to scientific discussions of emotion, as though he were sniffing around for something else.40 Darwin is constantly ranking the relative wonder of his objects. The comparative forms “more wonderful” and “less wonderful” appear frequently in the notes, helping him define where different elements of the world fall on the scales: “I remember my pleasure in Kensington Gardens has often been greatly excited by looking at trees at [i.e. as] great compound animals united by wonderful & mysterious manner.” His use of the word “wonder,” however, is not always irenic, and he often invokes it

STYLES OF INCONSEQUENCE

in comparisons that diminish the significance of the human subject. The following is only the most explicit statement of this position, and there are many others: “People often talk of the wonderful event of intellectual Man appearing..—­the appearance of insects with other senses is more wonderful. its mind more different probably & introduction of man.” Of course he refuses the wonder of an enlightened sovereign subject. Even a mind like Newton’s is not safe: “That the embryo the thousandth of inch should produce a Newton is often thought wonderful. it is part of same class of facts that the skin grows over a wound.” Throughout these notes, he resists the cognitive interpretation of what passes before his eyes, moving through the world with his emotions as a compass: “When we talk of high orders, we should always say, intellectually higher.—­But who with the face of the earth covered with the most beautiful savannahs & forests dare to say that intellectuality is only aim in this world.”41 His attention spins without settling, streams without freezing. Exclamation points rain down on the pages. They flag his excitement over this or that fact, for example expressing shock and awe at the idea of vertebrae sustaining a creature who has no need of a head: “bisexual animal with a vertebra only & no head—­!!” He identifies the need to link usefulness to the morphology of body parts: “Till we know uses of organs clearly, we cannot guess causes of change.—­hump on back of cow!!” In the following two passages we find instances of irony and self-­awareness as Darwin begins to dismantle the architecture of natural theology. Pandemonium is an apt word to describe the rebellious condition and quality of the notes as they rage against the mythologies upholding Christian heaven: “Study geographical distribution study relation of fossil with recent. the fabric falls! But Man—­—­wonderful Man.” And finally he begins to consider metaphysical concepts—­deity, in this case—­as the outgrowth of evolutionary processes rather than innate forms of knowledge implanted there by divine beings: “love of the deity effect of organization. oh you Materialist!”42 The notes revolt against orthodoxy. They swarm, shout, and gasp. Personifications aside, the notes contain much that Darwin surely deemed too salacious for publication later on, particularly when it comes to animal and human sexuality. In Notebook N, for instance, the second

43

44

CHAPTER 1

of the great collections of material bearing on metaphysical questions, he remembers childhood reflections on homosexuality: “I often have wondered why all abnormal sexual actions or even impulses. (where sensations of individual are same as in normal cases) are held in abhorrence it is because instincts to woman is not followed.” His wonder at sexual abnormalities doesn’t stop with homosexuality, but occasionally touches on still more taboo subjects. A stray note from Notebook M: “There are numberless people insane of particular ideas which are never generally, if at all discovered.” And another note puzzles over the question of whether primates are attracted to human females, arguing that an instance of this happening proves that any animal can recognize the animal dimensions of humanity: “The monkeys understand the affinities of man, better than the boasted philosopher himself it is chiefly shown in old male—­A very green monkey . . .—­he has seen place its head downwards to look up womens petticoats.”43 While some notes convey a sense of rapture and wonder, they never stall on those emotions, but they rove, casting about for the stranger detail, the hidden story, and the odd thing that will burst the seams of convention. Useless Organs

While some of this material made it into the books, it is difficult to imagine Darwin dropping in passages about his boyhood reflections on homosexuality, or relating stories about smelling pictures on the walls of the National Gallery. Their uselessness insofar as publication is concerned analogizes the intensity with which the notes return again and again to uselessness as it appeared to Darwin in the world of plants, animals, and even geography. He becomes particularly excited by those variations within plant and animal bodies that apparently contribute nothing whatsoever to the organisms of which they are part. The wings of flightless birds, for example, or the human appendix, are neither particularly harmful nor beneficial. They vary in a state of play, illegible to conventional forms of natural historical explanation. The notes shelter such parts against those writers who would deny their neutral character.

STYLES OF INCONSEQUENCE

For example, the natural theologians—­ the ancestors of present-­ day intelligent-­design advocates—­simply produce their own commonplace to answer the question of the presence of useless bits and pieces: “nature does nothing in vain.”44 The “Transmutation Notebooks,” by contrast, not only represent a stylization of Darwin’s life but also picture the natural world as a sublime archive of variable parts, not all of which have a particular function. Many survive in spite of this, since nature as Darwin theorizes it has no guiding purpose directing its movements. The first records we have of this interest come from the Beagle Notebooks kept in August 1833. In the middle of the Falkland Notebook, Darwin records an encounter with a strange creature while he made one of his sallies to the island. The onomatopoeically named “tuco-­tuco,” or “toco-­toco,” a small mammal related to the mole, burrows underground and makes a sound that he described as “distinct louder sonorous, like distant cutting of small tree more peculiar noise.” He notes that the tuco-­tuco is “said to have no tail (?) and blind (?)”45 His rough note on the matter ends there. In two subsequent meditations, however, he returns to the subject of the tuco-­tuco with its rudiment of a tail and its strange eyes that seemed to serve no other purpose than getting injured as the small animal burrowed through the ground. The first is taken from Darwin’s Animal Notes, and the second from the Voyage of the Beagle, published long after: Considering the subterranean habits of the tuco-­tuco, the blindness, though so frequent, cannot be a very serious evil. Yet it appears odd that an animal should possess an organ constantly subject to injury.46 In the tuco-­tuco, which I believe never comes to the surface of the ground, the eye is rather larger, but often rendered blind and useless, though without apparently causing any inconvenience to the animal.47

The first entry employs moral vocabulary (“serious evil”), but such language disappears in the next instantiation of the thought, which includes the less severe adjective “useless.” As Darwin uses it, the word does not connote moral judgment, which we can discern because of his clarification that

45

46

CHAPTER 1

follows: the blind eye does not cause much inconvenience at all. In his descriptions of the blind eye of the tuco-­tuco, Darwin reveals his curiosity about and tolerance of inutility, a position very different from the one we might expect from a man who seems on the surface committed to “the survival of the fittest,” whether it takes the form of written notes or the eye of a subterranean creature that does not see. The uselessness of the tuco-­tuco’s eye extends metonymically to the landscape of South America itself. Reflecting on this landscape, Darwin frequently mentions the “sterile wastes” of the country. He addresses this fascination and the hold that barren landscapes have on his mind and memory. The plains of Patagonia, for instance, are “pronounced by all most wretched and useless” and yet they are the “images of the past” that “most frequently cross before [his] eyes.” He notes that the more fertile landscapes that he experienced fail to produce the same effect. Their imaginative incitements fall short. The sterility and the waste of these other, South American spaces take hold of his faculties. They are, he remarks hyperbolically, “the last boundaries to human knowledge.” Why do these and not other memories compel him? He suggests that his fascination with useless territory is caused by “the free scope given to the imagination.”48 What is not serviceable for humanity excites the activity of the imagination. The “free scope” of thought arises as a consolation in the absence of use. His imagination—­that fluctuating, variable organ—­takes hold of him when he contemplates those stretches of the earth that seem superfluous. The “Transmutation Notebooks,” for their part, serve as a shelter, an ark, not only for Darwin’s own socially wayward thoughts but also for the numerous “abortive” elements in this world. “What is abortive? when it does not perform that function which experience shows us it was for.—­ Most important,” he writes at D59.49 Examples of abortive organs that find a place in the notebooks are male nipples, the fused wings of certain beetles,50 snakes’ teeth that have perforations for poison without being poisonous, the genitals of mules, muscular ticks in a horse’s ear,51 the ability of some people to move their ears without touching them,52 sighs (“A sigh, is an abortive groan”53), the emotional expressions of a baby,54 a female flower on a male plant,55 the spiracles of a plant, and the wing of

STYLES OF INCONSEQUENCE

an apteryx.56 Such items are identified without trying to fit them into a functional system, without appealing to some unknown use that a “divine” creator knows about but that we do not: When one sees nipple of man’s breast. one does not say some use, but no sex not having been determined.—­so with useless wings under elytra of beetles.—­born from beetles with wings. &modified.—­if simple creation, surely would have been born without them.57

Such elements are, in general, vestiges that once served a function for their possessors; or else they are the incipient versions of structures that do not yet have a use for themselves, a reserve of value in the system that may someday become transmuted into significance, although this second possibility only occurs to him much later. Among the unifying principles that defined natural history before Darwin came on the scene was the doctrine, already noted above, that “nature does nothing in vain.” At E54, Darwin cites this commonplace as it appears in Thomas Browne’s Latin text: “‘Natura nihil agit frustra’, as Sir Thomas Browne says ‘is the only indisputable axiom in Philosophy’ Religio Medici Vol. II Sir T Browne’s Works p 20.” Every natural thing is tuned toward nature, or God’s purposes, according to Browne and nearly every natural historian. Each part of an animal, plant, or other form of life is attuned to the organic unity of the whole of which it forms a part, with no excess or extraneous material left over. Darwin’s quotation of Browne continues: “‘There are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons, & unnecessary spaces’ p23 ‘for Nature is the art of God.’” On this view, nothing is ever wasted; nature runs like a perfectly oiled machine in which everything has a place. Darwin dissents from this position strongly. “Here there is some error,” he writes. Refuting Browne’s commonplace, he rehearses a debate about why certain clams have “eye points” (tiny rudiments of eyes) while others do not: “Macleay then answered, because nature leaves vestiges of what she does—­does not move per saltum—­yet does nothing in vain!!”58 Darwin rejects the notion that nature is incapable of acting in vain. He saw the world everywhere generating neutral variations that did not produce deleterious effects.59 Browne’s

47

48

CHAPTER 1

appeal to nature as “the art of God” also depends on a notion of artistic form in which nothing is extraneous or excessive, where every part serves the whole according to organic unity. Darwin’s idea of form is so much more capacious, messy, and permissive of errant digression. Through his writings on the eye of the tuco-­tuco, his engagement with other natural historians, and his intense memories of sterile landscapes, the inoperative becomes an oddly valuable category for Darwin’s work. Through his notes he develops a strategy for containing these curiosities, enjoying the wonder and mystery they present but without putting faith in a deity as the only agency that could ultimately explain what these things are for. Like Darwin himself on the HMS Beagle, quartered on a vessel drifting without a clear goal in mind, these vagrant nipples and vestigial teeth find accommodation within his notebooks that make a virtue of their uselessness. In 1844, toward the end of his intense note-­taking period, Darwin stacked the “Transmutation Notebooks” into a box and left them there for over a decade, not showing them to anybody nor elaborating on their specific contents. He turned instead to a long study of barnacles that occupied him for seven years while his revolutionary theory remained in pieces in the notebooks, tucked away from view until he drew them out and began the arduous process of transforming them into On the Origin of Species. This book was finally published in 1859. There exist various household explanations for why Darwin withheld his theory for so long. Some contend that he was ashamed of its materialistic view of the world, or that his wife, Emma Darwin, had religious views that he did not want to offend. Others hold that he wanted to amass copious evidence so that there would be no question about the legitimacy of his proposal. Intriguingly, John van Wyhe argues against the idea that any such delay exists, stating that no concrete evidence lends support to any of the suppositions outlined above and that if we took seriously “the magnitude of the research programme,” then the years intervening between the notes and the book would not seem so significant. He remarks that the publication of the notebooks, beginning in 1960, might have “fuelled interest in the gap period.”60

STYLES OF INCONSEQUENCE

I would argue that psychological and social explanations for the temporal gap between the notes and the Origin actually displace accounts of the crucial formal differences between these kinds of writing. Said another way, explanations that account for the delay tout court strangely presume an equivalence between the notebooks and the published books, as though the former could have been instantly adapted into the latter without remainder at any moment Darwin chose to do so. The composition of the Origin, the Descent, and the Expression was not just a matter of pasting the notes together in a new order; it required cutting away and removing traces like those I am surveying here, and of course a re-­stylization into a new form. Few would deny that a great deal was gained by the production of these books, but the boyish skip and thrill of the notes got left behind. After the 1840s, Darwin stopped using notebooks to record his observations in this fashion. What Survives

Of course, Darwin did eventually open the chest where the notebooks lay fallow and unused, turning them into a quarry as he composed his works in the late 1850s. What had been a relatively asocial undertaking became the most significant monument of Victorian scientific achievement. What had developed as a style of eschewing the life of a sovereign human subject became the best example of what rational scientific thinking could accomplish. The style of free play and vagrant writing cultivated in the notes accords with the heterodox values associated with uselessness in The Origin. Darwin builds a place for objects of neutral value into the very structure of his laws, as already cited above: “The preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection, and would be left a fluctuating element.”61 The first sentence has become canonical; the second of only specialized interest. This grey area of existence cannot be accounted for by our usual metrics of value, or indeed by the grand law that Darwin had discovered. A great deal of matter simply hangs around, proliferating variations that remain neutral in the struggle for survival. Uselessness of this sort is not evil, but simply there.62

49

50

CHAPTER 1

While every body part and individual, according to Darwin’s theory, is subject to variation, rudiments or vestiges possess this quality in abundance. It is in a sense all that they do: “their variability seems to be owing to their uselessness, and therefore to natural selection having no power to check deviations in their structure. Thus rudimentary parts are left to the free play of the various laws of growth.”63 There are echoes here of the imaginative “free scope” that Darwin associated with the “sterile wastes” of the South American landscape. Natural selection chips away at the useful and expels the harmful, leaving untouched a mercurial collection of materials that hover beyond the reach of its power. Play, uselessness, and the imagination of future life become inextricable in this formulation. Utility and variability thus operate in an inverse ratio: the closer an organ comes to evolving a useful function for its parent organism, the greater the tendency toward uniformity among different generations of that part. The further it strays from the point of its usefulness (whether that moment be in the past or the future), the more various will its iterations become. Notebook D shows that Darwin takes the principle of the inverse ratio of utility and variation from William Sharp MacLeay, who sketches the idea in his Invertebratae of 1838. In the Origin, Darwin uses the stabilizing trope of analogy in order to make clear his meaning: “In the same way that a knife which has to cut all sorts of things may be of almost any shape; whilst a tool for some particular object had better be of some particular shape.”64 To be outside the rules of selection is to be “variable” with all the meanings that attend this word: mercurial, unstable, inconsistent, playful, changeable, inconsequent. What generates this changefulness, however, remained unknown to him. Extrapolating ethical meanings from Darwin’s theory of natural selection was as difficult for his nineteenth-­century readers as it is for us.65 But by reading his discussion of these appendages of uncertain purpose in the Origin alongside the writing styles found in the notebooks, a different way of understanding the ethical meanings of his work comes to light that does not depend upon functional explanations. For many years after sketching the broad outlines of his theory in his notebooks, he let them sit without converting them into a publicly usable, “particular shape.” Using the metaphor

STYLES OF INCONSEQUENCE

he eventually employs, it is as though he were making a knife that, serving no definitive purpose, did not have to assume a single, final, recognizable outline. With no calculable payoff for the general public, at least as far as he could see, why stop the kaleidoscope from turning? If he felt his theory had no particular function for other people, perhaps he wanted to keep it in a state of energetic variability rather than decisively landing on a meaning for it. As van Wyhe writes, “there was . . . no singular or cohesive block of time to which any decision or plan by Darwin can be hypothesized to apply. Instead, Darwin was occupied with many different, sometimes overlapping, sometimes successive, objectives throughout this period.”66 Even when Darwin stages his “long argument” in The Origin, he refuses to let natural selection have the final word on every aspect of the natural world. He effectively limits the sphere of its influence. He includes the “fluctuating element” of the useless organ in the margins of a work primarily focused on defending his argument about this other force. But natural selection became the entire focus of those interested in the ethical consequences of what Darwin was saying. The advent of Social Darwinism has probably confirmed some of his fears about letting his theory assume a form that public circulation renders socially instrumental. The idea of the processes of natural selection fell much too easily in line with the dictates of a ruthless, competitive picture of capitalism, underwriting an almost fundamentalist utilitarian viewpoint of how society should operate. At the furthest extreme, the theory has been used as moral justification for horrifying eugenic policies—­the knife sharpened.67 In the sixth edition of The Origin (1872), Darwin devotes more attention than he had in the first edition to the problem of what future possibilities exist for presently useless organs. There may be, the inference goes, nascent potentials within the appendix or the spleen. New functions may supplant old or existing ones, either after a long period of inaction for the organ or in a more sudden about-­face: “an organ rendered, through changed habits of life, useless for one purpose, might be modified and used for another purpose.”68 Thus Darwin introduces the germ of what Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba would eventually codify as “exaptation,” the process by which organs that evolved to sustain one function

51

52

CHAPTER 1

may abandon it for a better one.69 The classic example is that of feathers, whose structure first evolved to regulate temperature, only to become essential, later on, to flight. I have explored how Darwin kept his ideas in a state of fragmentation because of his resistance to their being put to social purposes and having their meaning arrested. One of the features of Darwin’s published writings that has frustrated interpreters is precisely his resistance to spelling out the ethical consequences of his work, or even intentionally evading the problem of what should be done with the theory in the future, especially given the fact that the theory curtails the visions of the future afforded by religion or even by a progressive notion of society. We are left with the same problem of deducing ethical meanings from what seems to be an innately amoral system. Many would say this is the wrong approach: that human ethics should not be considered in relation to evolutionary processes; that our goal should be, in effect, to resist the urge to graft the intentionality of natural selection onto our own ethical choices.70 Darwin’s note-­taking, however, allows for the extrapolation of a textual ethics that has little to do with a nature “red in tooth and claw,” or even with the recuperation of social emotions, and reflects instead an aesthetic mode of documentation and containment that resists the urge to make everything immediately usable. By turning to those sidelined elements of Darwin’s works that remain obscure to popular as well as learned interpretations of his works, we may “exapt” new futures for those works. As Walter Benjamin puts the matter in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” “the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.”71 What I have been offering here is in some sense an “exaptation” of Darwin’s notework—­reading it as a trace of Darwin’s own creative life and proposing that it affords an aesthetics of notation. While many of his notes may have been put to the service of his one long argument, others index a very different attitude toward the natural world and toward his own acts of contemplation. In the final count, Darwin makes uncanny provisions for treating his notes as something more than the footprints leading up to the theory of evolution by natural selection to the exclusion of other meanings and possibilities.

STYLES OF INCONSEQUENCE

The “Old and Useless Notes”

Darwin embodies the process of selection vis-­à-­vis his own documents, slicing into his collection of myriad bits and pieces of information in order to carve out the most pertinent elements. Notebooks B, C, D, E, M, and N bear the traces of these cuttings. He made notes in the first pages of some of the books indicating which pages he had removed. The first note on the inside front cover of B, for instance, is “all useful pages cut out Dec 7 1856 (& again looked through April 21 1873).” At the back of the Red Notebook he wrote “Nothing For any Purpose.” On the front cover of A he wrote “Nothing on any Subject.” In the early 1870s, after rendering his arguments in The Origin, the Descent, and the Expression, he gathered up forty-­two pieces of miscellaneous bits of paper of different sizes, either pieces of loose-­leaf or cutouts from other notebooks, and bundled them together with the label “Old and Useless notes about the moral sense & some metaphysical points written about the year 1837 & Earlier”72 (figure 1.1). The notebooks held a particular value for Darwin while he was keeping them in the 1830s and early 1840s. But by now that ship had sailed, as it were, and he measured their value by their serviceability in assisting him in making his argument, which would henceforth establish the Darwin we have all come to know and find quite useful. When Gavin de Beer published the first of these notebooks in 1959, they appeared in the Bulletin of the British Museum without the excerpts that Darwin had cut out for use in his publications. Soon afterward, others published these missing pieces, but it was not until 1974 that they would circulate again.

Figure 1.1  “[Old and Useless Notes about the moral sense & some metaphysical points written about the year 1837 & earlier].” Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

53

54

CHAPTER 1

Labeling the notes “Old and Useless,” however, paradoxically guaranteed that they would become of interest to future scholars, particularly those attuned to the utilitarian legacy of the Victorian period and the degree to which carving the world up into the categories of useful and useless leaves much unaccounted for. In other words, when we see the label “useless” we immediately rejoin: “or useful?” The fact that Darwin left these materials intact indicates something more than neutral tolerance; it suggests that he took care to preserve even those documents that served no purpose in the construction of his argument, pushing them forward into unfinished time. Like some of the collections examined above, the “Old and Useless Notes” are a set of energetic and thrilling fragments on an eclectic range of topics: moral sensibility, ethics, aesthetics, as well as tragic acting, the role of the will in guiding human action, and speculations about the dreams of dogs. Consider again the following note, taken down in a furious, barely legible hand, then consigned years later to the bundle of preserved “waste”: “I grant that the thrill, which runs throug every fibre, when one behold the last rays of & & or grand chorus are utterly inexplicable—­I cannot admit think reason sufficient to give up my theory—­.”73 In this passage Darwin takes note of the emotions stirred by beautiful sensory experiences: the sunset, or a musical chorus. Such things have no explanation, and although he doesn’t mention God outright, that would seem to be the explanation he is trying to avoid. Instead he notes the shivers such experiences produce in his body and leaves the matter there. Taken in 1837, this note already hints at his having a theory that could be at odds with the thrills he experienced in response to nature or art. While beauty would seem to be the prevalent feeling in this passage, I take the references to bodily thrills as the reason for their inclusion among the useless. One can almost feel his style of thinking, engendered by the notebooks, slipping away from his body like a garment as it becomes public knowledge. In the analysis of the Beagle Notebooks and the “Transmutation Notebooks” above, I showed how Darwin used his notebooks as an instrument for recording socially inconsequential experiences of wonder and sublimity. In the “Old and Useless Notes” there are several instances in which he meditates on the same issues: “Infinity eternity. darkness, power. being

STYLES OF INCONSEQUENCE

associated with God. these phenomena we (feel & ?) call sublime—­.” Among the useless notes we find the same kind of play and wanderlust as in the earliest notebooks. Here, the sublime returns as an emotional category that we wrongly direct toward a divine entity: “It appears to me, that we may often trace the source of this ‘inward glorying’ to the greatness of an object itself or to the ideas excited & associated with it. as the idea of Deity.” These thoughts are in accord with the materialist account of habit and emotion that he gives elsewhere, and they may not contribute anything new or vital to his theory, and yet this is no reason for not keeping the documents he makes on these subjects. “What is matter? the whole a mystery!” he exclaims.74 For a literary and cultural critic, it is difficult not to notice the surplus of humanistic writers included in the “Old and Useless Notes.” Darwin gathers Gotthold Lessing, Joshua Reynolds, and still lesser-­known writers on our aesthetic and moral capacities under the same label that he uses for describing male nipples or the abortive genitals of mules. These scraps of humanist endeavor simply hover in the margins of his thought, certainly not harmful to the theory, but not really of much use to it either. “How strange it, that Nature should have so little to do with art.”75 Fluctuating at a remove from the mainstreams of evolutionary theory, certain pieces of information nevertheless remain, unabsorbed but also undestroyed. Darwin has many “old and useless” questions about art and aesthetics: “What is beauty?—­it is an ideal standard, by which real objects are judged; & how obtained.—­implanted in our bosoms—­how comes it there.” You can almost hear his excited frenzy when he considers his own responses to beautiful things in the world: “Why flower beautiful? even to children.” Theoretical transitions between facts are even more paratactic than they are in the other notebooks: “I suspect conscience, an hereditary compound passion, like avarice.” Indeed, his topics of interest seem to run right off the rails: “How are my ideas of a general notion of everything applicable to the high idea in Tragic Acting?”76 Tragic acting, beauty, choral singing: the “Old and Useless Notes” present some of the most affectively charged passages in the entire archive of Darwin’s papers. Consider his question about how the “general notion of everything” might apply to tragic acting. It is a funny question Darwin poses, and you

55

56

CHAPTER 1

can see why he thought it a useless one to pose, leaving it to the side of his main argument. Why, after all, should evolutionary theory have anything to tell us about tragic acting, or, by extension, anything about the fine arts? The typical answer to the question is that it shouldn’t, even though there are many philosophers, for example the philosopher Ruth Millikan, who are not satisfied with this answer and take seriously the processes of selection on what might seem to be otherwise useless mental states.77 Others insist on accounting for certain aesthetic and ethical practices by means of a functionalist account of evolution, even when such experiments seem dubious at best.78 Seeking evolutionary psychological explanations for things like tragic acting seems to rely too easily on the idea that Darwinian explanation can be turned to any subject whatsoever, when these notes suggest that even Darwin did not believe that it could. Like the reconstructed “Transmutation Notebooks” and the Beagle Notebooks, the “Old and Useless Notes” reveal that Darwin enjoyed the ludic exercise of pairing different phenomena with his theory to see what would result but without necessarily assuming that such results would take instrumental shape. This reading of “Old and Useless Notes” suggests that Darwin himself seems skeptical about the idea that his theory would be useful in accounting for questions that face philosophers, literary critics, or art historians. It seems he did not believe that we could adequately explain humanistic questions by means of his theory of natural selection. It is perhaps most telling that Darwin chooses not to burn or otherwise destroy his notes after he uses them, as so many writers have done. He simply labels them “Old and Useless.” In his discussion of vestigial and rudimentary parts of the body, Darwin argues that such things are not merely the leftovers of bygone eras or traces of a lapsed usefulness, but that they are also carried forward. One day in the future, through some unforeseen coordination of environment and organism, these parts might find some new use for themselves. The case is similar with the notes, which bob alongside Darwin’s essential arguments but which have been primarily valued as the traces of that argument’s development. The task of the remaining chapters will be to delineate a different genealogy for his thinking by taking his interest in rudimentary form as a source of influence

STYLES OF INCONSEQUENCE

on subsequent generations of literary writers. None of the figures I turn to next would have read Darwin’s notes, and yet they are uncannily interested in notes and notebooks as forms that allow them to interrogate the concepts of inconsequence, triviality, the rudimentary, and the ephemeral. While there is and will always be a canonical Darwin, famous for identifying a unifying principle of all life on earth, my hope is that literary critics will look to his notes as forms from which they might derive great value, even if they don’t always put them to use.

57

C H A P T E R 2  T H I N K I N G P I E C E S George Gissing and Roland Barthes

at the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, there is a single entry under the heading “Flora”: AMONG GEORGE GISSING’S MANUSCRIPTS

Leaf picked by George Gissing and sent to Morley Roberts from Lago Averno [Naples] [1888 Nov. 9] flora (1 item)1

It’s a pressed leaf about two and a half inches long, folded over in two places, and enclosed in a tiny envelope that is inscribed with his friend’s address (figure 2.1). This fragile scrap competes with items of nobler stature in the collection: the “Commonplace Book,” the final draft of New Grub Street, his diaries. Yet amid these more valuable materials, we have a trivial piece of flora preserved for posterity. What kind of document is it? A fragment of Gissing’s Italian tour, picked on a day spent walking around Lake Avernus, it is unaccompanied by story or explanation. As a metonym, it might point to any number of possible narratives without indicating any one conclusively. Perhaps Gissing intends to convey his dolorous mood by 58

Figure 2.1  Leaf and enclosing envelope sent by George Gissing to Morley Roberts. November 9, 1888. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

60

CHAPTER 2

means of a classical reference, since the Romans regarded Lake Avernus (Lago Averno) as an entrance into the underworld. Alternatively, the leaf could signal the joy of a perennially downtrodden novelist getting to see the Italian landscape at long last. It might be an inside joke shared between Gissing and his longtime friend Morley Roberts, or it may be that he is making a minimal indexical action. “Look, this is the kind of thing that happens” may be all he means to say, to quote the stark realist Harold Biffen of his novel New Grub Street.2 As a novelist, Gissing was more often in the business of situating details and using them to fill out his narratives than of generating fragments with uncertain contexts. Despite having authored some twenty-­three novels by the time of his death at forty-­six, however, he was always something of a reluctant fiction writer. The profession was less a passionate vocation than a way of earning a living after a scandal in boarding school had squashed any dreams of a scholarly career. (He was caught stealing money to support the friend who later became his wife.) One of Gissing’s fictional writers, the misbegotten Edwin Reardon of New Grub Street, finds himself in similar straits: “if I had had the means, I should have devoted myself to the life of a scholar. That, I quite believe, is my natural life; it’s only the influence of recent circumstances that has made me a writer of novels. A man who can’t journalise, yet must earn his bread by literature, nowadays inevitably turns to fiction, as the Elizabethan men turned to the drama.”3 For both the real and the fictional man, writing novels represents a compromise and a consolation for missing out on a different future. Both must learn to temper their high cultural values in order to please the “midcult.” You can often feel the burden of this for Gissing, when you can’t understand why he is taking so long to describe something, or when it feels like the prose idles uselessly on the page. Even generous readers remark on the occasional tedium of his works. “It is sometimes very dull,” writes Virginia Woolf. James Joyce was more scathing: “Why are English novels so terribly boring? I think G. has little merit.”4 It may be that he yearned for another form. Although he wrote fiction prolifically and believed in the value of crafting it (despite his many setbacks), Gissing was highly ambivalent about the social function of novels, and of the realist novel in particular. While

THINKING PIECES

admiring the formal achievements of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, or George Eliot, he had serious doubts about the political convictions these and other authors associated with their representations. As Aaron Matz writes in an essay on Gissing’s “ambivalent” attitude to realism, Gissing experiences “an extended struggle with the predominant conventions and expectations of late-­Victorian fiction,” a struggle that Matz documents by turning to Gissing’s own voluminous writings on the subject, both fictional and critical.5 Nearly all of Gissing’s works, with the possible exception of his debut, Workers in the Dawn, unfold in the wake of his rejection of positivism and what had been its alliance with realistic representation in the novels of the mid-­Victorian period. I consider his resistance to realism as an expression of his anti-­sociality and nihilism, his persistent conviction that—­to put it bluntly—­life has no purpose and social progress is a dead fantasy. The novels of high Victorian realism have often been thought of as having didactic social functions, bringing members of disparate social classes into imaginative relations with one another either to engender sympathetic reciprocity between them or to do the ideological work of situating subjects in a capitalist network of exchange.6 Gissing’s novels often reproduce, with inertial force, the conventions of the “novel of purpose” without being able to endorse such purposes as anything other than a delusion. Normally this is read as a turn to naturalist fiction, a decidedly pessimistic genre that cynically rejects any pretense that art leads to social amelioration. In the naturalistic calculus, individual characters find themselves caught in systems of biological and economical hardship that promise no escape. For Gissing, The Nether World is likely the best example of the genre. Published in 1889, it depicts London’s East End as ubiquitously tragic, rendering it through the compilation of the grotesque documentary detail characteristic of the genre. Yet Gissing’s relationship with naturalism is no less fraught than his relationship with realism, and while he churns out his plots, he makes incipient gestures toward a new kind of writing that could enable his withdrawal from fabricated intrigue of either type. For if the realist novel in its British incarnation seems to Gissing to be too enmeshed in romance,

61

62

CHAPTER 2

the fable, and fantasies of social progress, naturalism fails because of its punishing attitude toward everyday details under pressure from relentless systems. In many ways, naturalism represents its own misapplication of Darwinian theory to literature of the sort indicated in the last chapter. In its Social Darwinist world, the primary motif is the complete subordination of every detail in life to the harsh controls of an amoral environment. And yet, intriguingly, Gissing’s notes and his late novel New Grub Street suggest a very different outcome for the miniscule detail than being swallowed up by a nature “red in tooth and claw” (which is, of course, Tennyson’s language and not Darwin’s.) Like Darwin as we encountered him in the previous chapter, Gissing carves out a space for neutral description, where variations and differences might be assembled without always being fatally subsumed. I consider how Gissing, over the course of his most productive period of 1887 to 1903, uses notes and fantasies of notation as a means to decline the perpetually disappointing narratives that he wrote, rewrote, and lived throughout his career. Notes, for Gissing, are minimalist documents archived without a view to serving a larger end or theoretical telos. Since they represent, on this view, a way of writing without teleology, their composition also suggests a way of living without a plot.7 These notes express Gissing’s antisocial and anchorite tendencies, while nevertheless offering a way of staying tethered to the world, if only in the drift of the present that may not be headed anywhere and that may not add up to anything. Like the detached leaf in the Berg collection, they resist implementation in a story. Gissing ultimately rejects both conservative and socialist politics, expressing a desire to detach from ideologies altogether in order to bob among discrete details. This kind of atopic drift does not involve the wholesale rejection of the world in favor of romantic individualism or utopianism (nothing could be more accursed to him), but rather a way of “thinking in pieces,” extracting the often trivial moments out of books or life in order to give them an opportunity to breathe outside the coordinates and determinations of plot. This chapter will thus draw us closer to nonlinear style as a form of ethos, alternately claimed by authors for themselves and for their characters and personae.

THINKING PIECES

I track this argument specifically through Gissing’s Commonplace Book and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, which reveal, respectively, Gissing’s intensely private note-­taking practices and his paradoxical attempt to make these public by fictionalizing the persona who made them. Before turning to these materials, however, I outline the ways in which Gissing already recognizes this idealized form of notation as the fantasy of a “degree zero” realism: a mode of representation free of plot, storyline, or political ends. New Grub Street, his great metafiction, evaluates the attempts by different writers to sustain a writing practice amid the weakening force of the “novel of purpose.” One of these attempts, Harold Biffen’s “Mr Bailey, Grocer,” is a dream of pure notation, which conceives of a writing practice that refuses to attribute significance to details, instead merely pointing to them. Insignificant details and fragmentary writing also concerned another aficionado of literary realism who appears in what follows. Roland Barthes’s late lecture course at the Collège de France in 1979–­80, The Preparation of the Novel, describes note-­taking at great length. Ostensibly an account of his own attempt to compose a novel, to found “a new writing practice,” Barthes’s course actually constitutes an extended exploration of what it means to take notes as an aesthetic and ethical practice of living the present without fictional or explanatory overlay, an art de vivre that presents, as he puts it, “the problem of realism.”8 Barthes and Gissing share a preference for preparatory and minimal acts of registration that needn’t amount to what we generally think of as finished forms. Yet rather than viewing these preferences as shortcomings, failures, or solipsistic retreats (both Barthes and Gissing have been subjected to such critiques), I acknowledge the way in which both men make decisive attempts to render their notational practices shareable, thereby sketching an incipient model for linking members of a social body.9 We find two writers ensnared by the powers of notation. For his part, Gissing tentatively leaves the structure of the novel behind to record details about the world, ultimately circling back to fiction to dramatize this very activity in Ryecroft. Moving in the reverse direction, Barthes spends most of his career in the fragmentary splendor of the note, yet comes to yearn for the continuity and synthesis of

63

64

CHAPTER 2

the novel. He dies before he has the chance to fully explore it. This chapter serves as a lighthouse for these two ships passing in the night, neither of which lands on its desired shore. Writing for Nothing

Gissing depicts the increasing uselessness of the Victorian novel in his New Grub Street, which also lays out a series of fantasies about how to contend with a marketplace of readers who take only a passing interest in the once-­preeminent genre. Yet we never get to see the inside of a book in New Grub Street. We get descriptions of and information about books, whether they are Edwin Reardon’s retrograde novels, Alfred Yule’s dusty volumes of criticism, or the codices filling the reading room at the British Museum. Books in this world have no insides to be inspected, evaluated, or even read. Instead, we watch their surfaces and the contextual conditions of their circulation. We get data about salaries and legacies, the physical health of the writers, their position inside and outside the literary networks of the 1880s. New Grub Street thus represents an exemplary resource for imagining the agency and sociality of books in other terms than those marshaled earlier in the nineteenth century. It turns away from the social purpose of literature as it had been imagined in the middle of the Victorian period, that is, as a representational system that binds disparate classes together by means of narrative conventions inciting sympathetic identifications, and toward a view of literature as capable of producing effects that differ from sympathetic reciprocity adding up to an imagined community. The result is a feeling, discernible in the central characters, of being exiled from the enriching social promise of plots whose conventions no longer work (if indeed they ever did). The great irony is that Gissing produces this effect by means of the very form that his narrative logic declares “useless”: the triple-­decker novel. What is the interior that has been dissipated? The inhabitants of New Grub Street live in “the valley of the shadow of books,” where texts have become effectively neutered. Yet while the imagery of the “book” recurs throughout, it is the form of the novel specifically that is under erasure in

THINKING PIECES

the literary marketplace depicted here. Gissing seems to subtly prophesy the supposed end of the codex, but the real struggle lies in the fact that the triangle of men at the center of the action (Reardon, Milvain, and Biffen) face a reading public that is indifferent to the novel in particular. The purposeful novel is the content whose evacuation presents the greatest social threat to the fin-­de-­siècle world of readers and writers, at least according to this self-­conscious narrative. As we will see, Reardon, Biffen, and Milvain distinguish themselves from one another by their relative ability or inability to develop a response to the shipwreck of positivist narrative forms. Reardon stays fiercely loyal to the triple-­decker, essentially going down with the ship. Biffen and Milvain, however, seek new courses by fragmenting and scattering its conventions and gestures. The entrepreneurial Milvain sees that the public most enjoys the lively and speedy circulation of short, exciting articles of fluff. Biffen elevates the description of trivial details to such a point that it leaves plotted structure behind altogether. Novelists in the mid-­nineteenth century drew inspiration and motivation from the endeavors of positivist social reformers, but Gissing began writing novels at a later moment, when the relationship of social reform and fiction had already frayed. As Amanda Claybaugh writes, the writers and the activists of the previous generation shared an ethic of conscious intervention in the “social” world. Both groups leveraged narrative (whether fictional or factual) to incite sympathetic identifications between readers and characters: Nineteenth-­century novels were written, published, read, and reviewed according to expectations learned from social reform. Like reformist writings, the novel of purpose was understood to act on its readers—­and, through its readers, the world. This conception of the novel did much to elevate its status. Where the novel had earlier been at best dismissed as frivolous, at worst condemned as sinful, it was now understood to be actively working for the social good.10

Claybaugh maintains that writers and activists did not merely share an ideology, but also traded narrative conventions that evoked sympathy and understanding, such as the “investigative visit” into slums or other

65

66

CHAPTER 2

marginal social spaces. For the authors Claybaugh centers, the “sociality” of novels refers specifically to their ability to provoke sympathetic responses in readers, placing different human agents into a system of affective relation by means of narrative conventions. This is, in Audrey Jaffe’s words, a “model of socialization through spectatorship.”11 At the beginning of his career as a novelist, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, Gissing studied the positivism underlying this view of fiction, devouring the works of Auguste Comte and Harriet Martineau while consciously adapting their world view in his first work, Workers in the Dawn. Positivism seeks a “social physics” to match the achievements of astronomy, geology, and other sciences.12 By studiously collecting facts and data about the world and its people, the theory goes, we will be able to develop methods for political and social amelioration. For a brief moment around 1880, therefore, Gissing seems almost optimistic, as he relates in a letter to his brother, Algernon: “just as there is a Science of Astronomy, & men can predict eclipses &c., just so we believe that there is a science of human life, that the total of the world’s history is already fully planned out, & that we are able to learn sufficient of the rules of this new Science to see for some distance into the mists of the future.”13 Of course Gissing’s assiduous study of human life did not lead to an endorsement of the human community as it was or even as some imagined it could be. No one was further removed from the “Religion of Humanity”: “his adherence to Positivism was nothing more than a stage on the way to the rejection of all creeds, whether religious or politico-­social,” writes Pierre Coustillas, introducing the volume that opens with the essay “The Hope of Pessimism.”14 Indeed, Gissing’s entire textual output might be read as an effort to sustain a relationship with society amidst the dilapidation of the positivist fantasy. “The Hope of Pessimism” announces Gissing’s abandonment of positivist philosophy and his attempt to develop an ethics driven by a Schopenhauerian belief in the fruitlessness of all action. His attitude in the essay is bleak, existential, and fatalistic: “We are shipmates, tossed on the ocean of eternity, and one fate awaits us all.”15 He critiques the views of Comte and Martineau by arguing that a scientific approach to society cannot ultimately answer the needs of its citizens because science cannot

THINKING PIECES

resolve the existential suffering in which humans find themselves. By encouraging people to ascend the ladder of empirical learning, a positivist society actually leads its citizens into deeper and deeper certainty about the hopelessness of their situation, while at the same time revoking the nourishing imaginative possibilities that religion had once, perhaps, been able to afford. Positivist practice, in Gissing’s view, cannot arrest this quest for existential meaning. We cannot merely replace tabernacles with microscopes. The only hope is to counterintuitively accentuate the feelings of alienation that people feel as a result of positive science’s inability to guarantee a meaningful plot. What results instead is a series of pessimistic withdrawals by different individuals; meaningful life can only be reassembled from the wreckage of our private hopes. Solace comes from scaling expectations down to almost nothing. In the now-­familiar terms of Lauren Berlant, Gissing eschews the “cruel optimism” of positivist social science, a fantasy that actually “inhibits flourishing,” and tries to unfold a way of staying tethered to life amid a gutted fantasy.16 Given the extremity of this position, it is hardly surprising that critics and biographers have read Gissing’s life as a steady movement away from social action and a retreat “into a decadent, Paterian subjectivity in which aesthetic appreciation is contingent on individual memory and fantasy and divorced from social exchange.”17 Indeed, in “The Hope of Pessimism” one can see his persistent cynicism about “this scheme of commercial competition tempered by the police-­code, to which we are pleased to give the name of a social order.” And of course it is true that his essay lands on voluntary, slow, and total human extinction as the only cure for our woe: “the grave will become a symbol of joy.”18 Yet despite his abandonment of positivist teleology, Gissing never forsakes its practices of observation and documentation. He continues to watch the world and collect notes about it, without the conviction that this technique will inevitably lead to progress and advancement. In a letter to his brother, he writes that “the world is for me a collection of phenomena. . . . The impulse to regard every juncture as a ‘situation’ becomes stronger & stronger. In the midst of desperate misfortune I can

67

68

CHAPTER 2

pause to make a note . . . & the afflictions of others are to me materials for observation.”19 Even as he regularly incorporates these observations into his fictions, Gissing imagines—­albeit faintly—­a way of living and writing that dwells at this “degree zero” of observation, what Heather Love, in a different context, has referred to as being “empirical without being positivist.”20 New Grub Street takes its force by exploring at least three responses to the death of socially purposive narrative. In the case of Reardon, Milvain, and Biffen we find three ways of writing for nothing. What is set to replace the novel in the ecosystem of New Grub Street? Gissing’s suggestion is that the literary marketplace has become obsessed with short and fleeting bits of prose. While the different characters in this novel take vastly different stances on the issue, no one seems to disagree about “what’s real” in this system: brevity. Alfred Yule puts the matter in the clearest possible terms: “the evil of the time is the multiplication of ephemerides. Hence a demand for essays, descriptive articles, fragments of criticism.” Fragments are multiplying out of all proportion, flooding the public sphere with fleeting bits and pieces of text that add up to nothing whatsoever. Jasper Milvain, the venal journalist, capitalizes on these conditions, diligently producing “bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery” all aimed at the railroad and omnibus readers from the class of the “quarter-­educated.”21 Reardon, for his part, is a complete failure when it comes to brief forms of writing. He clings tenaciously and pathetically to the vestigial practice of writing triple-­decker novels in the old style. He is, as Jasper explains, “the old type of unpractical artist” who is “behind his age,” and who reproduces with tedious inertia the forms of the past, making a habit of failure.22 And where Reardon fails as a novelist, Biffen doesn’t even try. Earning small coin as a tutor for workers trying to pass literacy exams, he pawns his coat and buys it back depending on the time of the month, living on meat drippings in a garret where he works tirelessly at producing a perfectly unmarketable (and therefore useless) book, “Mr Bailey, Grocer.” Gissing repeatedly suggests that we are meant to view Jasper as one type of artist (“the literary man of 1882”) and Reardon and Biffen as examples of another.23 In a direct address to the reader, the narrator assumes that

THINKING PIECES

they occupy the same position in the reader’s mind: “The chances are that you have neither understanding nor sympathy for men such as Edwin Reardon and Harold Biffen. They seem to you inert, flabby, weakly envious, foolishly obstinate.”24 On the level of form, however, Biffen and Milvain have more in common than Reardon has with either of them. The former two men, while taking very different attitudes to the question of profit and public acknowledgment, each find a way of contending with the dissipation of narrative purposes. Reardon tries in vain to reproduce dead narrative forms, remaining loyal to ineffective fantasies and end products no longer realizable in this environment. He is attached to a generic vestige. “Why will you go cutting your loaf with a razor when you have a serviceable bread-­knife?” Biffen asks him, invoking a knife as a metaphor for utility, just as we saw Darwin do in the last chapter.25 The comparison underlines the utilitarian understanding of literary forms. The imbrication with Darwin’s own imagery suggests a literary world teeming with various “organs,” and it is worth pointing out here the meaning of organ as both body part and “a means or medium of communication.”26 The two characters that occupy the most polarized positions within the market conditions of the age (Milvain embraces it, Biffen turns away) both develop a strategy for thinking in pieces. Milvain and Biffen thus embrace the uselessness of the triple-­decker form in order to develop the rudiments of a new kind of authorship. Reardon has no such strategy. While trying to work on his traditional stories, he finds himself unable to link the different bits together: “his mind looked into a cloudy chaos, a shapeless whirl of nothings.”27 This causes him nothing but anxiety and suffering. By contrast, Jasper and Biffen each produce a way of thinking the “whirl of nothings.” They share a certain gleeful sensation of freedom from the weakening plots that will not serve as the final cause of their endeavors. Of course they diverge sharply in other ways, specifically in the fact that Milvain “sells off” his notes the moment they are minted, while Biffen hoards his minimal acts of observation into a store of potentials that needn’t bear fruit either on the market or as a story. But they implicitly agree about what the real

69

70

CHAPTER 2

amounts to, that is, nothing but a heap of trivial pieces. The most salient difference between Biffen and Milvain lies in the fact that one tries to turn this apparent fact into an ethical form of subjectivity while the other just uses the situation to exploit people’s desire for instant titillation. In contrasting these two modes, Gissing calls attention to the fact that short bursts of prose are felicitous vehicles for both the collection of empirical detail and the flashy distortions of advertisement. Compare the following two passages, which are sections from what we might describe as Milvain’s and Biffen’s respective manifestos. Watch how each one elaborates an aesthetic and social position by focusing on the category of “vulgarity.” First, Milvain: We talk of literature as a trade, not of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, . . . I don’t advocate the propagation of vicious literature, only good, coarse, marketable stuff for the world’s vulgar. . . . I maintain that we people of brains are justified in supplying the mob with the food it likes. . . . To please the vulgar you must, one way or another, incarnate the genius of vulgarity.28

And here is Biffen: What I really aim at is an absolute realism in the sphere of the ignobly decent. The field, as I understand it, is a new one; I don’t know any writer who has treated ordinary vulgar life with fidelity and seriousness. . . . I want to deal with the essentially unheroic, with the day-­to-­ day life of that vast majority of people who are at the mercy of paltry circumstance.29

Obviously the motivations underlying their work could not be more different. Milvain has no love for the common people, viewing them as dumb consumers of the scrappy, coarse bits and pieces he issues on a conveyor belt. He produces momentary writings to feed the herd, writings that disappear almost instantly, like ice cubes tossed onto summer asphalt. His approach exploits the fact that an ordinary life resembles a mere collection of disconnected, fugitive, and purposeless moments and he renders his literary productions amenable to this rhythm for profit.

THINKING PIECES

If Milvain wants to swindle the reading public at the level of the momentary, seizing control of ephemeral experience by selling fleeting articles, Biffen wants to begin with the ephemeral experiences that the “vulgar” initiate themselves, and to collect these. Biffen seeks to represent the underlying triviality of everyday moments, rather than exploiting their rhythms for profit. He takes as his starting place the mere notation of what happens, even, as Gissing mentioned in his letter quoted earlier, in the midst of “desperate circumstances.” Both Milvain and Biffen see the brief, fleeting present as an opportunity and a valuable unit of time. Milvain’s work is opportunistically journalistic, but what Biffen does is much stranger, constituting a fantasy of notational style. Biffen holds out no hope for securing an entrance into a narrative of comforts and pleasures. When Reardon weakly suggests that he might secure a position for himself, Biffen responds bluntly: “What position? No school would take me; I have neither credentials nor conventional clothing. For the same reason I couldn’t get a private tutorship in a rich family. No, no; it’s all right. I keep myself alive, and I get on with my work.—­By-­the-­bye, I’ve decided to write a book called ‘Mr Bailey, Grocer.’”30 Refusing to yield to the trappings of cruel optimism, Biffen simply keeps himself alive, transforming (in the words of Berlant) “adjustment into an accomplishment.”31 “Mr Bailey, Grocer” becomes an element in this strategy of sustaining himself amidst his perpetual and ongoing state of social abjection. In the “manifesto” quoted above, it appears that the strategy in “Mr Bailey, Grocer” is to flatten and equalize all the incidents of life, the “paltry circumstances” of which “average” people are the victims, and to collect them in a structure that has no teleological narrative development, conventions, indeed any fictional effects whatsoever: “I shall never write anything like a dramatic scene,” he says, for “whatever is written for effect is wrong and bad.” His technique involves the collection of fugitive, faint observations of what he calls “trivial incidents.” It is a fantasy of pure data collection and of information contained without a plot. Biffen himself does not even view what he is doing as fiction at all. When Reardon suggests that “there may surely exist such a thing as the art of fiction,”

71

72

CHAPTER 2

Biffen retorts that “we must have a rest from it.” This retirement from narrative takes the form of what Biffen calls “honest reporting,” that is, collecting together “the numberless repulsive features of common decent life.” Focusing on the apparently insignificant and useless details of the world enables a “rest” from the tired fantasies that Biffen cannot indulge. Dissent would be too strong a word for this practice of documenting the most insignificant details he can read within life and doing nothing (or next to nothing) with them beyond their notation. The point is simply to say “Look, this is the kind of thing that happens.”32 “Mr Bailey, Grocer” abandons the novel of purpose altogether. It replaces fictional artifice with a collection of documents loosely tethered to the life of a “real” shopkeeper. Biffen’s attraction to the insignificant is accompanied by a certain “zeal and fire,” as Reardon notes, a death-­driven wonder at the flood of rubbish moments that make up vulgar life in late Victorian London, and a desire to produce a collection of such rubbish that is entirely useless, non-­teleological, anti-­conventional, and simply the result of minimal acts of observation.33 Without denying the fact that there is a terrible system in place that destroys life and forces individuals into terrible situations, Biffen’s production magnifies the tiny fragments within that system, enlarging the given moments of an individual life and arguably distributing attention across such moments evenly. This imaginary form of writing collects bits of “real life” without assigning significance by means of the usual novelistic operations. Writing the Present: Barthes

It’s as though Biffen is trying to get what Roland Barthes always had, namely the freedom of writing without advancing a particular goal, plot, or singular purpose. Barthes’s entire publishing career, from the early 1950s to his death in 1980, displays a paradoxical consistency in aestheticizing the fragment as a trope of reading, writing, and understanding the world. As his favorite rhetorical gesture, it appears as early as 1954 in Michelet, a work of thematic criticism broken up into brief prose paragraphs, and runs through his later productions such as A Lover’s Discourse, Camera Lucida, and Mourning Diary. Indeed, “Mr Bailey, Grocer”

THINKING PIECES

sounds in many ways like a parody of Barthes’s 1968 essay “The Reality Effect,” which takes a somewhat perverse interest in the “insignificant notations” that appear in realist novels, those “notations which no function (not even the most indirect) can justify” but paradoxically make the performative statement “we are the real.”34 Yet as a writer (even a fictional one), Biffen’s practice is much closer to what Barthes describes ten years later, in the last lecture course he gave before his death, The Preparation of the Novel. The earlier essay considers what it means to read realist fiction. The latter lectures find Barthes at a different point in his career, where he considers what it means to write it. Over the 1970s, with the success of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and A Lover’s Discourse—­arguably the origins of contemporary autofiction—­he had begun to attain a certain legitimacy not just in criticism but as a literary author in his own right. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan narrate the transition from the essay to the lecture course: “reorienting himself from critic to writer allows Barthes to return the undernoticed detail of the realist novel to the moment it was first noticed, the moment when a writer took note of something and then made a note.”35 While the title The Preparation of the Novel suggests that we will find Barthes inventing characters and discussing plot points, the bulk of the lectures actually consists of a finely detailed account of what it means to take notes about the world, since for him it is only out of these notes that he could ever begin to write the novel he wished to write. For the writing of a novel was not meant to be just another experiment in his life as a writer, but rather to endow its writer with an entirely new life. “I’m at the Fantasy-­of-­the-­novel stage,” he explains, and that is where he dwells for the duration of the year.36 The fantasized novel in question will be called Vita Nova, a title (New Life) that reflects an acute feeling of ennui with his writing practice in his early sixties, which he views as repeated material, doomed to repetition, to the lassitude of repetition. ‘What? From now on until I die I’ll be writing articles, preparing my teaching, giving lectures—­or, at least, writing books—­on subjects, which are all that’ll vary (and so little!)?’ Foreclosure of anything New (= the definition of ‘Doing Time’)37

73

74

CHAPTER 2

For someone who has devoted his entire life to writing, Barthes explains, a new life can only emerge as a new form of writing, “the discovery of a new writing practice.”38 The Preparation of the Novel does not culminate in the publication of a novel, but instead archives Barthes’s feelings about the possibility of writing one as well as his sense of inadequacy and insignificance before such a task. He fears that it will always lie beyond his ken. It is disarming to learn that the lover of fragments and the poster boy for jouissance reaches a point when he longs to produce continuous forms. Yet the fantasized novel he desires to write does not look like anything else in the canon. This is because, simply put, Barthes doesn’t love the same things other people love. And the novel’s genesis, he writes, is nothing but love: “the Novel is fantasized as an ‘act of love,’” he writes, adding a parenthetical blush: “(the expression is unfortunate, it leaves me open to accusations of sentimentality and triteness, but it’s the only one we have, after all, we have to accept language’s limitations).” He goes as far as to say that the whole point of the novel is to “to say whom you love,” drawing on statements by Sade, Tolstoy, and Proust to make this claim.39 Who or what does this man love? Writers such as Tolstoy and Proust proceed, in his view, by means of their love of the past and a desire either to tarry with historical situations or to swim in the waves of personal memory. But Barthes worries that he cannot live up to this tradition and that he has “a certain constitutive weakness within me, a certain incapacity to write a novel” which he compares to a person who wants to play the piano but cannot because of hands that are too small.40 This weakness lies in being disconnected from “memory, the ability to remember.” While he may love novels about the past, he has no love for the past in general: It’s not that I don’t like my past; it’s rather that I don’t like the past (perhaps because it rends the heart), and my resistance takes the form of . . . a kind of general resistance to rehearsing, to narrating what will never happen again (the dreaming, the cruising, the life of the past). The affective link is with the present, my present, in its affective, relational, intellectual dimensions = the material I’m hoping for (cf. “to depict whom I love”).41

THINKING PIECES

The present compels him with its sudden punctures, opportunities for redirection, and Buddhist satori. Thus he poses the rather paradoxical question: “Is it possible to make a Narrative (a Novel) out of the Present?” Yes, he answers. “You can write the Present by noting it.” Notation becomes a trope for living in the present as well as the method for writing it. The Preparation of the Novel offers no guidelines for building characters, settings, actions, or plots. These are the ingredients of the “anamnestic” novel, driven by a recuperation of time past. Rather than learning the tricks of the trade, Barthes seems to be challenging the norms of novel writing by hinting at his marginal desires and preferences, then asking where such desires might or might not become shareable with a larger community in the manner of the novel. So while his preparations never culminate in a book that we can call a narrative, he does perhaps manage to find his way through to “a new writing practice,” a self-­conscious form of continuous note-­taking that strategically resists structuration. This is a way of thinking in pieces. Barthes does not want to stitch up the potentiality of the singular notation into the sutures of a storyline. In a surprising move in a lecture course that is supposedly about novels, he turns to haiku as “the exemplary type of Notation of the Present,” mainly “out of personal preference . . . to speak of the short form that I love more than any other and that is as it were the very essence of Notation.”42 Through his readings and rankings of dozens of haiku, he amasses a list of the values that he finds within note-­taking. These values pertain not only to rhetorical gestures but also to the art de vivre of the note-­taker. The most important of these are that notation 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

doesn’t “come together as a system” individuates subjective viewpoints differentiates distinct elements of “the real” respects the void relies on “fleeting clarity, fleeting emphasis: a quality of emotion” 6. tries to “set a bell ringing,” to capture the moment of “that’s it!” 7. allows for the “co-­presence” of contradictory elements43

75

76

CHAPTER 2

The Barthesian note is a species of haiku, that is, a fleeting moment of clarity that does not require narrative fruition in the Aristotelian sense. Instead it values completely different things: distinguishing moments of reality, refusing the impulse to systematically explain them, allowing for fleeting and inconsequential effects. Indeed, Barthes takes the haiku as the “exemplary form of notation” in large part because of its graceful acceptance of inconsequence and its lack of pretension. “I don’t want to play down the inconsequentiality of this micro-­technique of Notatio,” he writes. “It can return to nothingness, having had no effect whatsoever . . . this isn’t real (weighty, muscular) writing, but that doesn’t matter.”44 It’s impossible to ignore this very strong desire in Barthes’s text (here and elsewhere) for writing that does not generate significance. But why write at all if it doesn’t matter? What is the difference between recording fugitive, nondramatic experiences and simply not bothering to do so? Barthes confesses his love of haiku and his love of the note. It goes beyond mere affection, however. He thinks note-­taking is sacred. It occurs at the juncture between a flow of undifferentiated “life” and our decisions about what matters: “Notatio instantly appears at the problematic intersection between a river of language, of interrupted language—­life, both a continuous, ongoing, sequenced text and layered text, a histology of cut-­up texts, a palimpsest—­and sacred gestures: to mark life.”45 Phenomena crowd our senses, each moment proffering itself for consideration, for notation, for being “marked.” Then we take our pens to our Moleskines and write down the world, or the pieces of it that compel us most strongly. Notation submits to the idea that there is, in fact, a world out there and that it matters, suggesting that it is also up to us to mark its salient properties. Barthes puts the matter bluntly: “what notation presents is the problem of realism.” It is “a writing practice that willingly submits to the authority of the Reality-­Illusion. From this starting point, how to organize, to sustain Notatio?” Thus his “affective link” with the present is not a call for momentary, epiphanic self-­shattering (i.e. jouissance) but a way of sustaining the “Reality-­Illusion,” the notion that there is something out there (right now) to be indexed.46 So the notebook conjures a Real that we construct

THINKING PIECES

with the self-­awareness that its constitution involves sustaining the most elemental fantasy: that there is a world we can observe together. Yielding notes to the novel represents an uncomfortable and ultimately untenable sacrifice for Barthes. Between the note and the novel “it’s as if there were an invisible, insurmountable wall . . . as if their waters didn’t mix.” What is this wall? The transition from one body of water to another presents a “psychostructural” problem: “the transition from the fragment to the nonfragment.” It is important to remember that Barthes is writing this lecture course in a confessional mode. It all stems from his putative desire to write a novel. For him the supposedly necessary transformation from notebook into novel is an ethical problem. The issue is lying. Narrativizing “comes down to conceding to lie, to being capable of lying (it can be very difficult, lying)—­to telling that second-­order and perverse lie that consists in mingling truth and falsehood—­Ultimately, then, the resistance to the novel, the inability to produce a novel (to engage in the practice of writing one), would be a moral resistance.”47 Barthes writes “moral” here, which suggests that he is obeying a mere rule of conduct, but there is an important sense in which the practice of notation involves an attitude to the world that respects the “Reality-­Illusion” but refuses various myths of progress. To be a note-­taker, here as in New Grub Street, does not mean creating imagistic scenes that will enable identifications based on character traits and their movement toward some kind of final reckoning, but is rather a way of imagining an aggregative continuity of pieces that do not have to add up to anything. The assembly, gathering, and concatenation of documents seem to make available a more ethical vehicle for sociality; they invite a plural account of reality, demanding the cohabitation of perspectives rather than the enclosed fantasy of a single author in a single artwork. “Queer Little Experience”

Roland Barthes felt a “moral resistance” to the prospect of transforming his notes into a novel. The fictional pretenses required to situate and give meaning to fragmentary observations about life seemed to him a bridge too far. If he had not died almost immediately after

77

78

CHAPTER 2

delivering this lecture course, he might have overcome this hesitation. As it stands, he left nothing but a few germinal sketches and several hundred index cards pertaining to the Vita Nova when he died in March 1980. In what remains of this chapter, we’ll see George Gissing experience his own moral resistance, but this time of an opposite kind. Experimenting with the aesthetic and ethical possibilities of notework, he ultimately subsumes these back into the genre he championed until the end—­the novel—­unable to fully endorse the open-­ended, pluralistic pleasures of the kind Barthes finds in the note, without the gesture of distance afforded by the creation of a literary character. We turn now to three interrelated but different documents that illustrate Gissing’s conflicted relationship with note-­taking: his “Commonplace Book”; the edition of that manuscript published by Jacob Korg in 1962; and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, Gissing’s last completed novel, which adapts select observations from his notebook writings, assigning these to the voice of the protagonist. Gissing’s New Grub Street vividly depicts the teetering condition of the novel at the fin de siècle as it struggles to retain its prestige in a new ecosystem of ephemera and seeming dross. It presents the marketplace with which Gissing struggled throughout his life, as he continued to write novels even while he sensed them losing the capacity to intervene in and ameliorate the sensibilities of their readers. The novel was becoming what Darwin might call a useless vestige of a formerly purposive organ. No longer capable of sustaining the ethical cultivation of sympathy and social cohesion (or at least the fantasy of such), it seems, in the hands of Harold Biffen, to decay into the production of fragmentary observations that resist any kind of plot. “Mr Bailey, Grocer” is the novel gone to seed. Given the way that Gissing’s life mirrors that of his moribund characters, it is not surprising that he would himself entertain the idea of leaving the conventional realist novel behind. For sixteen years, during which he published eighteen of his twenty-­three novels, Gissing kept a notebook in which, I argue, he experimented with a representation of the kind that Biffen practices and that Roland Barthes outlines, and which seems to indicate his awareness and desire for a forum that does not insist on

THINKING PIECES

individuated observations finding fruition in fictional structures. The notes suggest an ethos of writing based not on social action but on documentation. This apparent preparation for action becomes instead a way of imagining sociality in terms of the production of documents that incorporate the seemingly insignificant and non-­acting elements in the world. Their mere existence, that they are there, becomes the point. Still caught in the profound pessimism that tempers nearly every point of Gissing’s life, the notes also project the possibility of a playful kind of writing that promotes the circulation of and identification with fragments between readers and writers, and where these unpredictable exchanges of momentary and fleeting description and quotation take the place of plotted intrigue. They become a salve, though not exactly a source of hope, in the midst of deep despair. Gissing’s original Commonplace Book is a black notebook, 8” by 6” and containing only sixty-­five pages, that is currently housed in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library (figure 2.2).48 While most of the entries are undated, the few dates that do appear indicate that Gissing began keeping the notebook sometime in 1887 and continued to use it until 1903. In other words, this slim book took sixteen years to fill, and he kept using it beyond the publication of Ryecroft (there is even a note musing on a typo to be found in the published work). The notes are exceedingly small and economical. A single page can contain as many as fifteen entries, and each one is set apart from the others with a thin line. This book combines the traditional use of the commonplace book—­to assemble quotations—­with Gissing’s random observations about matters of everyday life, down to the blades of grass and the wind in the leaves. Each of the notes rests discretely on the page, unbound by any visible cataloguing strategy based on chronology or subject. With the exception of Ryecroft, the notebook has “few direct relationships” with his novels, and sits alongside them without directly informing them.49 Many of the notes reflect Gissing’s near total lack of faith in the general public and in particular the working classes, a pessimism continuous with the depictions of these classes that we find in his novels, where they are attended with a strange mixture of sympathy and revulsion. Three notes, from many possible examples, suffice to make the point:

79

Figure 2.2  George Gissing’s Commonplace Book (page 25). The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

THINKING PIECES

I do not love the people—­true. But my passion of sympathy for the suffering poor50 The outcry of ordinary people that they cannot find interest in novels of common life is intelligible enough. The true interest of such books is in their workmanship, of which these readers understand nothing whatever51 The untaught vulgar are very defective in the senses; they hear, feel, see, taste, smell, very imperfectly52

The first note breaks off in the middle of the sentence before Gissing can supply his subject with a verb, as though he can do nothing but register the fact that his passionate sympathy for the poor exists, but he cannot imagine acting on this awareness. The second note specifically targets the general public for its inability to contend with the aesthetics of the novel. Here, Gissing sounds like an amalgam of different characters from New Grub Street, despairing for the novel and blaming its waning audience for the genre’s increasing weakness. We are looking out at a world through a lens that washes the world clean of any higher purpose: pessimism. “Life is meaningless,” Gissing said out loud, a remark recorded at the back of his Commonplace Book in purple ink (along with other stray pieces of conversation) by his companion at the time, Gabrielle Fleury.53 The third note traces the supposed problem to the very sensorium of the uneducated. Yet he issues such negations in the midst of a notational practice. Despite the perceived futility and hopelessness of social life, Gissing sustains an attachment to the world by recording it in a way that is quite up front about the potential inconsequentiality of what he is doing. The notebook contains sanguine affects but only about the smallest, most fleeting experiences. This is perhaps a part of what has been called Gissing’s “despondent verve” about the commonplace occurrences of life:54 The thing that most of all it rejoices me to behold is the shadow cast by clear sunlight55 The unspeakable gratitude I owe to various persons—­strangers—­who

81

82

CHAPTER 2

have at various times played the piano in a room near to mine so that I could hear & enjoy56 There is a positive sacredness about the meal of tea. It is prepared with smiles. It marks the end of domestic work—­at all events for mistress, &, in simple houses, for all. Pleasure in hearing clink of the teacups.57

Small matters of near-­inconsequence float apart from any narrative arrangement. Gissing is not doing anything with these events; he merely documents them and stops. In his Commonplace Book, he sustains a minimal conviction that aspects of the world might be momentarily caught in these small encapsulations. As with Barthes, Biffen, and Darwin, he finds solace in those observations that needn’t contribute functionally to any larger, integrated work. All that holds them together is the fact that they appear together in the same volume, distinguished by a simple thin line. As Barthes will discover later in the twentieth century, notation can keep one from refusing the world altogether, allowing for a sustained relation to the present even if it drives at nothing. The smallness of the entries is also important, not just in terms of the relatively insignificant character of what they seek to capture but also the diminutive handwriting in which they appear. These notes do not take up much space either physically on the page or in terms of the time it took to keep each one. Hundreds of entries gathered over a stretch of sixteen years suggest their marginal yet enduring place in Gissing’s writing life. His Commonplace Book is, as the genre suggests, concerned with the quotation of and commentary on passages from other (particularly classical) works of literature. Gissing reveals his deep learning in Greek and Latin and his ongoing interest in the classical productions of authors of epic and lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, and prose in the originals and in translation. He includes lines by Euripides, Alciphron, Horace, Ovid, Thucydides, Augustine, Pliny, and of course Homer, to name just a handful. Yet equal in importance to such passages are those moments when he reflects on the meaning of quotation and sharing passages in the first place. “How a good line, read when one is young, sticks in the mind!” he writes. And again: “nothing in literature affects me so powerfully as certain

THINKING PIECES

passages in Homer.” At other moments he seems to yearn for the perfect listener for a passage that he has not written, but read: “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me. I cannot even read aloud decently when I have not perfect confidence in the hearer’s ability to understand.”58 The connection between quotation and sympathy suggests a wish to render the conditions of his Commonplace Book in a more social field, and that he intuited the possibilities of publishing in a fragmented and notational form that would not require the intervention of the novel’s apparatus. The free-­floating assembly of quotations and observations that characterizes the handwritten notebook undergoes a measure of normalization in Jacob Korg’s 1962 edition. There, Korg does what Gissing did not, organizing the passages under discrete topics: “Philosophy and Opinion,” “Literature,” “Words,” “England,” “Lower Classes,” and “Miscellaneous.” For a researcher scouring the notebooks for evidence on particular subjects, this would be very helpful, since it anticipates the interest that readers might take in Gissing’s thoughts about the philosophical tradition, say, or on questions of national identity. Yet it also configures that reader’s expectations of what the Commonplace Book is, or could be, in its original and loosely chronological arrangement. Interestingly, Korg peppers every section with quotations as well as small-­scale observations, rather than keeping these separate, and the result is a text that does capture a particularly important aspect of this and other notebooks, namely their capacity to record quotations while at the same time encouraging the note-­taker to compose their own words in such a way that they might be quoted as well. The notes both amplify other voices and intermix them with one’s own. Gissing’s Commonplace Book and Jacob Korg’s edition of it thus enact the utopian possibilities dreamed up in the productions of Biffen’s “Mr Bailey, Grocer” and Roland Barthes’s The Preparation of the Novel. A book made entirely of notes enables fragmented engagement and participatory elements to replace narrative as the primary engine of engagement. When it comes to the small-­scale observations that Gissing records, the often faint, small, or trivial objects described actually have the potential to do the work of connection and relation. What might seem like mere stuffing

83

84

CHAPTER 2

or filler in a novel, the “insignificant notations” whose only function is to signal the realism of the work, here perform a different, quasi-­social function; for example: “The little shop where I bought ‘brisket’ in Euston road. The rosy-­cheeked old man, & his sharp knives.” Snide barbs about various matters are also included: “How I enjoy the thought of a Royal Personage being sea-­sick in crossing the Channel!”59 The result is a paradoxical democratization of experience in the midst of a general unease with democratic ideals. Interest is engaged by the basic act of documentation, description, or quotation, rather than the insertion of these descriptions into extended narrative forms that require outcomes, such as the distribution of rewards and punishments, the restoration or dissolution of the community, marriages, funerals, successful employment, exile, and so forth. As Korg remarks, the notes seem to drift apart from the novels. They represent their own contrasting form. By rendering his edition as he does, he makes available more than simply a track record of Gissing’s reading or his stray thoughts. He activates a reciprocal movement between what an author does in this kind of genre and what the reader might do on their side of the page. (My copy of Korg’s edition of the Commonplace Book, for example, has the fragment of marginalia “on the banks of the panama” mysteriously inscribed on the title page.) This is, of course, similar to what Barthes famously describes as the writerly quality of certain texts, but the difference here is that note-­taking configures the relations of the writerly text in a literal, material way.60 It is not just a hermeneutic but an architecture. Gissing did not, of course, seek to publish his Commonplace Book himself, and this is where his own anxiety seems to differ from that of Barthes, examined above. While Barthes struggled with the notion of synthesizing all of his fragments into a new whole, Gissing experiences the inverse feeling. Leaving the notes as notes did not strike him as a possibility, and indeed the utopian possibilities I have just outlined would likely have struck him as fanciful. He believed in craft and organization (indeed his Commonplace Book notes that the British have “a genius for organization”).61 Yet the last book he ever completed in his own lifetime, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, does bear an important relation to the Commonplace Book. Rather than leaving these notations in fragments,

THINKING PIECES

Ryecroft assembles them into a series of four essays (titled after the seasons) and gives them the continuity and synthesis of emerging from the consciousness of the eponymous character. Gissing offers a preface where he stages himself as a mere editor who stumbled upon three notebooks in which he found these materials. In so doing, he asserts that his note-­taking persona is just that—­a persona, the product of a fantasy rather than a “real” expression of his own being. It has long been observed that Ryecroft may be Gissing’s alter ego. The former is a fictional character to be sure, but his backstory has some parallels with Gissing’s and in many ways might be read as a parody of it. He is a beleaguered and world-­weary writer, “a struggling man, beset by poverty,” whose writing garners him neither fame nor financial reward. “The name of Henry Ryecroft never became familiar to what is called the reading public,” runs the first sentence of the preface. After a life of thankless toil, he receives an unexpected, sizeable annuity from a deceased friend. This sum allows him to leave London behind and retire to a cottage in the vicinity of Exeter where he might enjoy a life of “tranquility of mind.” Finally able to abandon his “hack-­work” of novel writing, Ryecroft “bade farewell to authorship,” hoping “never to write another line for publication.” Yet among Ryecroft’s imaginary papers, Gissing (in his preface) claims to find a small bundle of notebooks that his late friend kept during his rustication. These contain “a thought, a reminiscence, a bit of reverie, a description of his state of mind, and so on.”62 While this makes it seem as though Ryecroft is simply Gissing under another name, the fictional status of the character is absolutely crucial to understanding the meaning of the work. For Gissing did not seek to take public responsibility for the notes as he had composed them in the Commonplace Book, but instead turned to a loose fiction and the ethos of a literary character who did this job for him. This leads to a few conclusions. First, Gissing recognized that the style of writing he adopts in the notes reflects its own fantasy—­a fiction that does not necessarily correspond to a neutral reality. Second, he remained loyal to a minimal novelistic structure and the efficacy of literary character. While it might be fun to imagine that all these notes might connect people to one another and allow them to

85

86

CHAPTER 2

read and write together in a textual carnival, Gissing could not subscribe to this. While he struggled to gain the kind of recognition for his novels that he thought they deserved, he fundamentally believed in the value of making them, even as his late work increasingly turned to the depiction of characters who abandon the same commitment. The epigraph to Ryecroft is Hoc erat en votis: this was my desire. The fact that Gissing introduces the entire book as an experiment in desire flags it as a fantasy rather than a direct realization of the kinds of potentials found in the Commonplace Book.63 Ryecroft turns away from the social world in order to drift among discrete details, without synthesizing them into a narrative. Indeed, he claims to have foresworn narrative forms altogether, preferring the stray observation and the meandering lines of note-­taking. This requires a stance apart from the world of people. Saying that his work of writing novels made him a mere “slave of the multitude,” his antisociality could not be more emphatic: The truth is that I have never learnt to regard myself as a “member of society.” For me, there have always been two entities—­myself and the world, and the normal relation between these two has been hostile. Am I not still a lonely man, as far as ever from forming part of the social order?64

The irony of Ryecroft is that its only character believes he is speaking at a remove from all auditors, when in fact Gissing uses the genre of the novel to distribute his views publicly. If Ryecroft is an object of desire for Gissing, the character’s appeal comes from his ethos as a note-­taker, especially because he is a constructed persona. Ryecroft forsakes the social world and its politics. He renounces “sympathetic understanding” and calls it “the rarest thing.” He summarizes the “real” condition of humanity with the following dictum: “To every man it is decreed: thou shalt live alone.” As we saw with Harold Biffen’s anchorite tendencies in New Grub Street, facing the bleak reality of the world requires abandoning the forms of cruel optimism that the positivist novel of purpose demands of us: “The mind which renounces, once and for ever, a futile hope, has its compensation in ever-­growing calm.”65

THINKING PIECES

The possibility of progress, improvement, and development on the level of the social is the fantasy Ryecroft believes he has dispelled by withdrawing completely. You might expect him to be a generally unpleasant and cynical character, yet this is not so. Even the earliest reviewers of the published book received it quite favorably, noting a slightly more affable tone in Ryecroft’s prose than what they were used to from Gissing’s novels. Where does the affability inhere? In the passages of the Commonplace Book quoted above, animadversions about society were intermixed with tender attitudes toward fleeting, insignificant objects. The same kinds of observations appear in Ryecroft, but now they come with a degree of metacommentary that situates them as part of a character’s ethos rather than Gissing’s. Ryecroft chooses simply to look at and document the small, fleeting, and insignificant traces of his world: “I have no wide view before me, but what I see is enough—­a corner of waste-­land, overflowered with poppies and charlock, on the edge of a field of corn. The brilliant red and yellow harmonize with the glory of the day.”66 The sufficiency of merely looking (“what I see is enough”) occurs without the demand for a more general context (“a wide view”) within which to arrange and place these materials. The book is filled with such descriptions of small items, fleeting natural phenomena, and stray quotations from other works, just as the Commonplace Book presents notes that cherish inconsequent phenomena. Like the Commonplace Book, Ryecroft is filled with instances of reading, though again we receive more commentary about the kind of world view and attitude that such reading reflects. The model is of reading and writing without heeding a “future life”: “I cannot preserve more than a few fragments of what I read, yet read I shall persistently, rejoicingly. Would I gather erudition for a future life? Indeed, it no longer troubles me that I forget. I have the happiness of the passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?”67 Here Ryecroft’s “sketchbooks” operate less like a quarry and more like a seismograph, an impression of sudden and ongoing moments, a zero-­degree waste book that will not be directed to future uses. It is like a rock skimming across the water that neither sinks nor touches an opposite shore.

87

88

CHAPTER 2

In place of “stories,” Ryecroft apparently jumps from moment to moment, beginning with what he refers to as the “queer little experience.” This might be the way sunlight strays across a page of his reading or the tempo of the first snowfall. Any small or minor observation might be the occasion for greater reflection, as though these queer little experiences were keyholes through which he espied a greater, dynamic world. What is “queer” about these “little experiences”? In the historical sense, it is simply their oddness. Allowing for anachronistic leeway, of course, their abjuration of a future life also connects Ryecroft and his readers to the abundance of the present, and the “queer little experience” can be read as a metonym for writing that has no future and for the privileges and burdens that arise from living in such a state. In chapter 4, we will see how The Picture of Dorian Gray reprises the connection between short bits of speech and a queer death drive, but in the case of Ryecroft the hedonistic abandon of jouissance is less important that its non-­teleological ethos, the focus on the present, the “happiness of the passing moment.” The leaves and snowflakes to which Gissing’s notations and Ryecroft’s reflections draw our attention hardly seem so orgasmic. Rather than being “shattered” at every moment and advocating for the perpetual dissolution of form, Ryecroft turns away from the future in a mode of restful documentation. Through him, Gissing imagines sustaining a purposeless present without yielding to theoretical or narrative schemata, with “no link appearing between one scene and the next.” Thus the character watches the movement of time without care to direct it, “sitting in utter idleness . . . viewing the golden sunlight upon the carpet, letting my eye wander from one framed print to another, and along the ranks of my beloved books. Within the house nothing stirs.” Nothing is happening, and Ryecroft, like a late-­Victorian John Cage, makes a record of it. There is simply a purposeless drift of attention and deixis: “There is the rustle of branches in the morning breeze; there is the music of a sunny shower against the window; there is the matin song of birds.” The most dramatic thing that happens is the collection of experiences of flora, which gives some idea of Gissing’s motivation for sending a friend the stray leaf with which I began this chapter: “I had cared very little about plants and

THINKING PIECES

flowers, but now I found myself eagerly interested in every blossom, in every growth of the wayside . . . never since have I lost my pleasure in the flowers of the field, and my desire to know them all.”68 To know them all: again a Whitmanesque desire arises to include every leaf and atom in his representation. Ryecroft models an openness to the nonhuman elements in his world that embodies the spirit of documentation and observation without positivist directives. He seeks aleatory, surprising, and unaccountable effects—­these become the locus of value and generate an atmosphere of potential surprise and refreshment. Thus Gissing’s late writing turns to something quite different from literary naturalism, finding a new potential in the categories of the “useless” and the “insignificant” detail rather than treating these as doomed within vicious systems. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, many of Gissing’s novels, in particular The Nether World, rehearse the naturalistic theses: in such novels, social and biological conditions determine all the characters’ choices; freedom is possible only insofar as they have money; their fate is determined from birth. Documentary details are included only to index these harrowing conditions, in which human life is churned through a voracious system. Perhaps Ryecroft shares the naturalist view to some extent, given that his notational explorations depend for their existence on a comfortable annuity. Yet the privilege he enjoys allows him to make a claim for the value of the insignificant, documenting phenomena without needing to enfold them into theories, providing only a transient apparatus for their containment that departs from the causal operations of plot and intrigue and proceeds by paratactical and even random linkages. Ryecroft relishes his new writing practice because it allows him to suspend the claims of theories and narratives without descending into total nihilism. Like Barthes, he works to avoid being enmeshed in any kind of systematic thinking that would limit the wonder generated by small details. “No theory of the world which ever came to my knowledge is to me for one moment acceptable; the possibility of an explanation which would set my mind at rest is to me inconceivable,” he writes. And yet part of what allows his sense of wonderment and joy to transpire is his faith in an ultimate power. He is “convinced that there is a Reason for the All.”69

89

90

CHAPTER 2

Ryecroft is a skeptic, but a loving one who plucks single details from the world and allows them to shimmer with wonder. The gathered herb, the note about piano music, the stray note culled from the Commonplace Book or written for the first time in Ryecroft—­all of these reflect Gissing’s desire (votis) to let “pieces” of information be only that: pieces collected without a view to explanation but whose very collection and assembly presents possibilities of comfort and harmony. I wonder if Gissing has the leaf he sent to Morley Roberts in mind when he has Ryecroft write this: What! Can I pluck the flower by the wayside, and, as I gaze at it, feel that, if I knew all the teachings of histology, morphology, and so on, with regard to it, I should have exhausted its meaning . . . Interesting yes, as observation; but, the more interesting, so much the more provocative of wonder and of hopeless questioning. One may gaze and think till the brain whirls—­till the little blossom in one’s hand becomes as overwhelming a miracle as the very sun of heaven.70

Here we get some sense, then, of why Gissing would pick a leaf in Italy and mail it to his friend: that is, as a means of provoking and sharing wonder by means of the most trivial and nondramatic notations. Of course, it must be stated again that Gissing assigns responsibility for these states and ideas to a fictional character, rather than taking them on himself in the manner of Barthes. As such we must hear within this gesture a note of skepticism, an awareness that seeing the notebook as a textual utopia is itself a fantasy. Gissing was too beholden to the form of the novel and his skills as a novelist to abandon either in the way that he has Ryecroft do. And yet even the fictional gesture of doing so produced unexpected consequences, for Ryecroft became the most popular book Gissing wrote in his lifetime, attracting the favorable attention of myriad readers, many of whom then reached out to him for the first time. This is an irony, given that the book expands upon an ethics of private and antisocial documentation. Indeed, its popularity extended internationally, with many Japanese critics, for example, citing it as their favorite book.71 Like Barthes, Gissing died just at the moment when he seemed to be stepping across a boundary into a new kind of writing and perhaps a new

THINKING PIECES

kind of life. Had he not died shortly after Ryecroft appeared, he might have gone on to produce many more experiments in this line. Certainly he believed it to be his best work. Its widespread popularity and far-­ranging circulation suggests that his notational style, despite its socially recessive dimensions, actually generated public connections and interactions with far more felicity than did his novels, which he wrote in part to satisfy his notion of what the public wanted. In place of any insistence on sympathetic identification and the intrigue of plot, in Ryecroft he produced a sketch of the ethical, networked sociality of the note.

91

This page intentionally left blank

C H A P T E R 3  G E R A R D M A N L E Y H O P K I N S AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

focused on notework as the playful collection of seemingly inconsequential and insignificant observations. This account suggested that notework displays antisocial qualities as it withdraws from regimes of civic usefulness or purpose. Its authors skim the surface of the visible world without settling their findings into any necessary shape, though I also advanced the point that this very elusive skimming style of composition does, in fact, have a shape that we can trace and describe generically. At the end of the last chapter, we saw how Gissing attempted to introduce his own notework from his Commonplace Book into the world of print through a set of framing narratives in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. In the two chapters that follow this one—­on Wilde and Lee—­we’ll see how these writers develop unique strategies for dealing with the public life of notation. For now, however, we remain “in the desk drawer,” as we turn to the notework of one of the most antisocial writers of the nineteenth century. THE PREVIOUS TWO CHAPTERS

95

96

CHAPTER 3

Even the poetry of the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins remained almost entirely unpublished in his lifetime, only to be discovered and rapidly installed at the center of the canon of English poetics in the twentieth century. He was never quite comfortable with the fact that his writings did not impact the world he lived in: “birds build—­but not I build; no, but strain, / Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.”1 Outcries of futility such as this prevail in the dark sonnets of his late work, where we find the shades of despair closing around him as he grades his students’ lackluster papers at Trinity College in Dublin. This chapter will consider some of that poetry a little later, with a new account of its depressive states, but the bulk of what follows concerns the writings Hopkins did during a period of about seven years when he had sworn off writing poetry altogether in favor of taking notes. While these writings might seem to be even more aloof to social consequence than the poetry, I explore how even these most evanescent inscriptions represent an effort toward generating collective ties. Hopkins practices a form of impersonal sociality through the activity of documentation and description. While they are certainly not social in the sense of being shared with readers beyond himself (at least not in Hopkins’s own lifetime), the notes nevertheless depict and enact processes of connection. Hopkins uses his documentary style to envision and verify a world of harmonies between human, animal, and inanimate forms. By collecting and arranging these observations in textual space, he provides a forum for their mingling and interaction as well as for himself to be interlaced, tied, and networked into relation within these phenomena. He thus reveals how notes, while seemingly antisocial, can imaginatively project a collective in which the writer is involved. In what follows here I aim to offer a partial corrective to a tendency within media studies that Lisa Gitelman calls “holding networks by the wrong end”: focusing on the large-­scale aspects of networks instead of the small-­scale and subjective endeavors involved with suturing together disparate elements in the world.2 This comes into focus against the background of a computational humanities that emphasizes larger-­scale projects of mapping and networking. Taking a mystic such as Hopkins as the object of interest here underlines the spiritual, creative, and small-­scale potential of documentation. It also considers networks in their more creative,

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

personal, and expressive dimensions. My goal is to take inspiration from the idiosyncrasy of Hopkins’s own verbal enterprise to find a vocabulary to describe forms that are simultaneously textual and social. This will necessarily involve recourse to strange words, but my hope is that rather than merely advertising new jargon I will instead offer ways of describing these acts of textual networking. The concept of haecceity serves to name forms of fleeting harmony both solicited and documented by Hopkins’s notework. Haec is the Latin feminine form of the pronoun “this.” Usually translated as thisness, the word was coined by the medieval scholastic philosopher John Duns Scotus to refer to “the quality that makes a person or thing describable as ‘this.’”3 But it is decidedly not a common feature that members of a certain group must possess in order to be a part of that group (in other words, not the bushy tail that nearly all bunny rabbits share). It is rather that which differentiates and distinguishes one specific instance of a thing and marks it as separate from any other. Hopkins famously associates the term with his own neologism, inscape, which he develops in the context of the notebooks and by appeal to which critics and scholars have tried to explain his poetics. In the first section of this chapter, I read Hopkins’s journals of 1868–­1875 as explorations of inscape, where this term operates as both a noun and a verb. Inscapes are moments of harmonic coalescence, what Dennis Sobolev calls “embodied organized form,” which Hopkins perceives in everything from waterfalls to the foam on his hot chocolate, from the pattern of paint in a picture to the shape of overlapping human faces in a concert hall.4 Yet the word also appears frequently as a verb—­to scape, inscaping—­which Hopkins uses to narrate his practice of linking objects in a mainly visual field and turning them inward for his own feelings to register. Hopkins thus clarifies the plurality inherent in haecceity, showing how the term can refer not to beautiful lonely shapes but to mobile communal assembly. These plural resonances also struck another thinker of small-­scale sociality who adopted the term haecceity, whose usage I take up in the subsequent section to reinforce the sense it has for Hopkins. Harold Garfinkel was a twentieth-­century sociologist who, working as a contemporary of Erving Goffman, pioneered the techniques of micro-­sociology. For Garfinkel,

97

98

CHAPTER 3

haecceity referred to the specific social arrangements that form in great numbers at every level of society, each with its own idiosyncratic and particular dynamics that the researcher must enter in order to describe. While it may seem quixotic to connect a nineteenth-­century Jesuit to a twentieth-­century social scientist, both develop a formal vocabulary that incorporates both plurality (of different kinds of actors) and movement (of their interactions). They differ, however, in their consistent application of their ideas to their work. Garfinkel stays with haecceity in the manner I’ve described; Hopkins will leave it behind. Garfinkel developed his account of haecceity to oppose the operations of large-­scale, data-­driven techniques of sociology aiming to identify and explain everything within their godlike purview. In terms that directly influenced Bruno Latour (who calls actor-network theory “half Garfinkel”), he used small-­scale analysis to show that the object of study we reflexively call “the social” was in fact composed at the faintest, most minimal levels of operation.5 He remained loyal to this position throughout his career. Yet for Hopkins’s part, much of the later poetry reflects what I read as a refutation of the creative practices of collective association that we find in his notebooks. In poems such as “The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo” and “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” Hopkins imagines relinquishing the inconsequential, ephemeral haecceities that human beings create in this world to a distant God, one who seems to operate with the supposed detachment and rigor of what one critic calls a “computer-­like automatism.”6 Especially in his episodes of deep despair and psychological ruin, Hopkins’s poems reflect an almost total alienation from the work of inscaping that consistently delighted him in the period when he had given up poetry altogether. This is ironically most visible in his late Dublin Notebook, in which “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” appears amid line after line of grey checkmarks and endless numerical calculations (his tabulations of grades for his students) and where all traces of exquisite haecceity seem to have bled away. Scaping

Hopkins’s early notebooks are venues of connection and not calculation. His writings in this genre flow, depicting and enacting exchanges, combinations, and linkages between clouds, waterfalls, snowdrifts, bluebells,

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

stars, flocks of sheep, human forms, the patterns on animal skin, and sunsets. His notations illumine collectives in the world through the collection of small documents. He is everywhere concerned with groups and their movements, for example in the following passage that considers a large congregation of humans: “Was happily able to see composition of the crowd in the area of the theater . . . the short strokes of eyes, nose, mouth, repeated hundreds of times I believe it is which give the visible law.” He is equally compelled by the movement of a flock of sheep and its similarity to running drops of water: “I saw the phenomenon of the sheepflock . . . It ran like the water-­packets on a leaf—­that collectively, but a number of globules so filmed over that they wd. not flush together.” To read the notebooks is to learn about clusters, bunches, and flocks. The features of the natural and human worlds appear in multiple and in mixture. Even when discussing uncountable nouns, such as cloud formations, or flowing water, Hopkins deploys a vocabulary of network and constellation: “In the train noticing that strange . . . rotten-­woven cloud which shapes in leaf over leaf of wavy or eyebrow textures: it is like fine webs or gossamers held down by many invisible threads.”7 There is always a multiple quality to Hopkins’s descriptions, and also something unfixed about inscape’s grammatical role in his notebook writings. Hopkins’s concept of inscape has proven notoriously difficult to stabilize. While the meaning of inscape differs depending on which critic is using the word and why, let us begin here by considering two established but apparently contradictory ways of understanding it. First, the more canonical version that made it into the Oxford English Dictionary on the force of Hopkins’s work alone: “Hopkins’s word for the individual or essential quality of a thing; the uniqueness of an observed object, scene, event, etc.”8 Its official definition suggests particularity, the quality that distinguishes something from everything else. The following lines from “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” (1877) underline this sense: Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—­goes itself; myself it speaks and spells Crying What I do is me: for that I came. (5–­8)

99

100

CHAPTER 3

The poem celebrates and cherishes difference, illuminating a world humming with an infinite number of subjectivities. This is a metaphysical, spiritual force, related to the Incarnation: “for Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his” (12–­13).9 The critical understanding of inscape as “thisness” evolves from Hopkins’s association of the term with Scotus. He records the moment of reading Scotus’s Sentences in his notes: “it may come to nothing or it may be a mercy from God. But just then when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus.”10 Yet many reject the idea that Hopkins’s inscape and Scotus’s haecceity are identical, on the basis that Hopkins deploys inscape to refer to specific formal qualities in combination. Multiple interpreters from different waves of Hopkins scholarship, among them W. A. M. Peters, W. H. Gardner, J. Hillis Miller, and Brian Willems, have commented on Hopkins’s apparently plural use of the term.11 Using the word inscape allows Hopkins to discern the mobile and collective aspects of form as it applies to groups of objects. Consider the following scene, in which Hopkins names elements and binds them together with his favorite concept: Another night from the gallery window I saw a brindled heaven, the moon just masked by a blue spot pushing its way through the darker cloud, underneath and on the skirts of the rack bold long flakes whined and swaled like feathers, below the garden with the heads of the trees and shrubs furry grey: I read a broad careless inscape flowing throughout.12

The sky, moon, cloud, trees, and shrubs are drawn together with a wavelike motion of inscape that holds the elements of sky and land together. The word indicates an action of interconnection, accumulation, and combination of elements inhabiting the same visual frame. Rather than indicating the specific character of any of these elements in the scene, inscape is by contrast a stylistic gesture that binds them together. While the noun inscape appears most frequently in Hopkins’s notebooks, he varies his use of the root word throughout its pages. Inscape functions alternately as both noun and verb. This allows the term, as Martin Dubois observes, “to refer not just to the quality observed but also to the

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

act of perception.”13 The word scape, without the prefix, appears in equally ambiguous ways. Scaping also appears as a gerund. These variations suggest the vitality of the concept at this stage of Hopkins’s life. In addition to specifying the unique qualities of a stream or a mountainside, it can also serve to yoke these together. For example, it is not the inscape of a single star that interests him, rather it is “a noble scape of stars—­the Plough all golden and falling, Cassiopeia on end . . . the graceful bends of Perneus underneath her.” Scape works as a synonym for group or spread. Fascinated by the spots of a leopard in a painting by Briton Rivière, Hopkins notes the way the flow of marks on the animal “inscape the whole animal and even the group of them.”14 The term reflects a unifying action that constellates multiple elements. The movements of inscape seem to both resemble and require sketching. The notes carry forward the visual aspects of Hopkins’s work (for example in his near-­obsessive use of “cross-­hatching” to describe what he sees) but also, in particular, the sense of sketching and outlining.15 Consider how he describes a sunset: “Before I had always taken the sunset and the sun as quite out of gauge with each other, as indeed physically they are . . . but today I inscaped them together and made the sun the true eye and ace of the whole.”16 Here, Hopkins contributes something to the scene, establishing that he does not simply register inscape but enacts it. It is something he is actively doing in the face of manifold presentations. As this particular passage continues, the prefix “in” falls away, enabling another twist on the root word: “It [the sunset] was all active and tossing out light and started as strongly forward from the field as a long stone or a boss in the knop of the chalice-­stem: it is indeed by stalling it so that it falls into scape with the sky.”17 In the two parts of this passage, which are continuous in the original, inscape (as a verb) becomes scape (as a noun), the latter suggesting relationship and coordination.18 Having the different elements of the assemblage “stall” brings out their formal interconnections and linkages. It is easy enough to see how inscape and thisness are equivalent when both are used as nouns, but it is more difficult to see how the verbal form of scape or inscape maps onto the concept of thisness. What would be

101

102

CHAPTER 3

the appropriate verb for creating relations bound into a this? Indexing? Describing? Pointing? It would seem to be a mix of sketching and attunement. I propose that we consider network as a fitting verb for defining the somewhat odd arrangements and movements of Hopkins’s note-­taking. If the sole end of these descriptions were aesthetic, that is, if his purpose were to create exquisite descriptions, then the verb “to sketch” might be sufficient. But his suppression of poetic language in this period of his life suggests something that doesn’t look like art or form, at least as we usually understand these words. In our own time, the verb to network obviously calls to mind the activities associated with professional advancement, but Hopkins presents a different idea, one that more closely resembles drawing and collage but in which the observer includes themself as a contributing element. The documentary accrual serves both to verify the presence of these resonances and harmonies and to implicate the documenter within them. The word note also stands in metonymically for the elements being assembled. The work of scaping can mean drawing disparate tones and colors into harmony. Describing the appearance of a rainbow in the midst of clouds, Hopkins adds more and more elements to his description, as though testing how far the scene could be stretched to accommodate various colors: “Richness of the greens . . . then the blue-­green of the lake, then again the grass-­green of the heights beyond, and to add a fourth note the sun coming out accented the forward brows and edges of the Battenalp with a butter-­bright lustre.”19 “Note” in this passage slips between significations, at once a mere element of the scene and a reference to itself as a written note. One can also hear “note” in its musical sense, as the colors of the scene make a visual chord. By breaking up the portions of a scene into various notes of color or shape, Hopkins allows them to be considered in a dynamic relation. Of course, these maneuvers define the notebook writings even when the word scape is absent. As Anthony Mortimer observes, the journals are filled with images of “webs, nets, meshes, cords, ropes, laces, braids and strands,” whose purpose suggests an activity of “holding in, tying together, preserving form in beings whose natural tendency would otherwise

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

be towards formlessness and dissolution.”20 Included in these webs and meshes are many elements of apparently little consequence. Hopkins’s understanding of “network” seems to specify something aleatory and quick to dissipate, for example the texture of the surface of his hot chocolate: I have been watching clouds this spring and evaporation, for instance over our Lenten chocolate . . . the film seems to be set with tiny bubbles which gives it a grey and grained look . . . It would be reasonable then to consider the films as the shell of gas-­bubbles and the grain . . . on them as a network of bubbles condensed by the air as the gas rises.21

Along with such bubbles, clouds are favored citizens in Hopkins’s world, and many of his notebooks feature sketches of the sky as it appears on a given day. Cloud formations are exemplary expressions of connection and linkage. Watching “a long chain of waxen delicately moulded clouds,” he suggests that they resemble “a brain,” or a “bale . . . because its knops are like the squeeze outwards of the packed stuff between the places where a network of many cords might bite into it.”22 To mark the difference from poetic activity or preparation, consider another point where scaping unifies elements that do not seem beautiful at all. Scaping serves both an accretive and integrative function for collecting experiences, no matter how abject. Two days before Christmas, in 1869, Hopkins finds himself sleepily listening to a sermon about the Apostles. Suddenly, in his dreamy mind, there appears an image of an Apostle constrained by a particular piece of wood, which he remembers seeing “in an outhouse.” Yet in his vision it rises up again, demanding attention. “It is just the things,” he remarks, “which produce dead impressions, which the mind, either because you cannot make them out or because they were perceived across other more engrossing thoughts, has made nothing of and brought into no inscaping, that force themselves up in this way afterwards.”23 This may look to some like a proto-­Freudian account of the “day-­residue,” or something like the return of the repressed. But in this context it marks scaping (note the strikeout through the prefix “in”) as an event that links fragmentary experiences together. While there may be an aesthetic charge to the presence of inscape, it is not wholly aesthetic: it is hard to see how

103

104

CHAPTER 3

Hopkins could have composed a lyric poem based on his “dead impression” of a piece of wood in an outhouse. Yet the notebooks suggest that this derelict object is yearning to be brought into connection with others. =, :

Much commentary has been lavished on Hopkins’s idiosyncratic use of metrical marks in his poems to indicate the stresses of his sprung rhythm. In the notes we do not find such sonic stresses deployed, yet there are still unique forms of punctuation to which I will turn as a way of bringing this part of the discussion to a close. Made available only in the most recent edition of Hopkins’s journals by Leslie Higgins, Hopkins’s strange, compound punctuation marks deserve attention. Sometimes these appear as an equals sign with a comma underneath; sometimes as a mix of equals sign, comma, and colon; or an equals sign and quotation mark; a dash and semi-­colon; a period with an equals sign and colon; or a parenthesis and equals sign. What do these ambiguous marks suggest? Here is one example: However the star knot is the chief thing: it is whorled, worked round, a little and this is what keeps up the illusion of the tree =,: the leaves are rounded inwards and figure out ball-­knots24

Hopkins attends here to the whole being of the tree, asking what binds it together. How are we able to apprehend a unified form out of all these bits and pieces? Immediately after calling the integrity of the tree an “illusion,” he introduces the strange mark that combines an equals sign, a comma, and a colon: =,:. All three symbols indicate relationships between the sides of an equation or between clauses in a sentence. In the midst of trying to interpret the visual elements of the scene, this completely idiosyncratic mark emerges, signaling the equivalence of the two sides of the mark (=), a pause in a list (,), or an explanation or elaboration (:). The mark suggests a moment of indecision, where Hopkins may not be quite sure how to indicate the grammatical relationship between a series of objects in his view and his own interpretation of them. The hesitation results in this compound mark, as though none of them were particularly satisfactory and Hopkins were reaching toward a new form of syntactical relationship.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

In this case, the elements he has chosen for the mark combine equivalence with sequence, such that his own interpretation of the tree’s form becomes a fold in his description of it. The most common irregular punctuation mark is an equals sign with a comma beneath it (=,), again suggesting a hesitation over whether Hopkins means to indicate equality or merely accretion. Consider this description of hedgerows: “hedges bending in flowing outlines =, and now misted a little by the beginning of twilight.” In this case the mark seems to draw together the misty twilight with the patterns of the hedges themselves. Just as the rippling movement in the nighttime passage above came to be identified as inscape, so too the equals-­comma appears at moments when a combined effect arises. For example, again: “the distance, esp. westward over Dartmoor, was dim and dark, some rain had fallen =, and there were fragments of a rainbow but a wedge of sunlight streamed down through a break in the clouds in the valley.”25 Here again, the fragments of the rainbow would seem to simply follow the order of Hopkins’s own descriptions, as the equals sign flattens the difference between them and makes them one. In the notework, then, inscaping and scaping connote integrative actions both revealed and produced by documentation. They reach for an ideal of harmonious assembly. Everything—­even the piece of wood in the outhouse—­asks to be brought “into scaping.” Those impressions that seem negligible, uncountable, or fated to be lost proffer themselves up to be folded into a collection of experience and be preserved. Even dying, and the ravages of old age, find accommodation within the interlacing threads: “It is not that inscape does not govern the behavior of things in slack and decay as one can see even in the pining of the skin in the old and even in a skeleton but that horror prepossesses the mind.”26 The provocation of horror and disgust, brought on by death, decay, or an outhouse, is no reason against something being incorporated into the system of connections Hopkins imagines in his notes. Activities that in the twenty-­first century we associate with machine activity, for example locating social patterns, linking individuals, or discerning and predicting “behavior,” are for Hopkins deeply felt, spiritual, and personal actions. In the following

105

106

CHAPTER 3

section, we will see how Hopkins used his poetry to express ambivalent feelings about how his aesthetic experiences would—­or would not be—­ harnessed by a remote agent. In his case, of course, the remote machinery is the Catholic deity. This series of journals by Hopkins simply stops in May 1875 in the midst of a sentence about the Welsh words for fairies. “‘Why she had seen the kippernappers’ her grandmother said to her son, Susannah Jones’s father. They were”—­and the sentence breaks off.27 We have scant journal entries after this, and none that follow the pattern we have seen here. The abrupt break, of course, suggests that Hopkins’s thinking continued into at least one other notebook, and he does elsewhere point to the existence of journals that have been lost to history. Yet after the journals of 1867–­1875, we have only the Dublin Notebook as evidence for the way he used this kind of device, and, as we will see below, he makes a very different use of the pages of that notebook. No sketching of inscapes occurs there. Of course, there is another major factor to consider in the trajectory of his notebook writings, namely that after this moment he renewed his practice of writing poetry. In 1875, Hopkins began composing a 35-­stanza poem of startling originality, inaugurating a fresh, lyrical life in “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” which put forward an entirely new stanzaic form and devised the original “sprung rhythm” for which he has become so well known. Microsocial Form

This is usually the moment in this kind of argument where a critic would transfer these findings from the notebooks back onto the poetry. But what if we stalled here, refusing to show how all of this material gets used up in the formidable lyrics, choosing instead to dwell on the forms of relation contained within Hopkins’s notework? For there is another, stranger way to approach what is happening in his notes that doesn’t push them toward another genre but stays in their midst as notes. They should not just be viewed as supplying content for the poetry; instead, they simultaneously identify and create mobile patterns of different elements that I think are helpfully called haecceities,

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

albeit not in the usual sense that scholars apply this term. Haecceity is a specific, patterned, and mobile formation of elements that depends upon being noted and engaged by a writer. It is thus an ambiguously textual and social form. In order to clarify this definition of haecceity, I turn in this brief section to the work of Harold Garfinkel, whose own adoption of this concept underlines its plural, and in his case explicitly social, dimension. In his usage, haecceity refers to particular configurations of social interaction that are created, sustained, and even understood as methodological by their participants. Garfinkel founded a heterodox school of sociology that he called ethnomethodology. Commonly glossed as the study of everyday life, ethnomethodology, like other micro-­sociological practices, departs from methods that emphasize large-­scale, statistical data collection. Its practitioners challenge the existence of a pre-­given social dimension of existence whose explanation rests entirely on their work. Instead, Garfinkel and his disciples propose to treat sociology as an everyday phenomenon, something created or achieved by actors themselves in their daily lives. This school of thought posits that everyone has a “method” by which they constitute the social. There are innumerable examples of such “ethnomethods.” Everyone has one or many that help them navigate the social world and their appearance within it. As Garfinkel claims, “the meaningful, patterned, and orderly character of everyday life is something people must continually work cooperatively to achieve.” As a discipline, ethnomethodology amounts to “the study of the methods people use of producing recognizable social orders.” Such studies could involve, for instance, the careful examination of documents that generate social order in institutions, or the famous “breaching” experiments, in which observers interrupt the processes by which subjects, often without self-­awareness, produce meaningful interactions.28 In the wake of these breaches, observers would attend to the subject’s efforts to repair fractured relations in such a way as to reveal the ongoing facture of social bonds and procedures. In this account, “the social” becomes a small-­scale event that I would argue is available to formalist analysis, since individuals create by drawing

107

108

CHAPTER 3

connections between individuals, objects, and institutions. Haecceity names the target of analysis for the micro-­sociologist and something individuals (including the micro-­sociologist) generate through their actions and descriptive practices. Like Hopkins, Garfinkel develops a strange idiolect in which to cast his ideas. One of his more verbose titles demonstrates his eccentric style: “Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Accountable Phenomena of Order, Logic, Reason, Meaning, Method, etc. In and As Of the Essential Haecceity of Immortal Ordinary Society.” I will address this strange diction below, but for now I want to note the way that Garfinkel opposes sociological methods that treat the world as a chaos of disorderly activity (in the above-­named article he calls it a “plenum”) in need of analytical explanation by sociologists.29 Readers of Bruno Latour will thus recognize Garfinkel’s importance to the development of actor-­network theory. “It would be fairly accurate to describe ANT as half Garfinkel,” Latour himself explains in Reassembling the Social. In his estimation, Garfinkel “believed sociology could be a science accounting for how society is held together, instead of using society to explain something else or to help solve one of the political questions of the time.” Latour extends Garfinkel’s account of the social to include nonhuman actors, whether this means the tools the scientist brings with her into scenes of investigation or the institutional constellation of things and people. In terms that are by now familiar to many literary critics, he explains that the social “doesn’t designate a domain of reality or some particular item,” but rather is “an association between entities which are in no way recognizable as being social in the ordinary manner, except during the brief moment when they are reshuffled together . . . thus, social, for ANT, is the name of a type of momentary association which is characterized by the way it gathers together into new shapes.”30 If there is no definable place or thing that we can index as “the social,” what matters for Latour is that we view networks as ongoing, contingent, and ephemeral things. Because of its emphasis on particular, small-­scale social scenes that are creatively fashioned by participants, micro-­sociology may offer surprising resources for literary critics interested in developing new accounts of the

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

relationships between form, society, and action. Heather Love’s ongoing recuperation of the work of Goffman emphasizes the continuity of textual and social expressions: Goffman ignores the distinction between text and world, enlisting literature as well as other narrative and fictional forms in the service of describing social dynamics and their reinscription of hierarchy . . . he analyzes scenes from “real life” with the slow, careful attention of a close reader; and he reads literature for its representation of social dynamics and hierarchies, without attending to many of the formal and ideological questions native to literary studies.31

As we will see now, Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological approach resembles practices of close reading—­except that he applies this technique to relations between people and things in the world, rather than to text alone. As I mentioned above, Garfinkel faulted twentieth-­century sociology for operating under the assumption that “order” in this world “can only be discovered after, and as a result of, the application of a social scientific method.” His whole project aims to revise Durkheim’s aphorism, which holds that “the objective reality of social facts is sociology’s fundamental principle.”32 This is usually understood to mean that it is up to sociology to discover and specify those facts, to mine them from a quarry of seeming chaos. Garfinkel reformulates Durkheim’s aims in another baroque sentence: For ethnomethodology the objective reality of social facts, in that and just how it is every society’s locally, endogenously produced, naturally organized, reflexively accountable, ongoing, practical achievement, being everywhere, always, only, exactly and entirely, members’ work, with no time out, and with no possibility of evasion, hiding out, passing postponement, or buy-­outs, is thereby sociology’s fundamental phenomenon.33

Garfinkel is notorious for his use of bizarre subordinating conjunctions, such as “in that and just how it is” here, and the even more bizarre relative clause “as of which.” Elements in social scenes must always be understood

109

110

CHAPTER 3

“as of which,” that is, pertaining to particular contexts. His language breaches normal ways of describing interaction in order to refresh the way in which we talk about what counts as social in the first place. I believe that such defamiliarization is valuable in our own time, when people use the word “social” as shorthand for negotiating Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram as often as they use it to refer to in-­person interactions. Yet, more than a decade after the appearance of such media, we still need more terms to describe their unusual configurations of verbal, visual, and interpersonal interplay. When Garfinkel says that the focus should be on “members’ work, with no time out,” he respecifies the target of sociology, arguing that the discipline should move away from analytic methods (which rely, crucially, on the collection of data on a large scale) and focus instead on the incremental ways that subjects call “the social” into being. Whether the context is “freeway traffic jams, walking together, the exhibited order of service in formatted queues, turn-­taking in conversation” the sociologist must attend to “the coherence of its identifying orderliness” as the population that staffs it.34 This also involves “total immersion” in the social contexts whose “patterned orderliness”—­haecceity—­sociologists wish to identify. Their practice often attends to the consideration of particular “scenes” of sociality rather than their underlying psychological causes. It is in this sense that it works as sociology’s answer to close reading, asserting the value of formal particularity in any interpersonal scene.35 One of the advantages of this method is its self-­reflexivity: there is no fundamental split between the subjects and scenes under investigation and the scholars doing the investigating. Marks

Haecceity names particular, fleeting networks of actors registered by notes, whether those actors are glaciers, clouds, or hedges mixing under moonlight. Just as the ethnomethodologist practices a form of immersion in social worlds, merging and integrating with the orderliness she wishes to document, so too does Hopkins suture himself within the

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

scenes he describes. Yet unlike Garfinkel, Hopkins does not remain invested in the task of bringing such networks to light. The paper record, however incomplete, suggests a clean break between the notebook writings considered above and the poetic output that defined his textual life from 1875 to his death in 1889. Since the journals simply stop and the poetry resumes, it might seem that Hopkins just traded out notes for poems. Yet this interpretation would too quickly dispense with the formal identity of the notes. I think Dubois is right to resist painting all of Hopkins’s works with one brush: “One obvious danger is that the effort to harmonise Hopkins’s poetry with his prose writings according to a consistent intellectual programme means we neglect what is distinctive to each of the forms in which he wrote.”36 My interest is in the apparent disappearance of these affirmative depictions of collectives in the natural and social worlds once poetry reenters Hopkins’s life. In what remains of this chapter, I examine particular poems in which the speaker dramatizes the process of collecting worldly fragments only to balk at the task of synthesizing them. The writings examined above displayed the utopian dimensions of note-­taking, its active creation of haecceities. In contrast, much of the poetry assigns the task of tabulating the flickering effects of this world to a God who operates with what Howard Fulweiler suggestively calls “a kind of computer-­like automatism.”37 The poem becomes the medium that transmits these raw materials into His care. I do not wish to reduce the variety of the poetry to a simple formula, especially since the poetry stages unresolved and changeable conflicts in Hopkins’s view of the world and its relation to Christian ideals. He does not design each line with a view toward glossing a consistent theological position, but across many of the poems, Hopkins invokes a divinity with the power to format and synthesize the ephemeral experiences of this world. While in some instances this involves a manic, celebratory ecstasy, other moments mourn the fact that this process will occur elsewhere, “yonder,” beyond the horizon of the speaker’s death. The late poetry composed in Dublin, in particular, expresses deep conflicts over the question of whether God has any interest in the sensory experiences and impressions we have undergone in this life beyond our rectitude within it.

111

112

CHAPTER 3

The fate of inscape in Hopkins’s poetic output remains particularly unsettled. The understanding of it as a principle driving his compositions derives from two sources. First, a letter to Bridges: “What I am in the habit of calling ‘inscape’ is what I above all aim at in poetry.”38 Second, in his late lecture notes, kept during his time in Dublin, Hopkins writes that “poetry is in fact speech only employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake.”39 And yet these words and their variants that we saw rotating kaleidoscopically through the journals appear nowhere in the poems themselves. Drawing straightforward connections between the concept of inscape and the later writings thus remains contentious for critics. As Sobolev puts it, “there is no direct road from the analysis of the notion of ‘inscape’ to Hopkins’s poetry.”40 Indeed, some caution against making too much of the term since doing so makes it the yardstick by which we would measure any poem’s success.41 When Hopkins tells us that poetry follows “the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake,” he indicates the limited purview that inscape has for him after 1875, giving it a Paterian, aesthetic inflection, though of course one that preserves devotional force. On this reading, the turn back to poetry is not the culmination and ultimate telos of the journal writings, but rather represents a specific focus on one kind of inscape. Rather than the inscape of clouds, sunsets, sheepflocks, cascades, or droplets, he focuses on the webs of relation and patterns of sound. While this often results in ecstatic sonic outpouring, the more widely distributed networking action is no longer present in the way it had been in the notes. Hopkins invests in aural scapes—­the patterned order of sound, in harmonies and formal beauties, rather than a metonymic and visual/textual apparatus. This is not to downplay the achievements of his poems, but merely to remark that its forms are substantially different from those of the notebook; the two cannot merely be made to flow into one another, even if they can be productively compared. By placing the notework alongside the poetic works we find two different accounts and representations of observations, descriptions, and what to do with them. The nature sonnets dramatize one way of processing them that is built into the very structure of the poems. They begin by summoning particular

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

sensations and images in order to have them explained within a theological framework. Norman White describes this as Hopkins’s “two-­part structure” in which “the first part (the octave of a sonnet, or almost so) has the poet looking at a scene, describing it and his involvement in it, while the second part (the sestet) is the poet’s attempt to force this scene into a Christian context and draw a lesson out of it which could not have been predicted from the first part.”42 This is perhaps best exemplified by “The Windhover,” which begins as a bird with a “wimpling wing” and “off forth with a swing” in its “hurl and gliding,” and ends with that bird becoming Christ himself in the second half.43 The opening lines of the poem present a series of observations, while the concluding lines process these observations according to religious percepts. The objects he describes in the poems become allegorical, delivered to God for processing and ultimate arrangement. The result is that beautiful sensory experience immediately falls under the sanction of Christ: it is yielded to his authority. This marks a change from the sensory experience registered by the notes. There, Christian teaching hovered over the writings (Hopkins was, after all, in training to be a Jesuit) but he never made conclusive pronouncements about Christ’s relationship to the beauties he found in the scapes described. This kind of poetic structure allows Hopkins to relinquish sensory data to God, an event that is perhaps most elaborately diagrammed in the two-­part poem “The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo.” The first half presents the problem of mortal beauty. How are we to keep the sensual pleasure of beauty in this world from disappearing? Is there a way? The question includes appeals to the kinds of elements associated with the form of Hopkins’s notework, that is, with binding agents, cords, and laces: How to keep—­is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or brain or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty . . . from vanishing away? Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankèd wrinkles deep, Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?—­ 

113

114

CHAPTER 3

No there’s none, there’s none, O no there’s none Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair, Do what you may do, what, do what you may, And wisdom is early to despair: Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done To keep at bay Age and age’s evils, hoar hair, Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, windingsheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay; So be beginning, be beginning to despair. O there’s none; no no no there’s none: Be beginning to despair, to despair, Despair, despair, despair, despair.44

The speaker bemoans the impossibility of preserving or binding beauty in such a way that its value abides in this life. Hopkins refers to the kinds of “binding agents” that we saw in the notes: “bow or brooch or brain or brace, lace, latch” are named but only as absences unavailable to do the work of integrating and connecting the percepts. Hopkins suggests in the notebooks that even the wrinkles and lines of aging skin could be inscaped, whereas in this poem there is “no waving off” the wrinkles: no way to banish them. The poet calls out for something to preserve beauty, some outside power to swoop in and seal its promise. Branches, waves, the surface of hot chocolate: in the notes, these all exhibited the quality of being held together in themselves. There was no need for appeal to an intervening actor. In the new moment in which “The Leaden Echo” unfolds, wisdom means coming to terms with the fact that beauty cannot be fastened by actions taken in this world alone, and that if you do not move beyond that fact you will be led into a refrain of “despair.” The speaker of the poem sounds almost like the character of Dorian Gray before he makes his wish, realizing that his portrait will retain its beautiful face while he is destined for a wormy grave. The only hope is resurrection. The second section returns an answer to the question of how to preserve and guarantee beauty, namely to deposit these experiences in a realm of redemption “yonder” which lies beyond this world:

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

Spare! There ís one, yes I have one (Hush there!); Only not within seeing of the sun. Not within the singeing of the strong sun, Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air, Somewhere elsewhere there is (ah well where!) one, Ońe. Yes I cán tell such a key, I dó know such a place, Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone, Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet Of us, the wimpledwater-­dimpled, not-­by-­morning-­matchèd face, The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet, Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an

everlastingness of, O it is an all youth! . . . 

The way to preserve beauty cannot be found in the realm of normal time, not “within the singeing of the strong sun.” It lies “elsewhere.” This section depicts the earth as we know it as “treacherous” and the air as “tainting.” This is a stark departure from the vision of the earth promoted in the notebooks. Of course, the speaker of the poem here is not Hopkins himself but the maidens of St. Winefred’s Well—­he wrote the poem as though it were a chorus for them to sing. Yet the difference in attitudes is still telling. The notes produce and reflect a net readily discoverable by the writer and which invites their inclusion within the array of inscape. In “The Golden Echo,” matters are different. The poem continues with an injunction to deliver the data of beauty to God: Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath, And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs, deliver Them; beauty-­in-­the-­ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God

115

116

CHAPTER 3

beauty’s self and beauty’s giver. See: not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the last lash lost, every hair Is, hair of the head, numbered. Nay, what he had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept, This side, that side hurling a heavy-­headed hundredfold What while we, while we slumbered. O then, weary then why should we tread? . . . When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care, Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder A care kept.—­Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—­ Yonder.—­What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—­Yonder, yes yonder, yonder, Yonder.

The speaker directs us to relinquish earthly beauty to God. The numerical language and its accompanying calculations stand out. “Every hair is . . . numbered,” and the code revealing the position and purpose of each and every hair can only be realized after this life and our death, which mark the period during which “we slumbered.” The poem is didactic, enjoining us to surrender; the speaker does not ask us to carefully and slowly describe the elements of the pattern in such a way as to render it palpable to the observer or coordinate him or her in the network. Instead we are instructed to “deliver” our experiences to God for safekeeping, since we are apparently incapable of doing the necessary work here. In fact the speaker’s voice seems to split into different personae in the final lines, as though the group of maidens were in dialogue with another speaker. The phrases “Do but tell us where kept” and “What high as that!” seem to issue from a different voice than the one that comes from them.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

In a poem where such intricate and ornate language is made to reflect on the worldly condition of pleasurable sensory experience, we might wonder whether it is the words themselves that are asking about the fate of their own beauties. The refrain of “despair” at the end of the first section becomes a refrain of “yonder, yonder, yonder, yonder,” pointing to a place where such beauty, at present a mere ingredient in a “mould,” will bear fruit. The varieties of pattern that captivated Hopkins, and in which he took such pleasure, here become synonymous with the beautiful alone. Worldly beauty stands as a rudimentary, germinal thing, which must be rendered meaningful elsewhere through sacrifice and deferral. In “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” Hopkins cedes responsibility for creating networks of relation and turns over his data to a macroscopic God to be computed and “numbered,” down to the last eyelash. Above, I explained that Garfinkel and Hopkins shared a view of haecceity as collective form, whether it points to the harmonies of a sunset or scenes of human interaction. Garfinkel uses this interpretation of haecceity to counter the dominant, statistically inflected operations of macro-­sociology, which in his view posits “the social” as a given and stable field in which people live their lives without necessarily being aware of it. In his notework, Hopkins was similarly taken with the idea of relationality as something constructed and open-­ended. This poem presents a very different option, namely leaving the task of preservation to God and releasing our hold on this world. This is a “golden” option that theoretically brings peace, since it lifts the pressure off the living to identify, perceive, and verify harmonies in the world. Other poems, however, view this contractual arrangement not as a golden prospect but rather as an occasion for a new kind of despair. Between the notebooks, the early poetry, and the darker late poetry, then, we have three distinct parables concerning the data of aesthetic experience and their proper destination. In the early poems, Hopkins has confidence that fragmentary sensory experiences will be synthesized and redeemed. This faith appears not only in “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” but also in “The Windhover,” “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” and indeed in the theodicy of “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Along with other works from the late 1870s, these are

117

118

CHAPTER 3

written in a state of near-­ecstasy, looking forward to a future moment in which the fluctuations of this world will be sheltered. Yet in other bleak and conflicted poems, for example the Terrible Sonnets, “Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves,” and “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and Of the Comforts of the Resurrection,” the small-­scale compositions are vanquished in the face of a final, divine action unknowable to mundane beings. In these more volatile works, God seems not to bestow order and pattern on the chaotic details of our lives, or if He does so, then in such a way that can only feel like a shattering of this life rather than a soothing balm. In this context, the God of the poetry performs the synthetic operations that Garfinkel, albeit in a very different context, resisted, criticizing “macro” sociologists for their systematizations, generalizations, and abstractions. I draw this comparison here not to say that macro-­sociologists are gods of some kind, but rather to identify the similar relationships to information that obtain in Hopkins’s theological work and Garfinkel’s social scientific experiments. I will focus on “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” because it is the poem that most dramatically conveys the idea that experiences (though they may be redeemed in some afterlife) can only be disorganized, scrambled, and dispersed in this life. It presents dark thoughts of everything flying off the handle and fragmenting beyond repair. In this poem, the ebullient celebrations of fluttering wings and fleeting beauty, so prevalent in Hopkins’s previous writings, collapse into a plot of the end times, figured as the “evening” that begins : Earnest, earthless, equal, attunable, | vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous Evening strains to be tíme’s vást, | womb-­of-­all, home-­of-­all, hearse-­of-­all night. Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, | her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height Waste; her earliest stars, earlstars, | stárs principal overbend us Fíre-­féaturing heaven. For éarth | her béing has unbóund, her dápple is at énd, as-­ Tray or aswarm, all throughther in throngs; | self ín self stéepèd and páshed—­quíte

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

Disremembering, dísmémbering, áll now. Heart, you wound me right With: Óur évening is óver us; óur night whelms, whelms, ánd will end us. Only the beakleaved bows dragonish damask the tool-­smooth bleak light; black Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wínd Off hér once skéined stained véined varíety upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds—­bláck, white; ríght, wrong; réckon but, réck but, mínd But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these twó tell, éach off the óther; of a ráck Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe-­and shelterless, thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.45

A binary operation overtakes variety as mathematical calculation steps in. The divine teleology disperses the variations and the minute folds of our experiences. The same sense of being “numbered” recurs here, although without the sense of beauty being preserved and rendered whole in the afterlife that we found in “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo.” The repetition of the word “two” is striking, but so is the spatial dimension within which the work takes place. There are “spools” upon which the “variety” of the world will be wound up, sorted, classified. This variety, in its “flocks” and “folds,” will find itself on the “rack”: the language suggests a figure turning a mechanical torture device that will convey a belt of flapping wings into one of two possible containers. The notework in the journals presented the blithe and pleasurable activities of the collector, producing a flutter of documents that were always already saved, valued, protected. The earlier poetry, for its part, had promised the future redemption of “whatever is fickle.” “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” reflects a very different world view, one in which a finished collection gets channeled toward fixed judgment but that guarantees no preservation of the aesthetic experiences mediated by our living senses.

119

120

CHAPTER 3

Many critics have noted the way in which “Sibyl’s Leaves” involves a withdrawal from Hopkins’s earlier, deeply held convictions about the possibility of creatively redeeming worldly experience. They note that the poem replaces this creative and spiritual production of harmonious collectives with a “doomsday ethics,”46 “a vast unravelling,”47 “the dissolution of the aesthetic moment into the starkly ethical one,”48 and a “dark and moralistic”49 view of the world. White describes the way in which “Hopkins can no longer find the psychic strength to observe and experiment with reality,” adding that the religious content of the poem “establishes complete domination, so that eventually the dogmatic beat replaces the variable images, just as black/white has overcome and replaced variegated dapple.”50 As in the case of “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” the musical feats of the poetry seem to come at the expense of worldly connections. All of these interpretations view the poem as bleak, and in terms of the current argument it would seem to operate at the farthest remove from the notework already considered. The irony is that Hopkins drafted “Sibyl’s Leaves” in the middle of his late Dublin Notebook, where we might have expected a reemergence of the kinds of forms he produced with his notes as a novitiate. However the conditions here are markedly different. He is no longer trekking across mountains and meadows but instead has, simply put, a lot of grading to do. Radically different in shape, size, and content from the journals of 1867–­1875, this notebook is the only substantial one we have after 1875. It represents a very different set of uses. Its name refers to where Hopkins lived when he filled its pages. Having been assigned to teach classics at Trinity College in Dublin, Hopkins quickly felt himself overloaded with the tasks of grading student examinations (of which he had hundreds upon hundreds to plod through), leaving him no time for his own pursuits. “I am in Ireland now; now I am at a third / Remove,” he writes in the despair of a dark sonnet.51 “Sibyl’s Leaves” appears in the middle of a sequence of ten pages on which Hopkins tabulates his marks and grades for the students, a fact that reinforces those aspects of the poem that bear on computation, final assessment, and the sense of spiritual accounting (figure 3.1). Leslie Higgins, editor of the Dublin Notebook, explains that it represents a stark

Figure 3.1  A page showing Gerard Manley Hopkins’s grading tabulations from the Dublin Notebook (Folio 10v). Reproduced by courtesy of the Master and community of Campion Hall, Oxford.

122

CHAPTER 3

break with all the work that came before. She writes that the “compositional protocols he had formerly lived by no longer obtained” and that “the cumulative effect of its fragmentary parts . . . embodies Hopkins’s experience of extreme dislocation” during his years spent in Dublin.52 I include a discussion of it here precisely because it shows how removed Hopkins had become from his earlier styles of notework that used the same kind of paper substrate. When considered in its manuscript context, “Sibyl’s Leaves” reflects the negation of the earlier notebook writings even more pointedly. The “leaves” of the title invoke both classical and early Christian sources. In addition to the poem and its many calculations, the Dublin Notebook contains references to the Aeneid that reveal at least one of the sources of the poem. In Book 6 of that epic, the Cumaean Sibyl delivers prophecies to Aeneas, who calls upon her: “O sacred maid, inspir’d to see / Th’ event of things in dark futurity” (100–­101). The Sibyl inscribes her prophecies on leaves that are liable to be scattered and lost. Aeneas asks her not to do this: “commit not thy prophetic mind / To flitting leaves, the sport of ev’ry wind, / Lest they disperse in air our empty fate” (116–­18.)53 The reference to leaves, here a tool for writing, harkens back to both the medium and the content of A1–­A5, in which Hopkins studied the patterns of oak leaves in particular (“I have learned the law of the oak-­leaves”).54 Yet here these scattered leaves have no pattern to reveal in themselves, and simply convey messages inscribed upon them. In the simplest sense, the reference to the Sybil underlines the prophetic, oracular nature of the speaker’s language, spelling out bleak events yet to come. In a more oblique way, the reference to the Sibyl invokes the image of a writer whose piecemeal jottings could blow away in the wind, never to be reconstructed or presented to reading eyes. When it comes to the leaves in question here, the allusion to this scene of The Aeneid is significant. Yet of course the allusions are multiple. There exists a collection of texts known as “The Sibylline Oracles,” which were important for Early Church Fathers despite their apocryphal and fragmented state, and with which Hopkins would likely have been familiar given his extensive theological training. A hodgepodge of Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Roman mythologies rendered in Greek hexameters, these

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

texts offer commentaries and retellings of Biblical episodes, and in addition reflect revelations of the end times. The scholar Emil Schürer refers to it as a “chaotic wilderness,” and an “arbitrary collections of fragments” out of which “[e]very reader and writer allowed himself to complete what existed after his own pleasure, and to arrange the scattered papers now in one, now in an opposite manner.”55 While the texts held importance for some early Christian commentators, they were ultimately deemed too unreliable to be of theological utility. They are wildly dispersed, offering no coherent perspective. “Sibyl’s Leaves” seems to urge us at every turn to consider the Apocalypse as a bibliographic problem. Can fragmentary writings (whether the prophecies of the mythological Sibyl, the unincorporated and “chaotic” writings of the Sibylline Oracles, or Hopkins’s notebook writings) be fruitfully assembled? Or is it their fate to be burned away and left unintegrated? These two options take Hopkins as far as possible from the active deployment of writing as a collectively engaged process, presenting him instead as a man wretchedly anxious about where his words were headed and how they would be processed when they got there. There is no suggestion that scattershot writings or experiences could have meaningful value in themselves. Helen Vendler writes that “the metaphor that comes to mind for ‘Sibyl’s Leaves’ is that of a body disintegrating into ever more shapeless fragments as each part entropically comes to resemble every other fragmented member.”56 The poem does not remain ambiguous on the question of integration and assembly. It concludes that our experiences will be divided according to a binary assessment of their value, with all dappled variation snuffed out. The poems reflect a complex revision of the attitudes and dispositions found in the journals. They do not merely use or deploy the notes as raw materials, but rather unfold a metacommentary on the very relationship between incremental sensory experiences, their documentation, and the ultimate destination of such documents. In this eschatology, human and nonhuman agents lose their capacity to produce significant connections and relations, and their experiences are always already sorted on divine scales. Miller argues that these late sonnets register a total withdrawal

123

124

CHAPTER 3

from God and isolation from the divine energy that had sustained Hopkins in other moments of his life. These are poems of dissolution, he writes, of “chaos” wherein “every self will be blurred, smeared, inextricably mixed in the other selves.” In the extremity of his isolation, the self “discovers that far from sufficient to itself, it is, in its isolation, entirely impotent, as impotent as a eunuch . . . where time has lengthened out into an endless succession of empty moments.”57 What had been meaningful (“a billion / Times told lovelier”) becomes repetitive and empty, an indistinct smear. This involves a great sacrifice, for it is not only our experiences as such that lose their potency, but our capacity to link these experiences together in ways that create unexpected and fruitful connections between the natural world, built environments, and the fabric of our own lives. This is not, then, the “disappearance of God” as Miller would have it, but rather Hopkins’s reanimation of Him as the remote master of the world’s information, the sovereign interpreter of our experiences but who remains unavailable for questioning. “Sibyl’s Leaves” is densely packed with sonic effects. Like its companion poem, “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and On the Comforts of the Resurrection,” it is intensely manic, crammed to bursting with eccentric words composing an emotional landscape at once solemn and wild. Each of these poems contains nearly double the number of syllables found in a conventional English sonnet. In a letter Hopkins called one “the longest sonnet ever made.”58 Yet for all the wild sprawl of the poems, the outriding feet spilling over the edges of the lines, their conclusions ultimately point to the foreclosure of this excess rather than a praise of it. The teleological drive of the poems runs against their sonic liberty and superfluity, finally reducing everything into “two spools” in the case of “Sibyl’s Leaves.” Sprung rhythm, acting to accommodate and even encourage multiplicity and redundancy, is rebuffed by the terminal mythology closing it all down. The more intensely Hopkins localizes the effects of inscape within the play of language, the greater his anxiety about the nature and remit of that play. The effect may be aesthetically ravishing, but this play of beauty is enclosed, sealed off, rather than being distributed in the world at large where this work of formation may encompass objects beyond sounds.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND MICROSOCIAL FORM

The evidence suggests that Hopkins did not keep journals with the secret intention of one day returning to the scene of life as a poet, ready to put his archive of observations to work in aesthetic objects. Taking the notes as notes allows us to see his activities of collection and documentation as expressive writing practices—­not the purview of God alone but locally accomplished efforts to trace a multiplicity of relations between worldly actors, efforts that in turn contribute to the dynamism of those relations. For Hopkins, sociality refers to the fleeting conjunctions of human and nonhuman actors, something achieved through slow descriptions of the ephemeral interactions of such agents, without projecting purposes for them or fantasizing their being subsumed in a deus ex machina. Rather than the sped-­up, teleological drive in “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” or the intensely specific individualism represented in the earlier ecstatic poems, the notebooks, with their seemingly aimless reports of oak leaves and hot chocolate foam, model a form of social being based on incremental description and atomistic collision.

125

C H A P T E R 4 A C O M P U T E R P R O G R A M C A L L E D “ W I L D E ”

detractors of Oscar Wilde who find his quips and barbs anything but witty. Consider this anonymous review from 1891, which casts Wildean style as a mechanical proliferation of short text that incorporates and compresses every man into the same format: T H E R E H A V E A LW AY S B E E N

Are they all hand-­made, these quaint perversions of the obvious? Are they not turned out by machinery at so much the gross? May we not suspect them to be the result of a facile formula, a process of word-­ shuffling, rather than of genuine insight into the facts of art and life? M. Jules Lemaître has given an ingenious recipe—­“Every Man his own Larochefoucauld” he might have called it—­by which the veriest dullard can concoct epigrammatic maxims in any quantity.1

A hundred and twenty-­one years later, an update of the critique appears in Gary Saul Morson’s The Long and the Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel. “Sometimes it seems there is a computer program called ‘Wilde,’” he writes, 126

A COMPUTER PROGRAM CALLED “WILDE”

that manufactures “useless twits who have nothing better to do than sound like Wilde.”2 The idea of a system that urges people to produce punchy verbal capsules, or even generates them robotically without the intervention of those people, is only too familiar to readers and writers in the twenty-­first century. Thus it has become something of a cliché to associate Wilde with new media and to view him as a kind of ancestral Tweeter. Twitter is filled with various “Oscar Wilde” avatars, rehashing and remixing his aphorisms, which together represent one attempt to connect the genre of the Tweet to historical stylistic precedents. It is curious that Wilde’s admirers tend to associate him with personal expression, individualism, and the neoromantic elevation of imagination and artifice, while the skeptics mentioned here construe him as a homogenizing force churning everyone’s language into the same syrup. His critics perceive within his work something contagious and (yes) viral that attracts fans by charming them into taking similar poses and attitudes. As I’ll examine in some detail in the last part of this chapter, Wilde himself dramatizes these fears in The Picture of Dorian Gray, where it is Lord Henry’s epigrammatic style itself, his frolicking language, that pushes Dorian into wishing that he could remain forever young. Wilde’s style poses a problem for Morson and others because it dresses witticism in the philosophical clothing of aphorism. In many ways Wilde collapses the distinction between those forms, along with epigram, adage, paradox, and slogan, a slippage that readers will notice has already crept into these opening paragraphs. Some anthologists, such as Louis Kronenberger and W. H. Auden, include Wilde in their collections of aphorists even as they draw a firm line between aphorism and epigram, distinguishing these using the language of social class: An epigram need only be true of a single case . . . for example, Foxhunting is the pursuit of the uneatable by the unspeakable, which is an admirable remark when made in a country house in the Shires, but a cheap one if addressed to a society of intellectuals who have never known the pleasures of hunting. An aphorism, on the other hand, must convince every reader that it is either universally true or true of every member of the class to which it refers, irrespective of the reader’s convictions . . . Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing.3

127

128

CHAPTER 4

Kronenberger and Auden invite Wilde into the elite company of aphorists, including twenty-­five of his lines. The language in this passage invokes social class, although in confusing ways. If epigram is the domain of fox hunters, and aphorism that of scholars, how is it aphorism that is “essentially aristocratic”? M. J. Cohen, by contrast, introducing The Penguin Dictionary of Epigrams, claims Wilde as “the emperor of the epigram” and essentially divides the history of its practitioners into those who come before and those who come after him.4 Indeed, Wilde seems quite happy to use the different terms interchangeably, titling one publication “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” and another, in the same year, “Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-­Educated.” His other works self-­reflexively refer to aphorism, epigram, or paradox. In the Intentions volume, which includes the dialogues “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist,” Wilde refers to “aphorism” twice, “epigram” not at all, and “phrase” ten times. This suggests that he was less interested in demarcating the difference between these terms than he was in experimenting with the effects of enclosed, quotable sentences. While the last chapter considered one of the most reclusive Victorians, Gerard Manley Hopkins, this one turns to one of the most extroverted. However different these writers are, they both use notework to project collectives in the form of documentary fragments. For before Wilde’s verbal capsules assumed their recognizable shape, he had developed a distinct style of notework at Oxford, using it not for self-­promotion and the subversion of bourgeois hypocrisy but as a medium for scholarly communication in which facts and even entire bodies of academic knowledge were rendered as a community of actors in ludic interaction. His Oxford notebooks will be the focus of this chapter, specifically the hitherto unpublished “Notebook on Philosophy,” as well as the better-­known “Commonplace Book” and “Notebook Kept at Oxford.” Together these suggest a way of understanding the social life of the note, not as a solipsistic retreat into the collection of pleasurable verbal baubles but as an attempt to come to terms with a massive influx of competing and contradictory information at Victorian Oxford in the nineteenth century. Wilde transforms this overloaded scene of information into something like a methodological gala, where data particular to

A COMPUTER PROGRAM CALLED “WILDE”

various disciplines commingle and communicate on the same page. In his three-­hundred-­page “Notebook on Philosophy,” documentation becomes a way of styling information in a nonhierarchical field. This notebook also reveals an unexpected source for this mode of inquiry—­Francis Bacon—­ whose works were among those recent additions to the Oxford Greats curriculum and whose theory of aphorism as a technology of social notation held out a utopian promise explicitly recognized by Wilde. One of my goals here, then, is to use Wilde’s notebooks to place him more firmly in the tradition of “elite” aphoristic technique represented by Bacon, the Jena Romantics, and the nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century writers who followed. Yet at the same time, I aim to show that these utopian aspirations for aphoristic discourse are crossed with darker, insidious possibilities. The rhythm of scholarly communication that we find in Wilde’s notebooks undergoes a dystopian subversion in Dorian Gray, where epigrammatic wit of the fox-­hunting variety takes over. In other words, mobility, wit, and self-­promotion supplant the values of collective inquiry. Dorian Gray presents one narrative of what happens when notes go public. While the novel’s exploration of the dark side of aestheticism is well known, what may be less obvious is the way that epigrammatic speech provides the tempo of Dorian’s pleasure-­seeking excursions. It is not simply his own beautiful portrait that impels him to make a fatal wish: it is this portrait as mediated by Lord Henry’s witticisms and the plotless drift of the mysterious “yellow book” that he gives to the boy. I read Dorian Gray as a Gothic reaction against fragmentary media of the sort we are more used to seeing in twenty-­first-­century narratives, for example in television shows such as Dark Mirror. Living like an aimless and chaotic collection of random writings, Dorian treats pieces of information as he does accessories and jewelry, as mere ornaments. In contrast to the fun phrases that Wilde delivers in the Intentions dialogues or his theatrical comedies, his novel takes a surprisingly conservative and prescient position with regard to epigrammatic language. This chapter is thus the most Gothic in the book, as it considers the anxieties that attend the public circulation of fragments. It also suggests an uncomfortable proximity between a felicitous genre of scholarly inquiry—­aphorism as social notation—­and the vanities of consumerism.

129

130

CHAPTER 4

The Oxford Notebooks

The notebooks Wilde kept at Oxford between 1874 and 1878 have long been useful to those seeking to understand his familiarity with the works of different philosophers and scientists from the classical and modern traditions.5 We have three major manuscripts from this period: the “Commonplace Book,” the “Notebook Kept at Oxford,” and the “Notebook on Philosophy.”6 These documents all reflect Wilde’s studies with the Literae Humaniores (also known as “Greats”) curriculum, which one commentator called “one of the noblest monuments of Victorian education,” a paradigmatic classical program.7 Yet at the time that Wilde entered Oxford it was undergoing significant curricular change and institutional uncertainty. The poet and critic F. T. Palgrave referred to the years around 1870 as a “plastic period” when “radical changes are possible.”8 Greats, which began in 1800 with a strictly philological, classical focus, “was increasingly supplemented by the reading of modern books.”9 Another major trend (with important internal resistances) was a turn away from religious education and toward a secularized curriculum.10 While Linda Dowling argues that Wilde’s notebooks anticipate the “personae and that movement of free play which was so brilliantly to characterize the movement of his critical dialogues,” I would suggest that their “free play” also reflects the state of Greats at this moment, with its fluctuating content, porous boundaries and uncertain purposes.11 The recent surge of scholarly interest in historical commonplace books has yet to extend to the notational practices of Victorian Oxford directly, yet scholars such as Jillian Hess have made it clear that such information structures were still relevant well into the nineteenth century.12 An 1860 guidebook for students of Greats (authored by one Montagu Burrows) gives some clues as to the value that was placed on notation. Burrows explains the need for good notes: “We want something which we can grasp at once, yet something that will give us all we care to reproduce.” Using the tools of “abstract,” “summary,” and “epitomizing,” the good note-­taker will produce cogent encapsulations of texts and arguments and create opportunities for connection and association. The “management of the space left for remarks” on this or that text is equally crucial, and Burrows

A COMPUTER PROGRAM CALLED “WILDE”

calls for a lot of empty space to be left on facing pages and around the quotations in order to include “in the briefest form everything bearing on the abstract which we have been able to extract from our other sources of information.” In this way an “atmosphere of light” will surround the different epitomes. While these notebooks are supposedly directed toward the end of sitting the examinations, Burrows emphasizes that they may in fact be the true outcome of one’s education: “the note-­book remains when the examination is over” as a “true friend” and “a library in itself.”13 In other words, the notebook serves as an end in itself beyond the role it plays in helping students study. Wilde’s talent for stylish encapsulation looks very different when we consider it in the context of nineteenth-­century Oxford rather than the literary marketplace. To read the notebooks in this light suggests that Wilde employed notation as a medium for processing information in a state of methodological uncertainty—­Literae Humaniores in the 1870s—­and that Wilde’s aphoristic style represented a suitable and even an exemplary reflection of his educational situation, rather than any quixotic subversion of conventions. The notebook, with its aphoristic fragments, becomes a medium for responding to a confusion of methodological approaches and an uncertain future for liberal education. Wilde maintains a skeptical distance from his materials while enabling information from vastly different sources to assemble. While Dorian Gray, as we’ll see below, treats the circulation of verbal capsules as an antisocial and “inverted” attitude to information, the notebooks imagine sociality itself as a documentary event.14 They socialize data by containing information in axioms, commonplaces, and summaries and encouraging inflections and dialogue between them. Facts and quotations keep their distinctiveness while conversing, alongside many small drawings of actual faces, which are rampant in the Trinity College Notebook (from Wilde’s Dublin adolescence) but attenuate as verbal information takes over at Oxford.15 The “Notebook on Philosophy” comments on its own form: “We can extricate ourselves from details: summarize our knowledge. We can abbreviate our thinking: we think in short hand. and can transmit our knowledge in a portable sense.”16 The “Commonplace Book,” with its myriad headings, casts a wide net over

131

132

CHAPTER 4

different subjects: Metre; Thought; Nonconformists; Metaphysics; Whistler; Future of Science; Sociology; Method; The Protoplasmic Hierarchy; Law; English Thought from Bacon; Slavery; Agriculture; Thought: like Digestion. Most commonplace books exhibit eclecticism, but noteworthy here is the way in which entire methods or disciplines (metaphysics, law, agriculture, science) are themselves epitomized, vying for space with “Whistler” or other categories. Method itself comes under scrutiny, and the topic recurs throughout the “Notebook on Philosophy.” Wilde values the inclusion of so much disparate information in one space over the exhaustion of one subject.17 Dowling describes Wilde’s talent for translating “the conceptual language of one author or thinker into the intellectual system of another—­so Darwin is brought to bear on Hegel, and Plato is made to confront Herbert Spencer.”18 Yet the singularity of Wilde’s notational ability has less to do with the eclecticism of the subject matter (again, a feature of the curriculum at this time) and more to do with revealing the imbrication of these materials. Bits of language reach out from their original context to confer with others across vast stretches of time, or across disciplinary protocols. Wilde traces commonalities between the paradoxes of different fields, for example when he compares features of chemistry with criminology: “Matter often behaves paradoxically and so does mind: that two cold liquids mixed together should become boiling hot, is as strange as the fact that severe laws do not decrease crime.” He attends to methodological differentiation while simultaneously refusing to respect it: “The division of Labour, the differentiation of function, the evolution of organisms can be illustrated from History as clearly as from the microscope.” Humour spills over, as under the heading ‘Survival of Fittest in thought’ he writes “Nature kills off all those who do not believe in the Uniformity of Nature and the Law of Causation.” Considerations of time and space exert a minimal impact on Wilde’s thought, thus Euripides “perhaps of all the Greeks had the most share of the modern vague spiritualistic tendency—­the tendency of Werther, and Rene, and Faust—­the morbid analyzing faculty.” He represents the “Furies of Orestes . . . with a sort of Pre-­Raphaelite frankness of detail.”19

A COMPUTER PROGRAM CALLED “WILDE”

In the “Notebook on Philosophy,” Wilde shows how collection and notation counteract methodological rigidity, particularly that of the human sciences.20 He is convinced that any one school of thought, discipline, or method is insufficient in trying to account for the world. He seeks a rotation of disciplinary knowledge. Consider, for instance, the nearly illegible first page of the notebook: Philosophy passes into religion because it cannot answer its own question: the highest truth of philosophy is rational and self conscious poetry, the highest poetry is natural and unconscious philosophy.21 (figure 4.1)

The first sentence of the notebook is an aphoristic statement calling our attention to the limits of any single method, whether merely critical (philosophy), theological (religion), or aesthetic (poetry). This thought appears in almost exactly the same form in the “Commonplace Book” under the heading “Mysticism.”22 Aphoristic notation serves pluralist ends, as it

Figure 4.1  The first entry in Wilde’s “Notebook on Philosophy.” The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

133

134

CHAPTER 4

gathers numerous viewpoints in the same space in the manner of a series of frames or lenses that can be traded out at will. In arguing that we rethink Wilde’s Oxford writings as pluralistic assemblages of “social” notes, I am veering away from explanations based on “social context” and “social factors” and toward Bruno Latour’s redefinition of the social as “a trail of associations between heterogeneous elements,” which I began to describe in its incipient forms in the previous chapter.23 Over the past decade, Latour has challenged uses of the word “social” that designate a specific domain within which human actions proceed and by appeal to which those actions can be exhaustively explained. This has been the dominant strategy of critique in the social sciences and humanities for decades, he argues, and it has become “useless,” because of changes in strategy on the side of the right and smug stagnation on the left. The target of critique has moved, or at least Latour thinks it should move. Critics arrogate to themselves exclusive powers of demystification and explanation, guaranteeing their own knowingness while projecting a plenum of “normal” people “out there” who toil away in ignorance of the true social forces that determine every aspect of their life and being, forces that only “we” can see. Critics should, Latour argues, avoid reproducing robotic gestures of demystification ad infinitum. In language that could have been drawn from “The Critic as Artist,” he suggests instead that “the critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather.”24 Here, criticism sounds like keeping a notebook or a scrapbook, and Latour invokes the notebook as a trope for the kinds of “risky” scholarship he values.25 Wilde’s notes draw together distinct kinds of information in a space of socialization.26 Certainly Wilde toys with lines of propriety. Boundaries have been crossed or fiddled with. Members of the audience are clutching their pearls or rolling their eyes. And yet a feature of Wilde’s work that is worth attending to—­evident in the handwritten apparatus of the notebook—­is that numerous actors are welcome in the game, and that no single member of the group will control the movements of the others.

A COMPUTER PROGRAM CALLED “WILDE”

Indeed, Wilde anticipates many of the critiques that Garfinkel and Latour would make of large-­scale sociological explanation that we surveyed in the last chapter. He is particularly distressed by some of the totalizing claims of social scientific methodology, in a manner that recalls Garfinkel’s hesitations in the face of macro-­sociological analytics. Any attempt to exhaustively explain the social sphere leaves many phenomena unaccounted for: “in fact the question is what does social science not include,” he writes. When Latour—­himself a sociologist—­criticizes accounts of the “social” that continually reproduce identical interpretations, he is rehearsing an argument Wilde grasped a long time ago: “The danger of thought is to imagine too great a correspondence between our abstract notions got by analysis and externalities: ‘subject and object’ for instance, ‘cause and effect,’ ‘form and matter’: we can look at a thing in many different ways.”27 What Wilde is after, instead, is a way of allowing all the individual actors (pieces of information) to retain their integrity, which enables association rather than terminal explanation. This atomic view of information is something he considers in the notebooks, namely in his discussion of the relationship between small “bits” or “units” (parts) and the way they do or do not find resolution in theories (wholes). Thus “history is the account of the mutual attraction and repulsion of primitive political atoms. The atomic theory is a valuable hypothesis not merely in physics but in politics as well.” Under the heading “Method” he paraphrases Herbert Spencer on this score: “Every aggregate of units is determined by the properties of its units. man is the unit of society.”28 The notebook thus dramatizes this political possibility by treating notes as so many citizens of a collective, and where information of a potentially useful quality sits amidst more futile tangents, all brought into the web of Wilde’s spidery handwriting. There are next to no cross-­outs in these notebooks, another fact that helps to distinguish their form from manuscripts and drafts intended for wider publication: misspellings and malapropisms stay just where they are, leading one to wonder how many times Wilde was thinking of something other than what he wrote down. Such is the condition of the inquiries underway in these volumes, which avoid “the conscious straining after a result” and can accommodate even

135

136

CHAPTER 4

those inert bits of organic matter that so captivated Darwin: “Useless Organs: Mole’s eyes: the appendix veriformis in man and the external of the human ear• The navicula of the oyster which causes the extraordinary mortality among young oysters.”29 Units of error or biological sterility remain a part of the “organism,” not in the sense of being absent presences in the manner of a Derridean trace, but simply by taking up as much space on the page as other kinds of material. In their edition of the “Commonplace Book” and the “Notebook Kept at Oxford,” Philip K. Smith and Michael Helfand advance the claim that these documents represent a synthesis of Victorian evolutionary thought and philosophical idealism: the notes seek to reconcile Spencer and Hegel. Rather than dismissing the notebooks “as an interesting jumble of seemingly unrelated entries,” they “argue that they have coherence and importance within the historical context of the philosophical, scientific, and literary movements that Wilde followed at the time.”30 What this reading misses, however, is the potential that lies in the “interesting jumble” as an interesting jumble, that is a collection of individuals and face-­offs in which extraction, quotation, and aphoristic summary work to assemble disparate materials in one space of contemplation. Perhaps “interesting” is itself a better aesthetic category than “beautiful” for discussing the notes; as Sianne Ngai describes it, the interesting creates relays “between affect-­based judgment and concept-­based explanation in a manner that binds heterogeneous agencies together and enables movement across disciplinary domains.”31 Smith and Helfand make Wilde a kind of Casaubon grasping for The Key to All Mythologies. I think that for Wilde, the notes create provisional and temporary alliances between different methods and different historical periods, an effect achieved by the mediation of scholarly materials into small, mobile bits. Wilde’s second-­order method—­the distillation of available knowledge into bounded segments—­imbues pieces of information with the individualistic potential he normally reserves for people in “The Soul of Man,” De Profundis, and his other critical writings. Usually we think of Wilde as being hostile to unassembled bits of data, viewing his entire project as a deflation of the Victorian “fact,” a position forcefully articulated by Vivian

A COMPUTER PROGRAM CALLED “WILDE”

in “The Decay of Lying”: “Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.” The argument holds that “facts” are particles of narrowly utilitarian thinking put to the service of an impoverished realism. “Don’t degrade me into the position of giving you useful information,” says Gilbert in “The Critic as Artist.” At the same time, Wilde wants to secure for human individuals the right to “useless” development, to unique elaboration of personality free from labor. Such is the essence of Wilde’s anarcho-­socialist utopia defined in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”: “The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.”32 In Wilde’s utopia people are not beholden to the mundane facts of life, nor are they reduced to being facts themselves, subordinated to the social sciences. Instead their basic needs are met, allowing them to subordinate reality to their own autotelic purposes: they can become works of art, beautiful objects in a collection rather than useful cogs in a system. In his notes, information assembles in an analogous manner. His treatment of information models the human community he wishes to call into being, that is, it is a virtual realization of a collection of individuals. His famous aphorism, “it is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information,” may be a more social claim than we realize.33 At an historical moment when the methodologies available to the Oxford undergraduate were compounding rapidly, and when the strength of traditional classical education was beginning to wane, Wilde uses his notes to demonstrate how the sheer socialization of data from vastly different spheres overtakes the evidential functions it performs for any single system of knowledge. The “Notebook on Philosophy” generates aphorisms that reference and also dramatize this process: So the more we discover the emptier are our definitions34 In fact the qualifications are so numerous they destroy the rules35 Society marches on and leaves definitions high and dry36

Wilde’s critique of method surveys and summarizes a wide range of authors: Plato, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Herbert Spencer are among those directly

137

138

CHAPTER 4

confronted. In one of the recent additions to the Greats curriculum, however, Wilde finds a surprising ally who helps him to imagine processing information in such a way as to evade the deductive force of existing methods, and who furthermore theorizes the use of a felicitous medium (rather than a method in the traditional sense) in which social notation may transpire. Bacon

While entries on Aristotle and Plato occupy the most space in the “Notebook on Philosophy,” Francis Bacon is a close third. Benjamin Jowett insisted upon adding the Novum Organum (New Method) (1620) to the Greats curriculum as a part of the process of modernization and secularization described above.37 Bacon uses aphorism as a kind of scholarly anti-­method, the purpose of which is to loosen the hold of existing methodological dogmas and enable an experimental, inductive approach to knowledge. Certainly Wilde’s sources for aphorism are myriad. Jowett’s enthusiasm for pre-­Socratic fragments and aphorisms at this time may have directed Wilde toward the writings of Heraclitus and other ancient practitioners of the form.38 We also know that his witty locutions owe much to the modern examples of La Rochefoucauld, Samuel Johnson, George Meredith, and Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée).39 The inclusion of so much Baconian material in Wilde’s notebooks, however (he copies out thirty aphorisms from the Novum Organum and references Bacon’s theories continually) allows us to understand his aphoristic style in a new light, which is to say more closely in dialogue with the tradition of aphoristic writing in philosophy. Without diminishing the influence that other aphorists and epigrammatists undoubtedly exerted on him, the Baconian connection allows us to consider Wilde’s epigrammatic production as a pragmatic form of informational assembly, in which distinctions between utility and inutility have yet to be made, and where the social life of information becomes critical to its development. Bacon presents the Novum Organum “not in the form of a regular treatise, but digested, in summary form, into aphorisms.”40 Aphorism is Bacon’s instrument for allowing information to be “noted” elegantly and memorably while retaining a sense of play and mystery. He did not just write aphorisms,

A COMPUTER PROGRAM CALLED “WILDE”

but also theorized the form by showing how it competes nimbly with the reigning but outmoded methods of scholasticism. The general trend of learned writing, as Bacon observes in The Advancement of Learning (1605), tends toward the prolix: “it hath been too much taken into custom, out of a few axioms or observations upon any subject, to make a solemn and formal art, filling it with some discourses, and illustrating it with examples, and digesting it into a sensible Method.”41 The danger of “method” is that it creates a false impression of completeness and perfection that does not in actuality exist. This leads to idleness on the part of students and scholars, who have no need to investigate or question the dominant orthodoxies because these “are taught as complete and long perfected in all their parts.”42 Aphorism, by contrast, more honestly represents the fragmented, piecemeal way in which the world and its knowers interact: “particulars, being dispersed, do best agree with dispersed directions.” Bacon proceeds by “dispersal” because it encourages original and unexpected encounters. All the usual modes of argument, exegesis, and analysis are suspended so that listeners and readers can ponder statements economically. When it comes to aphorism, “discourse of illustration is cut off: recitals of examples are cut off; discourse of connection and order is cut off; descriptions of practice are cut off. So there remaineth nothing to fill the Aphorisms but some good quantity of observation.” Crucial here is the way in which methodological commitments can be loosened by privileging an atomic approach to information: the aphorism, a social note, becomes the most critical form of writing because it does not pretend to make more than a small demand on our time and attention. Though it may create an impression of enclosure and boundedness, and its content may be explosive and memorable, it nevertheless reaches out to be assembled with others like it, not in a story or treatise but in a notebook of similar statements. Because, for Bacon, it accurately reflects the always-­incomplete status of knowledge, it is a privileged way of pursuing such knowledge, one that is much more playful, spontaneous, and socially engaged than the available desiccated protocols. The form is participatory: “Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest.”43

139

140

CHAPTER 4

Aphorism combats the fantasy of total representation and systematic closure (in this case a fantasy perpetrated by obsolescent organs of knowledge) by encouraging a larger swathe of the population to introduce their own observations into the fold: to take notes together, in other words. Bacon interested nineteenth-­century scholars at Oxford and Cambridge less for his scientific innovations than for his historical and stylistic importance. While the Victorian interpreters William Stanley Jevons and William Whewell criticized the inductive method as “the blind heaping up of observed facts” and “a form of scientific bookkeeping,”44 Pater called Bacon’s prose “a coloured thing” and cited it as an example of style that need not be “confined to merely practical purposes.”45 Certainly Wilde shares the view that Bacon’s contributions to science were less significant than his contribution to literary style. He is the only thinker in Wilde’s notebooks explicitly hailed as an aphorist or epigrammatist—­and Wilde uses these terms interchangeably when referring to his writings. Minimizing Bacon’s “invention” of the inductive method, Wilde elevates his other contributions, in particular “his epigrams.”46 Quietly uttered at the end of the “Notebook on Philosophy” (which lay dormant in a private collection until it was purchased by the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in 2004), we find an additional and unlikely dimension of Wilde’s style, one that takes us back to the beginnings of a scientific tradition he ostensibly disavows. The point is not that Wilde straightforwardly agrees or disagrees with Bacon’s philosophical arguments. The transmission is stylistic, ethical, and also political. As Wilde writes in the “Commonplace Book,” “the rise of inductive philosophies is democratic.”47 His recognition of Bacon’s epigrammatic innovations leads directly into a reference to Cowley’s “Ode to the Royal Society,” a poem that heralds Bacon as a prophet leading British culture toward utopian possibilities: Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last, The barren wilderness he past, Did on the very border stand Of the blest promis’d land, And from the mountain’s top of his exalted wit Saw it himself, and shew’d us it.48

A COMPUTER PROGRAM CALLED “WILDE”

Wilde associates Bacon’s epigrams—­his preference for short, brief expressions—­with anticipatory promise, the faint possibility of a better world. Engaging questions of utility, contemplation, inactivity, and the proper remit of knowledge, Wilde’s collection of Bacon’s words anticipates many of his own sparkling writings bearing on similar subjects. This offers us a new context for thinking through Wilde’s celebration of uselessness, apparent in the aphorisms “all art is quite useless” and “it is a very sad thing that there is so little useless information nowadays.”49 We move away from the disinterested pleasures of aestheticism (articulated by Kant and rehearsed in the French context by authors such as Théophile Gautier) and toward the question of inquiry, the media best suited to it, and the social possibilities these make available. The notebooks and the collections of epigrams analogize social assembly and disassembly simultaneously; they present communities of individuals harboring contrasting and dissenting viewpoints that vie for attention. While Horkheimer and Adorno begin The Dialectic of Enlightenment with a critique of Bacon’s instrumental reason,50 Bacon actually resists a simplistically utilitarian view of knowledge: “although our ultimate aim is works and the active part of science, still we wait for harvest time and do not try to reap moss and the crop while it is still green.” In a paradox that surely captured Wilde’s imagination, Bacon recognizes the pragmatism of supposedly useless pursuits: “the hope of further progress in the sciences will be well founded only when natural history shall acquire and accumulate many experiments which in themselves are of no use.”51 Wilde translates and paraphrases such passages in the “Notebook on Philosophy,” imagining science as a path to beautiful, useless experience (figure 4.2). For example, Aphorism 81 of the Novum Organum: 81. [“The true and legitimate goal of the sciences is to endow human life with new discoveries and resources”] yet cf. [“we must look for illuminating, not profitable, experiments”]52

Wilde finds excerpts that emphasize the vital inactivity that underlies proper scientific meditations:

141

142

CHAPTER 4

80. Bacon complains that natural philosophy has never found “cavantem hominem” [an empty space for man]: necessity for σχολη [rest, leisure] for the philosopher53

Bacon viewed private contemplation as inferior to public discourse and the wide circulation of information. Yet a few pages later, Wilde contorts Bacon’s words to make his own point about the contemplative life: “the fact of it’s existence is the reason for its existence. Bacon’s scornful words are it’s glory—­Like a virgin consecrated to God it bears no fruit. its duty is to comprehend the world not make it better.”54 Contemplation and comprehension are not, in Wilde’s view, a means of making the world a better place. The forms of experiment and inquiry advocated by Bacon should not be confused with social activism or political intervention on their own (what Wilde will eventually decry as “philanthropy”). However, this does not mean that the forms of contemplation Wilde values should be taken as antisocial refusals directed to his own navel. Instead, they represent a utopian desire in which information and people may assemble without singular, overarching purposes.

Figure 4.2  Bacon’s aphorisms in Wilde’s hand from the “Notebook on Philosophy.” The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

A COMPUTER PROGRAM CALLED “WILDE”

A desire for pluralist and nonsystematic thinking, along with its democratic subtexts, will motivate the use of aphorism by myriad Romantics two centuries after Bacon. In the Athenaeum journal, for example, Friedrich Schlegel uses the form of the fragmentary aphorism to elevate particular observations at the same time as he intuits the possibility of a unifying principle binding them together. Novalis also participated in what he called “Encyclopedistics,” through which he gathered material germane to different fields of knowledge in the hope of breaking through to new syntheses. And the Zibaldone of Giacomo Leopardi attempts a similar synoptic and yet fragmentary assembly of information. However, such thinkers did not limit their convictions about aphorism to the pursuit of knowledge, but also viewed the form as a model for the kinds of organic democratic assembly they wished to see in the world. Schlegel, for example, argues that many works of supposed coherence “have less unity than a motley heap of ideas” that are bound together by “that free and equal fellowship of parts in which . . . the citizens of the perfect state will live at some future date.”55 The aphoristic fragments of the Athenaeum journal are frequently personified. The ideology of fragmentation supposes that in such ad hoc collections no single thesis imposes itself on all the others and forces them to fall in line with its pronouncements. Instead, such assemblies model what Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe and Jean-­Luc Nancy call “an ideal politics” where pieces of information retain their boundaries and do not have to subordinate themselves to a particular order, nor act as mere pieces of evidence in support of overarching arguments.56 On the one hand, aphorism engenders the ongoing circulation and recombination of information deployed in non-­systematic and nonhierarchical ways. On the other hand, each aphoristic capsule is under no obligation to speak in meaningful ways to those around it. While Bacon, for instance, sees aphorism promoting scientific dialogue and inclusivity, Schlegel famously pronounces that it should be “entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine.”57 It enables a utopian assembly of both information and people, and yet at the same time paradoxically encourages individualism, as any one aphorism or person can guard their boundaries behind a shield of quills.

143

144

CHAPTER 4

Little Dorians

Wilde explores the inverted, narcissistic threat of epigram in The Picture of Dorian Gray, where he tests what happens when the form moves from the Baconian technique of the notebook into the literary and journalistic marketplace of the late Victorian period. While his notes use the short phrase to reticulate diverse kinds of knowledge and the actors that produce it, his novel shows just how easily that technique can be used to seduce and manipulate auditors. The character of Dorian serves as a cautionary tale, warning the reader that the witty short phrase can lure audiences into a way of life aligned with its jumpy, non-­systematic rhythms but without the generative thought promised by the notes. Forgoing any sense of the pluralistic assembly of ideas, Dorian lands only on those that speak to his quest for eternal youth and ceaseless pleasure. The wit in Dorian Gray has long been seen as a negation, whether of decent discourse itself or the very idea that there could be norms of decency. It is Lord Henry who voices most of the epigrams in the novel. He is the novel’s principal dandy, almost nihilistic in his apparent celebration of artifice and pleasure. Ignoring the moral outcomes of the narrative and personifying the form of the epigram, the Victorian press took Lord Henry’s perspective as dominant, criticizing the novel for harboring “a mob of courtier epigrams . . . all forced to premature growth in the hothouse of a somewhat sickly fancy.” It is said to spill over with “effeminate frivolity” and “flippant philosophisings.” Punch magazine, responding to the “Preface” to the novel, called it “a literary flower-­bed” and “a little flower show,” calling to mind not only the sense of quotations as “flowers” but also the caricature of Wilde as a sunflower they had printed in their own pages.58 These responses maintain that Wilde’s style is not only mechanical, as the Pall Mall review suggests in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, but too feminine, glib, and superficial. As usual, homophobic language infuses critiques of Wilde’s style. Nearly a century later, criticism from both gay and queer studies would celebrate the errant Wildean epigram for respectively distinct reasons. The former camp associates it with the refusal of heterosexual masculine norms and the emergence of a modern gay male identity, while queer critics view

A COMPUTER PROGRAM CALLED “WILDE”

the ludic play of the epigram as a rejection of stable subjectivity altogether. Thus Jonathan Dollimore links the rhetorical dissidence of the epigram to Wilde’s sexual dissidence, while Christopher Craft construes Wilde as “writing against all essentialist notions of being, inverted or otherwise,” and refusing “to identify subjectivity and sexuality.”59 Whether traduced by phobic nineteenth-­century periodicals or celebrated by those recovering politically expedient models of queer life in the past, the style of Lord Henry in Dorian Gray signals for many readers an attitude of rejection and critique linked to Wilde’s own queer identity and the sexual subtexts of his novel. Reading beyond the encoded queer content, however, I wish to consider how the novel operates as an allegory for how we deal with information when it is presented in excessively charming and enticing ways. The relationship between Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray models the threat posed to society by epigrammatic style. While the question of art’s influence upon action remains, throughout the novel, a matter open to interpretation, it is usually the influence of the portrait that occupies a central place in such discussions. Yet there can be little doubt of the pernicious effect of Henry’s speech upon Dorian. It is Henry’s language, as much as the portrait, that throws Dorian into a vortex of self-­obsession, narcissism, over-­consumption to the point of absurdity, and ultimately his own death. Ensnared by Henry’s public performance, he in turn becomes a consumer of momentary pleasures, holding to no convictions beyond the pursuit of those pleasures and the deployment of his body and mind for the reception of sensation without analysis. The critical tendency is to see Basil Hallward’s painting of Dorian as the catalyst for the latter’s fatal wish, but Henry is a crucial part of the mechanism. He serves as a medium and a relay that binds Dorian to the portrait and encourages a sense of their identity with one another. Through epigrammatic enchantment he fixes Dorian as an object among objects, a product among products who does not exercise reflective or critical judgment but is simply made to consume and be consumed. Presented with Basil’s unfinished painting of Dorian, Lord Henry calls him “a Narcissus . . . a brainless, beautiful creature, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at.”60 While Dorian sits for the picture,

145

146

CHAPTER 4

suspended in the moment of his own representation, a feed of epigrammatic commentary flows from Lord Henry’s mouth into the boy’s ears. The following, infamous passage emphasizes individual feeling as a force to compete with the systems and laws that supposedly deaden the mind: The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr Gray, you yourself, with your rose-­red youth and your rose-­white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-­dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame—­ ‘Stop!’61

Dorian cuts him off. Henry’s words pile up after he issues his famous “temptation” epigram, reinforcing the idea, twisting commonplace logic and overwhelming Dorian’s psyche. The boy is left bewildered. The magic of Henry’s language penetrates Dorian and awakens him to new emotions and states of mind. Dorian latches onto the content of Henry’s words but also the flashy brevity with which they are delivered. Lord Henry speaks these “few words,” filling them with “willful paradox.” This leads Dorian into a state close to ecstasy, brought on by Henry’s cadence. Using free indirect style, Wilde figures the influence as a kind of music: Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute.62

Significant in this passage is the nearly perfect accord between the form and content of Henry’s speech. It is difficult to say whether the object that

A COMPUTER PROGRAM CALLED “WILDE”

entices Dorian is the one-­liner about temptation or the bite-­sized style of Henry’s language. The appeal to musical form in this scene helps us to understand the coordination of style and content in short phrases such as these. “All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music,” writes Walter Pater in his essay “The School of Giorgione.”63 Music is the paradigmatic art for Pater because it is best able to “obliterate” the difference between form and content upon which most other kinds of art depend. It is telling that Pater, who is not routinely epigrammatic, delivers this particular idea in such a quotable form. How does the line itself aspire to the condition of music, or obliterate the difference between form and content? To read it in this way brings to light the rhythmic and sonic elements that abide within the plural forms of epigram; they seem to affect the listener not only through the appeal of definitions and statements but because of the appealing cadence they offer and because they can pile up, tumble together, and encourage readers or listeners to skip from one to the next like musical notes rather than sentences following one another. The complete blurring of content with the medium through which it is delivered is both an aspiration and ideal of Victorian aestheticism. In Dorian Gray it is Lord Henry’s speech acts, even more than the portrait or other examples of art, that hew most closely to Pater’s own convictions about the unity of form and content. Lord Henry operates as a problematic medium that generates relays running between an art object and the thing it represents, encouraging the other characters to see them as interchangeable. This medium also conveys a particular content: to see life as nothing but a series of pleasures, sensations, and temptations to which we must yield momentarily before switching them out for others. The form of epigram enables this transaction between art and life upon which the entire novel (and much of Wilde’s critical output) is focused. In the notebooks, a degree of this aestheticization allows for the concise articulation of concepts drawn from different disciplines, allowing their points of linkage to shine forth. Yet in the novel the charms of this style become overwhelming and insidious, and the pleasure it affords subverts any value for inquiry. Certainly

147

148

CHAPTER 4

there is a queer subtext in this scene, and it is of course difficult to read it without understanding Lord Henry’s influence upon Dorian as sexual. Wilde makes this nearly explicit when he describes the “secret chord” that Henry touches in the boy that “had never been touched before” and is now “vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses.” Yet the real trouble lies in the form through which these ideas are transmitted. We cannot ignore the explicit content here (hedonism), but the pursuit of pleasure that Henry encourages is not exhausted by the sexual subtext. It directly encourages an aestheticized relationship to language and information and pushes Dorian to make his wish: “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old!”64 Even after this scene, Henry’s epigrammatic actions continue to fascinate Dorian. The insidious epigrammatic performance recurs at Aunt Agatha’s luncheon. This highly artificial situation further underscores the interest Wilde takes in the way that this form of speech circulates and works on the public at large. After light repartee, the group turns to the subject of paradox, the standard form of the Wildean epigram. One Mr Erskine says “the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-­rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them.”65 Lord Henry loves such acrobatics, and Wilde suspends the dialogue in order to describe his verbal action as though it were a physical one. His ideas take on power by a process of ornamentation and aesthetic manipulation: He played with the idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly as he went on soared into a philosophy, and Philosophy herself became young.66

In Dorian’s studio, Henry’s epigrams had encouraged him to make his wish to remain forever young. Here, Henry shows that his epigram can place philosophy itself into a state of adolescence. Wearing wings and covered in glitter, philosophical language becomes a circus performer. Philosophy, once an old woman, becomes young once more. “Facts fled before her like frightened forest things,” he writes.67 Henry’s wit appears to

A COMPUTER PROGRAM CALLED “WILDE”

keep knowledge spry, swinging on the trapeze and poised on the tightrope, yet in the process he diverges from any commitment to truth in favor of entertaining and spellbinding language. Wilde’s description of Henry’s language does resemble certain passages of the “Notebook on Philosophy” that we examined in the previous section, and his verbal cartwheels might be taken for the kind of invigoration of knowledge we have seen some commentators associate with aphorism. The novel form, however, construes these formal attributes as a threatening wildfire. For Dorian, these are not scholarly processes promising the genesis of new ways of thinking or new scientific discoveries, but instead license his disconnection from the social by translating everything into a swarm of atomized pleasures. While Henry speaks at Aunt Agatha’s luncheon, “Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one under a spell.”68 Once again the hypnotic effect of Lord Henry’s “few words” lulls Dorian into a dangerous stupor. His wish to trade places with the art object, mediated by these words, is also a desire for the kind of constant novelty and freshness of thought that Henry represents. He doesn’t just want to be art; he wants to live epigrammatically, forever in boyhood and always in play. Dorian Gray suggests that such wordplay can only result in overindulgence followed by death. Even Dorian himself becomes attuned to this possibility when Henry does not find beauty in the same places that he does. “You cut life to pieces with your epigrams!” Dorian exclaims. And again, later: “you would sacrifice anybody, Harry, for the sake of an epigram.”69 Dorian himself is the person who has been sacrificed on the altar of epigram, a fact of which he becomes aware at certain moments in the narrative. The gem-­like words had once enchanted and entranced him, but after a good deal of momentary bliss Dorian condemns the frothy epigrammatic rhythms of the novel as harshly as some of its reviewers did. The threat diagnosed by Dorian and the reviewers alike is that people will live recklessly in fleeting moments of narcissistic experience and consumption. Henry compounds his influence by introducing Dorian to a “poisonous book”: the mysterious “yellow book” that bodies forth the social anxieties stemming from the prospect of treating information as an aesthetic

149

150

CHAPTER 4

collectible rather than something to be used in the formation of a plot, theory, or the cultivation of new kinds of thinking. The book turns Dorian into a sequence of momentary phenomena: “It was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.”70 It is “a novel without a plot,” and it “fascinates” Dorian, goading him to indulge every passing whim. Indeed, it is unclear whether the novel lacks a plot or whether Dorian simply refuses to read for one, having been trained by Henry to extract only the most explosive fragments and to carry them out of their context in his “search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful.” Unable to sympathize with the parts of the book that relate to the hero’s downfall (he reads those parts “with an almost cruel joy”), Dorian brackets off other sections (such as chapter seven, bearing on the decadent Roman emperors) to reread again and again in a manner both fragmented and repetitive. The book propels Dorian to collect innumerable luxuries, not the least of which is information itself. Just as “he collected together from all parts of the world the strangest instruments that could be found,” he also inhabits intellectual theories temporarily and provisionally: “he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night.” Thus he studies Darwinism “for a season” for the “curious pleasure” it gives him, before moving on to the next juicy idea. The prose of the volume, to which the reader does not gain access, produces musical effects in line with Henry’s own style: “The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie.”71 The book transforms Dorian into a dream of hypnotizing, repetitive moments, a transformation that leads directly to his confrontation with Henry about the threat posed by his epigrammatic style and to the strange act of self-­destruction (which is a destruction of his own representative document—­the painting) that concludes the story. Early reviewers took the novel to be making an opposite point from the one suggested by its plot, which I take to be in accord rather than in

A COMPUTER PROGRAM CALLED “WILDE”

conflict with their conclusions. Both suggest that when epigrammatic language circulates freely in public, it loses whatever intellectual power it might have and proceeds to dismantle people’s capacity for clearheaded thinking. The fear is that it will produce a situation where, as the Pall Mall review suggests, every person will become their own La Rochefoucauld, robotically generating pithy sentences and carving up all received language into the same pieces. Everyone will begin to live as though they were in “a novel without a plot,” suspended in their own yellow book, withdrawing from a framework that would extend their human lives forward in a meaningful and progressive narrative. With its moral conclusiveness and narrative closure, the plot of Dorian Gray is among Wilde’s most conservative productions. However, when critics attacked the shorter, 1890 version of the novel published in Lippincott’s Magazine, Wilde responded by publishing a list of epigrams that would then be published as the famous “Preface” to the second and longer version of the novel. These enigmatic lines conclude with the famous pronouncement “all art is quite useless,” which in light of the notebook writings might be taken as a summary of Immanuel Kant’s concept of the disinterestedness of art advanced in the Critique of Judgment. Beside the preface, we have two additional lists of epigrams that Wilde published independent of any structuring plot or poem. These are “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” and “A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Overeducated.” By composing these lists of free-­floating epigrams, Wilde seems to be reaching for a kind of public discourse that preserves the playful but generative notational philosophical style that we saw in the notebooks, even as his most famous novel gives voice to the anxieties that attend the circulation of passages bouncing about in public without stable context.

151

This page intentionally left blank

C H A P T E R 5  U N R E C O V E R I N G V E R N O N L E E

Vernon Lee never produced tidy epigrams or aphorisms. Quotations from her works do not circulate as epigraphs for books and films, adorn mugs or T-­shirts, or punctuate arguments by witty critics. Yet like her more famous counterpart she valued the technology of the blank book and used it throughout her life. More than this, the note serves as a master trope for her writings as a whole. She often introduces or discusses her books as though they were simply another version of her rough sketches. “I am sitting, as I said, writing in my notebook,” she tells us in The Enchanted Woods.1 Her introduction to The Spirit of Rome uses a similar conceit: “I have found it impossible to use up, in what I have written upon places and their genius, these notes about Rome. I cannot focus Rome into any definite perspective, or see it in the colour of one mood.”2 Or introducing the philosophical dialogues in the volume Althea: “the various parts united or balanced, will give the impressions, fluctuating, consecutive, but consistent, which UNLIKE HER CONTEMPORARY OSCAR WILDE,

155

156

CHAPTER 5

I find in my note-­book on the subject.”3 Unlike many of the figures we have surveyed up to this point, Lee is unwilling to sacrifice the spontaneous qualities of note-­taking in the forms she offers up for public consumption. In general, she refuses to argue consistently or to synthesize her ideas in continuous structures. Rather than conscripting her notes into other genres, she takes social responsibility for producing them in all their embarrassing exuberance, often paying a price in the form of ridicule, dismissal, or mere neglect. In this chapter, I turn to a figure straddling the Victorian and Modernist periods in order to narrate the emergence in that moment of a new kind of author: the public note-­taker. Lee is more loyal (and self-­consciously so) to the capacities of the note as a genre in itself. Over the course of her career she develops a style and purpose for writing in ephemeral and incomplete strokes, deemphasizing their arrangement in works fitted for an enduring spot on the canonical shelf. As we’ll see in what follows, she uses notes as a felicitous way of capturing fluctuating aesthetic responses and rendering these shareable. Frustrated by the nebulous and idealized accounts of aesthetic emotions on offer from German philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller, Lee uses the form to externalize her own subjective and complex aesthetic responses, providing a forum for their communication and intermingling. Uniquely, this style includes what she calls the “often humiliating” aspects of aesthetic response that many would suppress in favor of its more noble attributes of cognitive play and disinterestedness.4 The sheer eccentricity of her enterprise meant that many of her Modernist contemporaries found it repulsive, a fact that is often invoked to explain the neglect that Lee has suffered in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. This neglect by critics and readers, both in her own lifetime and in the decades that follow, seems to be an inescapable element of Lee’s work. There are in fact multiple explanations for it, of which her apparently off-­putting and somewhat garish style is one. Born Violet Paget in 1856, in France, she is a Briton who spent very little of her life in Britain. She lived in France as a young child and in Tuscany for most of her adult life. Her voracious reading in art, literature, and philosophy thus took place

UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

in a continental context, though her primary influences were Victorian sages such as Walter Pater and John Ruskin. As a result, her “cosmopolitanism” and the “range of her reference” tend to exceed that of her Victorian contemporaries, which Benjamin Morgan suggests contributes to the difficulty of fitting her into British literary periods.5 Her mixed nationality is further complicated by temporal hybridity: she lived until 1935, and thus traverses the Victorian and Modern periods, always an awkward (and yet critically productive) position. As a consequence, she has become exemplary for critics seeking to narrate the connections between those historical moments. Born either too late or too early, she represents an untimely figure whose redemption will come in the future, which may be very well “our” present.6 Yet no matter how many chapters, articles, conference panels, and books literary critics and historians devote to recovering her works, something about them seems to resist joining the canonical objects of her moment. Part of my goal here is therefore to “unrecover” her writings. By this, I do not mean returning them to literary obscurity, but rather taking seriously the idea that her style is what Kristen Mahoney calls a “performance of marginality.”7 She undertakes this performance through the exposure of her minute aesthetic responses. Virginia Woolf, for one, found this aspect of her work irritating. “What a woman! Like a garrulous baby! However, I suppose she has a sense of beauty, in a vague way—­but such a watery mind,” she says in a letter.8 It is precisely Lee’s watery garrulousness that interests me here. A word that derives from Latin garrulus, it means “given to much talking; fond of indulging in talk or chatter; loquacious, talkative.”9 Triviality and inconsequence seem to be two of Lee’s legacies, for good or ill. The first half of her career sees her struggling to gain a foothold in the world of arts and letters, but as her life unfolds she relinquishes aspirations to great literary fame, preferring to experiment with the possibilities of minor and fragmented writing. Ultimately, her work and her theories present a unique view of aesthetic experience that bypasses traditional forms of visual or literary art altogether, aiming instead to inaugurate a collective project of amassing piecemeal impressions and recollections. This has recently been told as a story about the rapprochement between

157

158

CHAPTER 5

science and art, but I believe that Lee’s principal contributions involve her attempts to create forms that enable social enjoyment and inquiry.10 I will begin by considering the original account of marginality that Lee puts forward in her essay “Limbo” (1897), in which she suggests a way of reading the errant and unintegrated elements of past aesthetic production that does not freight them with the burden of being works of lost “genius.” Then, I explore the central place that note-­taking occupies in her description of the importance of aesthetic response in her theoretical writings, to which she gives practical expression in the highly bizarre “Gallery Diaries” that she keeps with her romantic partner, Clementina Anstruther-­Thomson. In these diaries, she makes an open exhibition of her doubts, messy dissatisfactions, and outré thoughts about the art she perceives, and while doing so courts mockery, attack, dismissal, and literary failure as she articulates the flux of subjective aesthetic experience. Her persistent aim in these writings is to expose her most vulnerable and humiliating experiences, those flickering effects of her body, mind, and heart, and through this exposure to chart how works of art connect to and enfold the myriad objects and people that surround them. Lee shows how aesthetic response is primarily and not secondarily social; her notes are not meant to aggrandize her own experience but to suggest a way that these responses might be worked out communally. Finally, I consider the theory of literature that she offers in The Handling of Words (1923), where total artistic forms are entirely subordinated to the fragmentary materials that underlie their creation and that they leave in the minds and bodies of their interpreters. Limbo

It is not surprising that Lee, herself a marginal figure, has her own idiosyncratic theory of artistic marginality. In her essay “Limbo,” she implicitly rejects efforts of straightforward historical rescue. Our goal in finding novelty in the remnants of history should not be to resuscitate forgotten geniuses, she suggests, but to value the peripheral contributions of figures primarily known for other things. The subject of the essay is “the kingdom of might-­have-­been.” This is a realm of emotional

UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

states, qualities, and achievements never actualized, but that seem to hover around our real lives and works like counterfactual possibilities. Her emblem for it is the “rabbits’ villa” of children’s playgrounds. This is a miniature building, the kind of toy house you find in gardens inhabited by rabbits or other small animals: “merely a wooden toy house, with green moss-­eaten roof  .  .  . with the tall foxgloves, crimson and white, growing all round it.” In the essay, the villa stands as a container for the dreams and fantasies of children. “The Rabbits’ Villa is, to the eye of the initiate, one of many little branch establishments of Limbo surrounding us on all sides.” She calls the object “ludicrous,” a “superannuated toy” and a “Noah’s ark on stilts.”11 But like many of the abandoned and derelict objects that appear in Lee’s corpus, it is laden with emotion. Looking into it “spiritually,” she finds it “oddly pathetic” for it seems to entomb the childhoods of those who played there. The rabbits’ villa is a playpen where the fleeting potentials of childhood cavort. Lee likens these juvenile counterfactuals to the outskirt spaces of the archive, but promptly rejects the notion of finding lost heroes there. “There are no mute inglorious Miltons, or none worth taking into account,” she writes in a dismissal of Thomas Gray’s romantic speculations from “Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard.”12 She holds back from endorsing the very endeavor that contemporary criticism applies to her own life and works: I do not believe there is much genius to be found in Limbo. The world, although it takes a lot of dunning, offers a fair price for this article, which it requires as much as water-­power and coal, nay even as much as food and clothes (bread for its soul and raiment for its thought); so that what genius there is will surely be brought into market.13

And yet alongside the recognizable feats of genius lies a domain of secondary activity and talent. The market may pass over it, but it may nevertheless generate unforeseen value in a time to come. Lee highlights those undeveloped or overlooked aspects of great minds, the full range of whose abilities were not necessarily exhausted by their environments. In so doing she returns us explicitly and directly to the discourse of useless organs that we surveyed in the discussion of Darwin

159

160

CHAPTER 5

in chapter 1. Lee’s work thus provides a germane example of how Darwinian conceptions of evolutionary time, utility, and uselessness began to inflect cultural thinking in the years following the publication of his works. One of the legacies of that work was to give a meaningful account of how minor and trivial events can accrue value in another time or in a different environment: I am tempted to think that the hobbies by which many of them have laid much store, while the world merely laughed at the statesman’s trashy verses or the musician’s third-­rate sketches, may have been of the nature of rudimentary organs, which, given a different environment, might have developed, become the creature’s chief raison d’être, leaving that which has actually chanced to be his talent to become atrophied, perhaps invisible.14

In a different environment, she suggests, bad poetry or drawings might have flourished into forms of great value, while others—­even those that have been since become more significant—­would recede into the background. This account of vestiges and rudiments serves as an apposite instance of this book’s argument as a whole, insofar as I have been seeking to retrieve a set of forms that might not always have been legible as such to their producers. Lee, however, is very much aware of how her own life and work accord with these concepts. I would argue that the approach to the past that she describes in “Limbo” also contributes to her self-­concept as a writer. Her works constantly feature lapsed or yet-­to-­come art forms, memories, emotions, events, places, and buildings. An obsession with literal ghosts, the past, and old things—­the spectral remnants of bygone eras—­saturates her world view.15 She is always immersed in the dead, or more accurately the not-­quite-­dead. “The Past puzzles me; and I like being puzzled by the Past,” she writes. Yet it is never the mainstream of history that excites her, but rather those artifacts of lost time that are not lacquered in significance and that rust instead in the rabbit house of the garden. She lingers in the past without nostalgia, as her sense of it is always bound to the future and the reactivation of these neglected potentials in a time to come. This

UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

conditions the sense she has of her own works as being mere rudiments for other, future readers to expand upon, but also her account of her historical moment: “do we not belong, we people of the nineteenth century, rather to the future which we are forming than to the Past which, much to its astonishment (I should think) produced us?”16 What does it mean to write with the awareness that one is already in a ghostly relation to the future, and even to one’s own present? Lee was already vaporized in her own lifetime, regarded by writers such as Woolf, Max Beerbohm, and Henry James as insubstantial, erring from both the mainstream and the avant-­garde.17 I would suggest that these writers found her style of writing and conversation embarrassing. I would also suggest that she doubles down on the humiliating exposure of her fluctuating percepts and affects that made her appear ridiculous to many of her contemporaries. She surrenders responsibility for synthesizing her garrulous writings, eschewing the game of wins and losses in the literary marketplace. She writes in order to produce raw material that posterity may single out for development or rejection for reasons that may be quite invisible to her, just as she rifles through the locations and artifacts of the past for similar effects. It is this aspect of her writing, more than her interest in scientific aesthetics or the proto-­neurosciences, that strikes me as being most relevant to us today. It is through the twin impulses of laying bare aesthetic responses and giving up ownership over their ultimate meanings that Lee speaks to us directly, not as a Gertrude Stein or Woolf manquée, but through the form of her altogether weird and vulnerable notes. Notes and Beauty

Lee always wished to bring idealistic claims for aesthetic experience down to earth, that is, to render the field of what we call aesthetics more practical and relevant to everyday life. In a dialogue from Baldwin she has one of her characters poke fun at this, naming it as a peculiarly British preoccupation: “It is extraordinary . . . how aesthetical questions invariably end in ethical ones when treated by English people.”18 One account of this grounding impulse has been extensively explored by critics of her thought, namely a “science of aesthetics” that would be capable of

161

162

CHAPTER 5

adapting techniques of scientific observation in order to understand exactly how aesthetic contemplation functioned in relation to other mental operations. This would, in theory, render the study of aesthetics more physical than metaphysical. Morgan narrates this shift of emphasis as part of a longer, relatively unacknowledged aspect of Victorian aesthetics that “was not primarily pursued in the idiom of philosophy” but rather “at the intersection of multiple discourses and practices, including art history, the novel, interior design, physiology, and evolutionary biology.” This necessitated what Morgan calls “an outward turn: an exteriorization of mind, consciousness, and the self into networks of matter, sensations, and objects.”19 Lee, speculating about possible future inquiries into the experience of beauty, thought that the metaphysical tradition of aesthetics, through Kant and Schiller, would inevitably give way to scientific analyses of the mental and emotional processes that arise in our interactions with works of art. The outdated modes of philosophical inquiry become, on this view, nothing but a preamble to this science of the future, merely “fragmentary facts, partial observations, and lopsided hypotheses, scattered in the works of philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Spencer.” She also makes it clear that her own proposals for this form of aesthetic study are themselves little more than rudiments. As usual she delegates the work of assembly and full elaboration to future thinkers: “I have said that these aesthetics are new, and I should add that they are still rudimentary, full of hypotheses admitting as yet of no demonstration, and of collections of facts requiring to be brought into intelligible connexion.”20 Lee’s crossing of science and aesthetics represents another fertile intersection that scholars such as Morgan, David Sweeney Coombs, and Nicholas Dames have explored at length. Yet we should also attend to the way that her work in these areas yielded formal experiments worth taking seriously—­we needn’t run with her into scientific byways. Her study of the beautiful includes suggestions about how to generate and study these oscillations of attention. These techniques also serve, in her account, to cultivate the states of non-­instrumental feeling and cognition that complex forms invite us to inhabit. These are not abstract and idealized states

UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

detached from everyday life. In many ways the low-­grade significance of everyday aesthetic experience is precisely where the aesthetic can do the most work. Lee promotes note-­taking as the best instrument for calling oneself to greater account of one’s aesthetic leanings, preferences, responses, attitudes, and affects. Taking notes, in other words, is a central and necessary aspect of unlocking the potentials of aesthetic response. In the chapter “Aesthetic Responsiveness” in The Beautiful, she connects note-­taking to the work of the aesthete: I think I can assure the reader that if he will note down, day by day, the amount of pleasure he has been able to take in works of art, he will soon recognize the existence of aesthetic responsiveness and its highly variable nature. Should the same Reader develop an interest in such (often humiliating) examination into his own aesthetic experience, he will discover varieties of it which will illustrate some of the chief principles contained in this little book.21

The parenthetical reference to our “often humiliating” aesthetic experience reveals something unique about Lee’s theories and the role of taking notes within it. We don’t approach works of art as entirely disinterested contemplators who amputate our faculties from the somatic fray of sensation, nor are we eager to rise above the many mental states we undergo that have nothing to do with questing after art objects and the beautiful plenitude of nature. We are checkered beings, given to fickle and mercurial responses. As Lee describes it, some days “aesthetic appreciation has begun with the instant of entering a collection of pictures or statues” while on others “enjoyment has come only after an effort of attention” and there are still other moments when “shortcomings and absurdities have laid hold of his attention.” Some days we might take an interest in formal dynamics, other days in the content, other days in the texture of the wall on which a picture hangs or the way tourists mingle around it. Lee ventriloquizes and also satirizes the kinds of absurd and silly ideas the gallery-­goer might include in their notes: “Would Michelangelo’s Jeremiah knock his head if he got up?” And “how will the Discobolus recover when he has let go the quoit?” Or “haunted by thoughts

163

164

CHAPTER 5

even more frivolous” when we compare the figures in a painting to real people from our lives: “How wonderfully like Mrs So and So!”; “The living image of Major Blank!”; “How I detest auburn people with sealing-­wax lips!”22 More than most thinkers in the aesthetic tradition, or in the circles of fin-­de-­siècle aestheticism, Lee understands that our experiences of beauty are not sealed up in disinterested aspic, nor are they divine expressions of freedom or the good mediated by sensuous stimulation. Instead they come to us mixed up with a whole slough of ridiculous and absurd mental representations. Insofar as elevated experiences of art exist, they bring in their wake a whole train of impressions and recollections into the gallery on a given day: the range of our moods, the contingent elements that surround or infiltrate the work of art that may or may not be intended by the artist, our reactions to these, and the way that all of this colors our experience of the artist’s productions. Nor is this all: the work is also blanketed by the whole history of such responses as they have accrued over time by countless other commentators and viewers. Coombs calls this “aesthetic graffiti,” the intermingling of our own responses with that dense stack of others that have already been attached to the object of concern.23 It is through the technique of note-­taking that these different elements can be brought into view. The open, expansive, and inconclusive nature of notework allows for ongoing, metonymic associations that needn’t ever come to a head. This aspect of note-­taking has been associated with the desire to cultivate empathy: “Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson transform the notion of empathy: they make forms of para-­literary writing—­the lecture, the gallery diary—­central to empathic experience.”24 Empathy, as Morgan teaches us about Lee’s use of the word, means something less like sympathy and more like attunement to the physical properties of an art object. I would argue that these “para-­literary” forms of writing are even more significant than they appear in their guise as technologies enabling Lee’s scientific interests. They are themselves conduits for the inclusion of the often minor and trivial perceptions we have in the face of works of art. They have the capacity to redistribute the value of aesthetic experience so that we can attend to the experiences belonging to even marginal persons.

UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

They reach toward a sociality of response, and as we’ll see in the next section they inadvertently give rise to form in themselves. Notes reveal that aesthetic responses are inflected by what comes before and after them through metonymic association. This theory of attention depends upon a dynamic of perception and expectation, and also a weaving together of different sensations into an evolving and fluctuating whole: Our attention selects certain sensations, and limits to these all that establishing of relations, all that measuring and comparing, all that remembering & expecting; the other sensations being excluded. Now while whatever is thus merely seen, but not looked at, is excluded as so much blank or otherness; whatever is, on the contrary, included is thereby credited with the quality of belonging, that is to say being included, together . . . But, by an amusing paradox, these lines measured and compared by our attention, are themselves not only exceeding so much otherness and blank; they also tend, so soon as referred to one another, to include some of this uninteresting blankness . . .25

Lee goes into more detail than Kant or Schiller about what the viewer actively contributes to the experience of the beautiful. The audience of the musical piece, the painting, or the literary work dashes forth between salient elements of a manifold and all the excess stuffing or dross that may play a more variable role in the experience of the individual viewer but that is nevertheless along for the ride. Not everything included in a work is necessarily important to that work, but we still need what is “not important”—­in fact this shores up the brighter stars. The “uninteresting blankness,” this “other” matter, features strongly in this process, whether it is the small notes in a song or the space of the night sky lying between stars in a constellation. I think this is different from talking about the way poets use “the white space on the page” or the cliché about listening to the notes a musician is not playing. This is not just a handling of negative space but, to reference Clive Bell, a way to account for the insignificant dimension of significant form.26 Aesthetic attention cannot be easily reduced to states of contemplative inaction and disinterested play; it also includes

165

166

CHAPTER 5

these barnacle-­like feelings and thoughts that glom on for the ride. Lee’s notework allows us to see the “garrulousness” of aesthetic response and makes this available to circulation. “. . . not to make one bang! impression”

Lee generated notes in this way in the museums of Italy, both alone and with her companion, Clementina Anstruther-­Thomson (Kit). They recorded their physiological responses to artworks as they beheld them. There is something disarmingly ridiculous and wondrously experimental about the Gallery Diaries these women kept. They embody Lee’s preference for seemingly trivial details, as she suggests when she calls the notes “delightfully irrelevant.”27 It would have been particularly strange to see them operating in tandem. Imagine entering a gallery and seeing two people taking turns examining one another’s bodily responses to sculptures and paintings. One of them stood before such artworks and “felt” her way into them, while the other opened her notebook and began to dash off observations about how the other seemed to be reacting. Lee also kept gallery diaries alone, writing down her mental and physical responses to the works in real time as she went: these gallery diaries of mine (in which, as remarked, I have never noted down anything which did not spontaneously offer itself on the surface, so to speak, of my everyday aesthetic consciousness) testify to the existence in myself of a very curious idiosyncrasy28

The notebooks catch the flickering surface of impressions, whether austere, humiliating, noble, or vulgar, skimming them off the top of Lee’s consciousness and storing them up to be examined later. She links this in the passage above to the “everydayness” of these experiences. Lee shines a light on the way that even positive encounters with art do not necessarily give rise to a luminous, cathartic event. Instead they include a dimension of the routine: an integrated, steady pulse of the aesthetic within the course of life. The purpose of the Gallery Diaries was ostensibly scientific, an attempt to provide the evidence to support the kinds of psychological aesthetic theories Lee advanced in The Beautiful.

UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

They would attend, for example, to the fluctuating movement of the eyes, the shifting temperatures of the body, or the many palpitations of the heart. The goal was to deidealize aesthetic experience; Lee describes it as “renouncing the habit of a priori discussions in aesthetics” and letting go of the hazy generalizations philosophers offer. “Of course a great picture is made to be seen at several goes. You possess the whole; but you also possess these exquisite details. These things are made for leisurely living with, not to make one bang! impression.” Quite apart from their scientific purposes, Lee’s gallery notes relinquish any pretense toward the universal character of particular aesthetic judgments; these are instead “modest studies of the inner life of an individual.”29 Yet they retain the impulse to socialize and share the details of those experiences. Her notes publicize her alternating satisfactions and dissatisfactions in art. They announce liking, disliking, and intermediary states, documenting these in something close to real time, as we’ll see in a moment. The note-­taking resembles less the sketches of an art student imitating the masters on a bench in the gallery than the everyday pictures that museum-­goers take of things they like, find funny, or wish to reject today and post subsequently on online forums. It is this willingness of Lee’s to share and overshare her experiences of art that defines the form of the Gallery Diaries, with their gestures of disclosure and self-­display. It is, perhaps, a rudiment of a contemporary trend that Sianne Ngai identifies in her account of minor aesthetic categories. Pointing to the way that the Internet creates formats in which people can film and post their affective responses to, say, double rainbows or Susan Boyle’s performance on Britain’s Got Talent, Ngai observes that “it is clear that what we might call Other People’s Aesthetic Pleasures have become folded into the heart of the artwork, essentially providing it with its substantive core.”30 Ngai points to the way reactions to art both inflect and extend the original object of interest and, in the process, generate new forms of their own. Lee is working in a different context, of course, but her Gallery Diaries carry off a version of this aspect of modern experience in which “aesthetic artifact and affective response [are] conflated.”

167

168

CHAPTER 5

We tend to take for granted the subjective character of aesthetic response as well as its public performance. In the late nineteenth century, however, to take that matter seriously meant charting new territory. We should not underestimate the gumption it would take to make these items public in the way Lee did. While drawing on the works of psychologists, she undertakes a daring experiment in lending such theories formal enactment. She records that she is engaged in “aesthetic introspection” and makes it clear that her descriptions drift away from the works themselves so as to become sketches of her own, interior landscape. Her moody responses to architecture thus represent “a mode of myself rather than a quality of the place.” The attitudes of the spectator are of course fluid and changeable, but Lee emphasizes the nonexistence of a pure and ideal aesthetic experience, claiming that our relationship with works of art “varies from day to day.” The Gallery Diaries jettison a Platonic ideal of beautiful form: “there exist in experience no such abstractions as aesthetic attention or aesthetic enjoyment, but merely very various states of our whole being.”31 What makes the notes unique, however, is not only their displacement of idealized aesthetic response but also the way they model an alternative experience of simultaneously subjective and communal effects. In the Gallery Diaries, sculptures and paintings range playfully about their locations in the museum, intermingling with the fluctuating moods of the viewer and the other objects surrounding them. Lee presents artworks caught at specific moments in time, sharing as much detail as possible about how the work appears then and there. She breaks down the proverbial frames that bind the artwork in a solitary confinement, allowing the gesture of a human sculptural figure to interact with the real bodies of the tourists, their creaking boots, her scallop hat, and whatever objects or effects happen to fall around it at that moment. Here is her account of the Apollo (figure 5.1), which had been pulled from the Tiber only a few years earlier, in 1885: Leaning on balustrade of terrace outside I get him at a better angle and distance. I get him particularly in the midst of my impressions of air, of stirring leaves, flying, chirping birds, children playing outside. He is in my life.32

Figure 5.1  Apollo of the Tiber. Ca. mid-2nd century CE. Photo © Stefano Baldini/Bridgeman Images.

170

CHAPTER 5

The Apollo is made companionable, integrated into Lee’s perceptions and perceived within a mix of leaves, birds, and children. The fragmented condition of the sculpture matters: missing part of its neck, the entire left arm, and the right hand, it invites Lee to coordinate it with her own body, ideas, and moods. Fragmented sculpture finds a supplement in the notational fragments Lee composes as she resituates the figure in a new surround, making it continuous with forms of life around it (birds, children, leaves) and the rhythm of her own day. Lee’s notes thus fit into a tradition of artistic production that foregrounds the frames, environments, and contexts in which art itself gets presented. The twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century photographer Louise Lawler, for instance, creates images of famous works of art in their “real” habitats. For example, A.C.A.D.E.M.Y. (1987) pictures a fragmented sculpture of Nike with velvet ropes in front of it and against a backdrop of other sculptural fragments. Her Does Andy Warhol Make You Cry? (1988) photographs Warhol’s Round Marilyn displayed with its auction tags and estimated price before going up for auction.33 Lee’s notework is less bound up with the institutional critiques this type of art includes in its latter-­day forms, but she allows for a different account of the relationship between an artwork and the locations (both mental and physical) in which it appears. We know the notes function as a seismograph of her responses, yet they do more than provide evidence for as-­yet-­unknown future scientific theories. They orient her in therapeutic ways. Indeed, while recent scholarship has valued Lee’s “psychological aesthetics” because of its scientific orientation, we do not always consider the way they also draw on the therapeutic aspects of psychology, which we know to have been of equal, or even greater, interest to Lee as she contended with mental struggles.34 Through her note-­taking in the galleries, she stages her own attempts to integrate and join with the objects around her. The statues ballast her consciousness in a difficult moment (in this case, having lost Kit in the midst of the time these notes were being taken), and this fact about her personal life contributes something to the process of her looking: “I find in these statues (which I see at once and quite well) an extraordinary calm, charm, some sort of deep kinship and confidence, which comes out to meet my

UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

perfect goodwill, my determination not to let the passing hours be wasted, the beautiful present of life soiled by personal sadness.”35 Lee’s field notes from the galleries represent an attempt at what contemporary psychologists might call self-­soothing: the notes are both a vehicle and a record of this process, allowing her to draw connections between herself, the work of art, and the surrounding environment. This is, perhaps, another “embarrassing” feature of what she is up to here, namely, her willingness to mix personal disclosures into her descriptions of classical sculpture in a way that provides momentary relief from her own distraught condition. The notes do not just show us beauty lifting Lee’s spirits, since negative responses to the works are very much a part of her vulnerable expressions. These experiences have the capacity to depress as much as enliven the viewer. Lee’s ambiguously embarrassing or courageous inclinations show that she was unwilling to claim the feeling of aesthetic pleasure when she felt none (remember that the book in which these appear is, of course, called Beauty and Ugliness). Her notes admit the absence of pleasure in the beautiful as much as its presence; as often as not this means displeasure due to the experience of what she sees as formal imperfection, but more complex feelings play a role as well. Standing before canonically significant works, Lee often remarks that she simply cannot muster the kind of response the history of reception would seem to demand. Thus her captions on the Sleeping Ariadne are somewhat unique (figure 5.2). One of the worst statues in existence: a woman arrested in the act of falling off a sofa on which she is lying in a hideously uncomfortable position . . . it is the inertness the visible tumbling out of bed which makes the public think that she is sleeping.36

This is hardly a classic response to the Ariadne, whether we are speaking of the Victorian period of criticism or our own. There is something faintly wicked and contrarian in Lee’s wish to distance herself from the critical consensus. This is replicated when she mocks the Apollo Belvedere—­ made famous by Johann Winckelmann’s ekphrastic passages in History of Ancient Art—­“a little too much of the kindle and snort which makes him restless.”37 Critics such as Jonah Siegel have commented on this aspect of

171

172

CHAPTER 5

Figure 5.2  The Sleeping Ariadne, long called Cleopatra. 2nd century BCE. PHAS/UIG/ Bridgeman Images.

Lee’s aesthetic criticism, that is, its contrarian stance toward the norms of art history.38 She seems to delight in positioning her commentary against the standard or more famous examples, insisting on their consideration in the “aesthetic graffiti” that gathers around the image. Her critical eye finds still more flaws when she turns to Lorenzo Monaco’s Large Madonna and Saint, which she also refers to as “on the whole one of the ugliest pictures I know,” giving a bullet list of the reasons for her distaste and labeling it “Why I Don’t Like Lorenzo Monaco” (figure 5.3): “Why I Don’t Like Lorenzo Monaco”:

1. The colour—­acid, shrill, crude, opaque (probably repainted) 2. The swarthy, sooty faces. 3. Their being set like ill-­mended crocks [pot or jug] on shoulders

UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

4. The idiotic glowering which makes me feel queer 5. The vague, delusive, changing relations of body and head in space, like masks and bats, waving in space, but waving at wrong discordant intervals, so that I find a protuberance where I expect an emptiness 6. The limpness of arms and hands, particularly contrasted with truculent pose of head and glance 7. The total scatteredness, idiocy, fussiness39 Trying to be upfront and honest about the paintings and sculptures she finds in these vaunted spaces, Lee makes good on both sides of her book’s

Figure 5.3  Lorenzo Monaco, Coronation of the Virgin. 1414. Tempera on wood. 199 ¼ x 176 ¼ in. Photo Credit: Alinari / Art Resource, NY.

173

174

CHAPTER 5

title, i.e. beauty and ugliness, aesthetic pleasure and displeasure. What she consistently refers to as the flux of aesthetic response comprises agreeable feelings but also aversion, disgust, boredom, and myriad other affects, to which she owns up completely. The reactions are occasionally ignoble, for example her potentially racist aversion to the “swarthy, sooty faces” in Monaco’s painting. Her policy of deidealization means that a host of what may be fickle and even offensive responses get swept up in the mix. A contemporary reader might fault Lee for her evaluative attitude toward the artworks, something Victorians practice reflexively but that their descendants regard with great suspicion. Evaluative judgments of this kind, however, capture the way that intensities from the paintings and sculptures move out into the environment around them, which is the true object of interest for Lee and what the formal properties of her note-­taking capture. One of the principles of psychological aesthetics that she takes from Karl Groos is his idea of Einfühlung, which Lee famously translates as “empathy” and which Groos glosses as “inner mimicry.” Lee adapts this notion in her account of “miming”: she uses this verb to understand the way that a work of art is “entered” by a viewer through taking in formal dynamics of the painting or sculpture on view. This is the way a statue “causes the spectator to mime internally the gesture” that the statue happens to be making, which involved Lee observing how she “reacted psychologically” to the formal dynamics, that is, not only to the content, of the art works before her. There is no guarantee that miming, or anything similar, does actually transpire for the art viewer, or that the event of wishing to mime reflects artistic quality in any sense. “I am getting to believe that it is only the bad statues which tempt us to mime,” she writes.40 And she feels not “the least inclination” to mime sculptures such as the Dying Gladiator or the Apoxyomenos (the “Scraper” figure). The notebooks are hardly pillars of devotion to either the works of art or the psychological theories she was exploring, but offer a picture of the mixed, contradictory, and often ignoble feelings that pass through her as she looks. They also provide a channel through which artworks reach out into human life. This happens by means of the impulses toward impersonation and mindful awareness of one’s own reactions. It can also be unpleasant

UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

Figure 5.4  Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Venus of Urbino. 1538. Oil on canvas. 46 7/8 x 65 in. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY.

and disharmonious. Thus when Lee arrives before Titian’s Venus of Urbino, she feels a “tune” in her head and what she calls “distinct palpitations,” being drawn to the window in the background of the picture rather than to the splendid curves of Venus that represent the central image. She does not even wish to remain with the picture (figure 5.4): perhaps I am trying through that window to escape out of the picture? I cannot go back without effort to Venus herself, and give it up. No! For wide-­opening of the eyes and lifting of the scalp or hat (I have glasses, not spectacles) and breathing hard through my nose and mouth, enable me to see her at last. But the effort is too great.41

Like a point-­of-­view shot of the painting in a film, we see Titian’s Venus through Lee’s glasses. We see the brim of her hat creeping in at the top of the frame. We hear breath sliding through her nose and mouth. She wishes to kiss certain pictures, while others make her think of rough cardboard.42

175

176

CHAPTER 5

We inhabit the painting with this particular viewer at the turn of the twentieth century, alongside the affects and events transpiring in her body. It is intensely intimate, and must have felt garish—­too exposed—­for many readers. Even today, when we are consistently habituated to these kinds of displays of artwork through personal mediation, it is difficult to engage with these documents. Lee fills these pages with so many details about her body, particularly those effects she calls her “palpitations.” Thus the notebooks register not only the flux of thoughts but also these somatic elements, as though she is bringing the technology inside of her body to monitor her heart rate and other factors. “All palpitations gone. I certainly seem to see better breathing through nostrils than through mouth. The open mouth is inattention.” Or again, “slight palpitations, at least rapid breathing with shut mouth,” and then, “I walk along and having got to the top of the stairs and into the gallery find myself with slight palpitations.43 Reading Lee’s notes, you are pressed to the surfaces of her skin, made to feel her clothing, her pulse, and her level of activity or fatigue. She lays herself bare. No doubt others would feel palpitations and hear different tunes, and would not even consider escaping the Venus of Urbino by leaping out the window. Lee still understands her own responses as taking place in a collective context, either alongside the ranks of many people who have grappled with an artwork before her (whether they recorded their impressions or not), or else with the literal groups of people (namely, the tourists) who filter through the museums and galleries alongside her. In place of idealized aesthetic experience, she installs a plurality of response and of context. Her own moody reactions are variegated. And she is constantly aware of the groups of people that surround her as she scribbles in her notebooks. Sometimes her reactions to the tourists are negative: “Rubbed the wrong way in gondola by some mannerless tourists. Attempt at showing them anything frustrated. Find myself with strong palpitations, a general sense of cat’s fur brushed the wrong way.” And at other moments she prefers the crowds to the art: “The statues seem infinitely more intrusive than the moving crowd of tourists.”44 She considers the gallery-­goers in aesthetic terms alongside the sculptures and paintings.

UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

We don’t have any record of what those other tourists might have recorded in their own notebooks. Certainly their notes would have differed in tone and intensity according to the details they observed in the artworks around them. Lee’s notebook might seem idiosyncratic to the point of narcissism, yet when we consider it as a single set of traces among many others that have the potential to be registered in the same genre, a new kind of aesthetic form, rather than a merely artistic one, comes into view. In the next and final section of this chapter, I’ll consider how Lee becomes much more self-­conscious about the formal and literary potential in the registration of her impressions. The kinds of fragmentary notes we find in the Gallery Diaries provide just one small example of what Lee imagines as a new location for aesthetic and specifically literary-­aesthetic inquiry. In this account, traditionally recognized objects of literary-­critical attention will be atomized and revalued for their capacity to store and reactivate singular, fragmentary impressions and recollections. Congregated Soap Bubbles

In the Gallery Diaries of Beauty and Ugliness, Lee takes little interest in art objects detached from the context of their reception. In other words, her concern is not with aesthetic quality, but with the way that art appears in institutional and social spaces and joins a continuum of seemingly nonaesthetic experience. Yet by making such reports as she does in her notebooks, she doesn’t surrender the importance or autonomy of art; in fact her gesture is to broaden its parameters so that it is not enclosed in frames or on plinths. Her notes give form and aesthetic significance to the manifold responses—­however potentially embarrassing, outré, or offensive—­that a viewer might have as different objects close to the artwork (tourists, architectural elements, her own eyeglasses) inflect and extend it into the surrounding environment. These notes may not have generated the kinds of public or scientific response she and Kit wanted, but they nevertheless succeed at giving a concrete textual structure to the nebulous thing called aesthetic response. It is form in this unusual guise, as a co-­creation of artists and responders together, that will also compel her in the literary essays gathered in

177

178

CHAPTER 5

The Handling of Words, a text that arguably adapts the formal structure of the note as she developed it in the Gallery Diaries and dignifies it with a central place in her account of literary aesthetics. Rather than focusing on aspects of genres belonging to the novel, poem, essay, or drama, she turns her attention to the fundamental psychological needs that such genres attempt to satisfy. Ultimately, Lee subordinates all of these forms to the cultivation of the raw materials that precede them and remain in their wake after engagement has occurred. In her evolutionary vocabulary, the human organism has a profound need to gather, store, and transmit impressions, and these can take priority over the pleasures of narrative, lyrical beauty, or other literary effects traditionally understood. Instead of writing in order to define literary quality, Lee examines literature’s role as a “universal confidant,” a storage device for the teeming impressions and recollections that might otherwise escape or go undescribed. Her formal interest lies not in plot, setting, character, or any of the usual topoi of literary studies, but instead in what precedes a literary form, those raw materials that we generate somewhere between our impressions of the world, our recollections, and the pieces of writing we happen to read. All of this streams together to produce a kind of virtual literary form. Literature just happens to be the device for the storage of fragments that they were using in Lee’s lifetime and before it. Ultimately, she dispenses completely with the need for what we recognize as finished genres, subordinating all of them to what underlies them, the sharing and combination of fragments of experience, what she will call “units of consciousness.”45 But first I wish to consider the nature of the call literature answers, because it is upon this need that Lee poses her new version of literary value. Underlying the creation of literary works is a deeply felt craving and a need to which she addresses her investigations: “It is my intention to review the various spiritual needs, or, if you will, cravings, to which literature ministers blindly and without inquiring after their goodness or badness.”46 As always, her interest turns to those neglected and sidelined elements of the human and natural worlds. The target of her investigations in the first half of her book is not the vaunted works of literature or art, and the pleasure they give by their arrangements, but instead the needs

UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

met or not met by these when considered alongside writings that may never possess a thing called literary quality. This “unceasing, incalculable output of written matter” ministers to these other kinds of needs: there is and ever has been an unceasing, incalculable output of written matter, serving or not serving its purpose in random fashion, and with the varying amount of waste and litter and nuisance incident to the satisfaction of all human wants; going, nine hundred and ninety-­nine thousandths of it, to swell the dust heaps and kitchen middens where anthropology seeks for the traces of extinct manners and customs.47

In other words, most of what people write ends up in what Lee calls limbo, or “the kingdom of might-­have-­been” that I explored above. There might emerge some work of literary quality from the heap, but this is rare and in any case comes to less than you might think in her theory of literature. That theory views literary art as always responding to this “primary impulse,” namely, “the impulse to revive impressions.”48 Lee traces the purpose of literature to the writer’s need for storage and the potential for reactivation, but this is all for the sake of reviving and sharing impressions themselves rather placing them in an organized work of art. Lee believes that theorists have done “scant justice” to this aspect of art, whereby it performs a task as a collection or archive in itself. What exactly is being stored and recalled? Questing for something unprocessed but nevertheless formally discernible, Lee describes what she calls “units of consciousness” as the currency in which writers and readers traffic. Literary art involves the coordination of these fragmentary elements. Writers use their works to preserve units of consciousness and to activate the reader’s own store of them. The writer’s consciousness, she writes, carries “only fragments on its surface . . . and fragments, moreover, quite heterogeneous.” It is thereupon “the business of the Writer to awaken in such combinations and successions as answer to his own thoughts and moods—­these, which you must allow me to call, in psychologist’s jargon, Units of Consciousness.” These pieces tumble together “by the random hand of circumstance” and present difficulties for the writer who must direct this “chaos of living, moving things” in the mind of the reader to the

179

180

CHAPTER 5

purposes their art requires.49 In a moment I will explain where Lee acquires this idea of piecemeal consciousness. Right now, however, I wish to emphasize that two competing processes affect any reader’s absorption of a text, according to Lee. On the one hand, a cascade of metonymic associations arises as we respond to the individual “units of consciousness” that the writer dabs onto our minds. Taking as an example the word “sea,” Lee rattles off a number of associations: “wide, deep, wet, green, blue, briny, stormy, serene, a thing to swim or drown in, connecting or severing countries; moreover, a word which may awake in our mind, because it has been accompanied with so many different ones, feelings of gladness or terror or sorrow.” In general we cannot control what units of consciousness come alive for us when we encounter any word or phrase in the work of an author. Yet at the same time, another process crosses this involuntary one, namely an improvised effort “of constantly comparing and sorting one’s own impressions,” which “may have rearranged these impressions in special abstract pigeon holes.” The notational metaphor (pigeonholes being storage devices for notes) continues as Lee emphasizes that every event of comprehension is unstable and haphazard, unique to this or that individual at this or that particular moment. Lee suggests underlining or marginalia to represent this: “we all know how different people single out different passages of the same book.”50 She envisions a complex network of writers and readers, occupying different times and spaces, alternately absorbing and recreating “units of consciousness.” Literature is not just a form but a container, a medium, and a machine that enables these impressions and recollections to tumble together, submerge, and reemerge. It connects us to the elements of a writer’s experience and mixes them with our own, creating a composite and pluralized notion of literary and aesthetic form. What it enables both is prior to the creation of any one work and follows after it: the communal assembly of bits and pieces of information. Even before we array our fragmentary collections before the eyes of other people, Lee says, they have this collective quality about them: Recollections behave very much like congregated soap bubbles, which the breath through the straw makes bigger or smaller; now one, now

UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

another takes body or loses it, expands and swallows up its neighbors, shrinks into one of a minute subsidiary cluster; detaches itself to float in solitary iridescence, or to burst unnoticed into nothingness.51

The projection of a social assembly shines forth in that word “congregated,” which suggests that units of consciousness assemble and disassemble constantly, and the plotted structure and recognizable shapes that they might assume in novels or poems are only momentary formations to which we owe no reverence. Lee draws on late Victorian physiological theories of mind to build up this theory of literary style. Those theories, as Nicholas Dames explains, cast human consciousness as a network of fragmented sensations, perceptions, and cognitions that tumble together without necessarily driving at holistic syntheses. According to these conceptions of mind, attention and mental action always happen in bits and pieces. Dames argues that Lee leverages such ideas in her development of a theory of the novel emphasizing literature’s function as preserving, storing, and sorting a nearly infinite number of atomistic perceptions and memories that flow through the minds of writers and readers. The Handling of Words includes chapters on different aspects of literary style, which are followed in the book by case studies of George Meredith, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and others. Dames’s true focus is actually the work of the first of these, Meredith, who in his account represents an apposite object of study for Lee since she was happy to “[abandon] plot as form” and focus instead on the piling up of “partial or minute notations of small patches of text.” As a writer of fiction, Dames argues, Meredith exemplified a similar stance, invested in “producing and describing fragmentary, discontinuous readings.”52 Dames is of course correct about Lee’s psychological sources, and about the fact that most of the case studies in The Handling of Words are writers of fiction. However, his exclusive focus on the novel as Lee’s main object of inquiry seems to miss a fundamental aspect of her own point, which I would suggest is the radical desire to dispense with things like novels and poetry altogether, imagining a way that she and her readers could participate in the recirculation of diverse mental notations as the

181

182

CHAPTER 5

very essence of aesthetic attention, combining in one style both creation and response. I would suggest that the note serves all at once as metaphor, metonym, and materialization of these inconsistent and fragmentary impressions and recollections. The notework Lee undertakes in the Gallery Diaries represents one attempt at this, but she describes so many of her works as collections of notes or sketches that it seems evident that she was attempting to reach outward from the standard models of authorship available to her. Indeed, this includes The Handling of Words, which she refers to multiple times as a collection of “notes” that have been “jotted down in the course of reading . . . not yet arranged to suit any theory.”53 Her eclectic mixing has long been acknowledged as an important aspect of her style, but understanding her principal genre as the note enables an even more receptive attitude to her works and their place in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. At first glance, the title The Handling of Words would seem to be “rhetoric” by another name. It suggests that the book will analyze the manipulations of language that make up literary style, and indeed, some readers did understand it as just one more manual of composition. Yet as Lee develops her ideas, the title begins to sound more and more like that of a self-­help book, as though How to Handle Words would have been an adequate alternative title. For Lee, grappling with reading and writing in terms of mobile units in a constant process of creation and digestion does not merely lead to a free chaotic play of signification of the kind that would occupy the postmodern theories she is often said to prefigure. Lee places the emphasis on what it means to move within such an environment. These evanescent congregations forming within the privacy of our own minds and interfacing with those of others represent an ongoing ethical negotiation, a process for determining, to enlist the metaphor, what notes to take down in our books and which to let drift by: “It is our own life, trifling as it may seem, but imperious by being ours, which must for ever check, deflect, and alter whatever of the life of others attempts to mingle with it.” In the flux and flow of bits of language, we make ourselves vulnerable to interference; we allow the notes of others to mix with the stream of our own impressions and recollections.

UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

Lee ultimately assigns a therapeutic significance to the manner in which readers and writers relate to their own fragmentary impressions of art as well as life. Writing and reading require opening one’s own hoard of lived experience in a way that blurs the lines between text and conversation. What she calls our “living web of little habits, feelings, interests, sensations, references, hopes and fears” is vulnerable to invasion, inflection, redirection, and manipulation. She also explains how this view of literary and aesthetic experience creates its own, second-­order feelings with which we must also contend: “feeling ourselves the living and thinking fragments of a whole, we need to watch and listen to all that whole’s mysterious ways; and have the irresistible impulse to mingle in the forces which are making, and which are destroying also, our little evanescent persons.”54 The “whole” here is not a finished literary object in a recognizable genre, but instead the entire community of textual production and reception at large, which operates by means of these fragmentary, notational exchanges and treats all literary form as a mere vehicle for this more fundamental and abiding activity. Hasty Jottings

In calling so many of her writings “notes” and “sketches,” and in practicing versions of composition that fall under these categories, Lee withdraws from synthetic or systematic arguments even as she suggests that someone might conscript her writings for such purposes. At times it might seem that her role is that of generating evidence for other people to interpret based on their own, unforeseeable interests and desires. What happens when notes are turned to data? When the texture they give to one’s life is treated as a quarry of information? Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson use note-­taking as their technology for rendering such fleeting experiences palpable. Certainly their notes make no attempt to draft a finished product in the literary sense. And while they are written with an intention toward the scientific, their authors never carry out the grand task of systematizing them or even see themselves as capable of doing so. Indeed, whatever scientifically inflected purposes Lee had for Kit’s notes ended up striking Lee herself, over time, as somewhat misguided.

183

184

CHAPTER 5

She came to see that making systems and the scientific use of notes drawn from aesthetic experience robbed their creators of a valuable if ephemeral form of property. In her preface to Anstruther-­Thomson’s Art and Man, Lee confides in her reader that her initial partner in crime came to resent having her notations leveraged by Lee for their potential scientific meanings. Kit was upset by the response to the publication of Beauty and Ugliness, which did not succeed at winning praise. Lee reflected on this many years later: I fear that, in some massive and scarcely conscious manner, Kit may have felt as if her very personal and living impressions were being deadened under what perhaps struck her as philosophical padding. There is in one’s hasty jottings something curiously unique; and after a lifetime spent in working on my own notes, I still sometimes catch myself feeling as if such manipulations of them came between me and my real self . . . May she not have missed the something of the moment and the circumstances, the something indescribably her own, when she saw her notes—­however little I had forced alterations upon her—­ solidly build into blocks of scientific matter?55

Even the slightest alteration of a note represents a kind of misuse of the potential that note held. Lee’s relationship with Kit emerges in this passage as a relational allegory about the difference between what we think we are doing when composing notes and what might get done with them on the other side of that labor. Lee’s sense of the note as a genre is that it remains closest to her “real self,” and to the “real self” of her companion. Whether or not this is true, viewing notes in this way is very different, as Lee suggests, from seeing them as “blocks of scientific matter.” It is easy to see why Lee would not hesitate to use any such materials, especially when we read the very last note of the Gallery Diaries: “It has cost me an effort to get out this book and write, but far less than to look at anything. How little trouble observing oneself and writing is. It seems part of the drowsiness.” How little trouble: the task of putting down one’s own feelings and sensations on paper does not feel like labor at all once the notebook has been taken out from a bag or a pocket. It is almost too

UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

easy. It extends without effort from the drowsy state in which Lee found herself during her many visits to Florentine museums and galleries. Notes such as the ones Lee created are, in other words, cheap to produce. They draw only on her own self-­consciousness, which is virtually inexhaustible: “All my psychic life has been thus accompanied by consciousness of itself.” This is “the spectator, whom I carry within myself. The greatest aesthetic enjoying, always very calm in my case, is accompanied, as has been seen, by a constant consciousness of my condition.”56 She lived in a world that did not necessarily value these documents of self-­consciousness, and it makes sense that she would occasionally view her own notes, as well as those belonging to Kit, as having social value only as data for the work of more important thinkers. Yet my hope is that the foregoing pages help us to understand just how comprehensive her claims for the note could be, and how these claims endured throughout and motivated so many of her works that still see the light of day.

185

CONCLUSION 

ASYMMETRY

as a distinct genre in order to detail the kinds of fantasies, emotions, and rhetorical gestures that transpire within it. The proposal is that notes should not be read only as germinal versions of other genres that we associate with particular authors. Instead, approaching a sample (by no means exhaustive) of Victorian writing of this kind allows us to map an unfamiliar terrain that we must learn to navigate in new ways if we are to understand the demands that twenty-­ first-­century technologies of reading and writing daily make upon our minds. Search engines and social media are fueled by many of the minimalist processes I have brought to light here, in particular the sheltering of seemingly inconsequential observations; the desire to trace harmonies and contrasts between different kinds of actors; the strange wish for or acquiescence to a distant agent to make sense of all our miscellaneous notations. Yet the difference now is that the online notes we compose do not lie in suspended animation in archival boxes or desk drawers for I H AV E T R E AT E D N OT E W O R K

186

ASYMMETRY

decades or centuries, but rather are culled, processed, and recirculated instantly in very different contexts and for very different purposes from those in which they were created. An abrupt, formal discontinuity breaks off our everyday acts of composition from their conscription into systems that many of us don’t understand any more than we do a jet engine. The question of what notes are, how we write them, and where they might go is thus continually and pressingly at hand. These discontinuities and the threat they pose find a contemporary Gothic expression in the science-­fiction thriller Ex Machina. In this film, an android named Ava undergoes a version of the Turing Test. Alan Turing designed this test in 1950 as a way of determining the presence of an artificial intelligence (A.I.). In the classic arrangement, a person listens to a conversation between a human and an A.I., the latter two remaining invisible to the first person. If he or she fails to determine which is the human and which is the A.I., the robot intelligence passes the test. Ex Machina makes some adjustments to the rules. Nathan Bateman, Ava’s creator, invites a young coder named Caleb to come and administer the test, although in this version Caleb is perfectly aware that Ava is an A.I. “The real test is to show you that she’s a robot,” says the creator, Bateman, “and then see if you still feel she has consciousness.”1 The twist in this latest version of Frankenstein is that the creator figure is a mogul of the participatory Internet. Bateman, a Silicon Valley billionaire, made his fortune with an online utility called Blue Book. Named, the film explains, for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notes and also referencing the genre of the British “blue book” (dossiers containing important information relevant to any field that uses them), Bateman’s project is similar to Google’s. In the course of the film we learn that it was the data collected from the billions of people using Blue Book on their phones and computers that allowed Bateman to create a functional and compelling A.I. He describes what the advent of search engines and social media meant: “it was like striking oil in a world that hadn’t invented internal combustion. Too much raw material, no one knew what to do with it.”2 At one point in the story this Dr. Frankenstein invites Caleb to enter his secret lab, where he jiggles a blue silicone brain in his hand, the outcome of all these online gestures.

187

188

CONCLUSION

The secret serum that catalyzes Ava’s consciousness is derived from billions of notations generated by the world’s population and given a meaning and purpose entirely different from what that population intended while using the tools in the first place. Within all that data hid something so much more powerful than the potential for advertising or connecting people across vast distances. It contained roadmaps of consciousness itself. Bateman’s penchant for information collection materializes in one scene of the film in an enormous wall covered in thousands of Post-­it notes. The Internet hovers in the background of every scene of the novel. Caleb must agree to “regular data audits” to ensure his silence, thereby giving up some degree of privacy in the manner of all digital citizens. When Ava meets Caleb for the first time, she asks questions that recall the required fields when opening a social media account: “is your status . . . single?” “Is Nathan your . . . friend?”3 The film offers a new version of the “rise of the machines” narrative by making it specifically about our relationship to the Internet. Suffice it to say that things do not go well. Ex Machina allegorizes our culture’s initial love affair with digital technology, followed by a violent disillusionment. Caleb falls in love with Ava, believing that Ava has fallen in love with him. Her body is predictably beautiful. Some parts of it are fleshy while others are transparent, revealing the glowing, crystalline circuitry within. Yet the knowledge that she is mechanical does nothing to slow Caleb’s seduction by her; in fact it accelerates it. By pushing his sexual and intellectual buttons, so to speak, Ava ably secures his confidence and ultimately compels him to assist her in murdering Nathan and escaping the compound where she lives. At the last moment, she leaves Caleb behind, even though she has led him to believe they would run away together. I have described the film at some length because it dramatizes a very twenty-­first-­century predicament, namely the asymmetry between what we think we are doing on our phones and laptops and what actually transpires at the other end of the network. In Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation, Dennis Tenen provides an account of the metaphorical dimension of this asymmetry. “We are in the grip of metaphor” whenever we use such tools, Tenen argues, for words such as “page,” “file,” and “home” have

ASYMMETRY

become such a naturalized aspect of our technological interactions that we forget that they are actually metaphorical. These metaphoric substitutions do not just occur on the level of individual words. The very physicality of these objects is symbolically organized: “The flatness of digital text is an illusion,” he writes.4 In the case of Ex Machina, Caleb thinks his conversations with Ava represent empathetic contact with another thinking, feeling being. Ava, however, has other plans. The plot of Ex Machina is only the latest of a long tradition traceable, ultimately, to Mary Shelley but more directly to Samuel Butler and his seminal 1863 article “Darwin among the Machines,” which he expanded into the “Book of the Machines” in his later utopian novel Erewhon, or, Over the Range. Butler suggests that machines might comprise another kingdom of the natural world destined for world domination. “We are ourselves creating our own successors . . . we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-­regulating, self-­acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.”5 This narrative defines an abundant subgenre of science fiction that includes the Terminator franchise, the Borg of Star Trek, and The Matrix. But while these famous descendants of Butler’s model use big explosions and intense violence to dramatize the rise of the machines, Ex Machina frames it as an event having more to do with the mundane phenomena of information processing and documentation. And yet these matters directly concerned Butler, a writer keenly and constantly aware of the force that the unknowable future exerted on our present lives and inscriptions. He was also another creator of notework. In his eccentric but prescient response to the Darwinian information, Butler suggests that our present life is merely one point on a movement that connects the deepest past to the farthest future. Without any knowledge of genetics, he develops this idea not only in his works on evolution and natural selection, which challenged some of Darwin’s conclusions, but also in his novels, where he treats character as an impersonal force connecting parents to children in unbroken sequences. “Birth has been made too much of,” he famously says, since we derive the contents of who we are

189

190

CONCLUSION

from inheritance.6 Equally, the future results of our actions are as much a part of us as we are in the present. “The life we live beyond the grave is our truest life,” he says. What we normally think of as our lives “is the gathering of waves to a head” that upon our death “break into a million fragments” which go on to produce consequences we cannot foresee.7 Butler gives expression to this pattern across his works, in particular his (posthumously published) The Way of All Flesh, but perhaps nowhere more artfully than in his Note-­Books, which he began around the same moment that he wrote “Darwin and the Machines” in 1863, and continued to use and revise until his death in 1902. In Erewhon he mentions the notebook as one of the machines that humans use constantly, more than their naturally occurring organs: “Man has now many extra-­corporeal members, which are of more importance to him than a good deal of his hair, or at any rate than his whiskers. His memory goes in his pocket-­book.”8 He gathered his notes into six volumes and a folio of loose leaves. Almost all the notes have headings, some of which double as the first word of the note: “EVAPORATION is an unseen heavenward waterfall.” “A MAN is a passing mood or thought coming and going in the mind of his country.”9 They are not all definitions, however, and he also collects stray observations and ideas for books or articles that will never be written. The Note-­Books stage Butler’s favorite theme (life as the impersonal transmission of qualities across generations) in terms of the production of documents. It is in the notes, unpublished in his lifetime, that he achieves the textual embodiment of his evolutionary thinking, which moves the decisive phase of life away from the present and into the future. James Paradis calls the notes a “wound object,” in the sense of being wound up, “shaped for his anticipated judgment by posterity.”10 Butler develops a form that gracefully accepts the fact that his life will be shattered into a “million fragments” at the moment of his death. He yields up his ownership over these fragments to the future, at once accepting and enacting a radical asymmetry between the work he does in sculpting them and what they may become. Butler sees himself as a documentary being, essentially made of his inscriptions. In the wider context of his evolutionary thinking, he views all machines as synthetic organs, and so it follows that he does

ASYMMETRY

not draw firm distinctions between his own body and the paper books that capture his thoughts between covers. Speaking of the books he has written, he remarks that “they are, in fact, ‘me’ much more than anything else.”11 He thus prefigures twentieth-­century formulations of documentation that cast it as a primary locus of human subjectivity, foreseeing the ways in which a person would increasingly become interchangeable with the documentary traces left in their wake. Why does Butler keep notes? Did he even wish to have them published after his death? “They are not meant for publication,” he claims, yet he spent the last decade of his life revising them. He refined them, typed them up, and left them to be discovered when he died. Some editors think this indicates that he obviously intended them for posthumous release.12 Others are not so sure.13 In a series of meta-­notes that reflect on his own habit of writing down such things, he vacillates about the nature of this kind of writing. Unsure of its merit, he nevertheless continues to improve it as best he can: I greatly question the use of making the notes at all. I find I next to never refer to them or use them. Nevertheless I suppose they help to clear one’s mind, and I have got into a groove of making them. I am aware that there are many of which I ought to be ashamed on a great variety of grounds, but as they came, so as a general rule I leave them—­good bad and indifferent.14

He resumes this theme of being ashamed of their inconsequentiality and frivolity later: “I am alarmed at the triviality of many of these notes,” he writes, yet adds that “it was less trouble to let them go than to think whether they ought not to be destroyed.”15 By “let them go” here, he means leave them as they are, even though he includes warnings in these prefaces that he believes most of them to be fit for the bin. As Darwin did with his “Old and Useless Notes,” however, Butler allows them to simply remain in existence. Butler’s sense of their potential value relates to each individual note and its success or failure. They are variously “good, bad, and indifferent,” he says. Some likely should have gone into the incinerator, while others

191

192

CONCLUSION

might have some worth in “throwing light upon the period” in which they were written.16 Yet Butler knows more than most that his own assessments of potential value, usefulness or uselessness, consequence or inconsequence, can only tell part of the story. Like Lee cultivating the magic of limbo, he accepts and even wishes for his writings to generate consequences that he cannot foresee. Leaving behind a trove of unconnected notations, “a million fragments” dispersed into the world, may have seemed to him the best way of inhabiting his strange sense of time and causality, as well as delivering these to the future. Behind the production of all the notes and their relative quality lies an entire ethos of textual transmission and its relation to long stretches of time. Is keeping notes vanity? Butler explains that some in his circle call his note-­taking “a piece of ridiculous conceit” on his part “since it implies a confidence that I shall one day be regarded as an interesting person.” The motif of the posthumously discovered manuscript was already well rehearsed when he was working, and he would not be the first writer to carefully time publications he would not be around to see in print. Butler might have seen the notes as an addendum to his books, hoping perhaps that if those books ascended to canonical prominence the notes might help to give some sense of who he was. He thought this rise to fame improbable. Like Vernon Lee and Gerard Manley Hopkins, he would never witness the extensive interest and understanding that people invested in his books. And yet he maintained the practice: “I prefer the modest insurance of keeping up my notes which others may burn or no as they please.”17 He has an ambivalent attitude toward their value, yet seems to intuit that there is something about them (he knows not quite what) that should be preserved for future reactivation or destruction. Butler will take his chances in a series of documentary acts recorded in his notebooks and which the future may choose to destroy or keep. To the accusation of self-­centeredness that his note-­taking provokes, Butler responds that the future is just as likely to forget him as not. In this he anticipates Roland Barthes’s comments on notation and its potential inconsequence that framed the inquiry of Part I: these notes “can return to obscurity, having had no effect whatsoever.”18 This is part of their great charm.

ASYMMETRY

As I have suggested in the preceding chapters, this peaceful acceptance of potential inconsequence enacted by the process of “becoming documents” represents a powerful stylistic gesture but also one that leaves the writings extremely vulnerable to manipulation by others. Minimalist writing of this kind may be conducive to some tranquility of mind and a graceful acceptance of non-­mastery, but it gives an enormous amount of power over to whoever receives these gifts or takes them as trophies “over the range.” Ex Machina depicts exactly this: the stray notations emerging from the flow of a billion souls can, when aggregated, create the conditions of life itself—­something that most of the people using the technologies at Bateman’s disposal would never dream of. For Lee and Butler, the future swirled in a state of imaginative and creative potential. They could direct their writings toward it, relinquishing their ownership over their own ideas but also giving up responsibility for standing by them. That which Butler conceived as an issue related to time (which he calls “the only true purgatory”), that is, the difference between what his notes are now and what they might be in the future, is for twenty-­first-­ century people primarily an issue of form. As noted earlier, we now swiftly deposit writings in online venues that in the past we might have left for future readers to discover. The owners of such venues reform and use these materials in ways that are completely orthogonal to the ones that spurred our creating them in the first place. In the aptly titled We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves, John Cheney-­Lippold argues that “online we are not who we think we are” and that “for companies like Google, algorithms extrapolate not just a future but a present based on the present.”19 There is a decisive formal difference between what we do on our side of the screen and what happens beyond it. We have accelerated the time that it takes for other agents (either other users of the same media or the proprietors of those media) to conscript those materials and remake them as they would like. One result of this arrangement is the feeling that what transpires on this side of the screen is formless, simply a heap of meaningless fragments that will never coalesce, or that such coalescence is precisely something over which we have no control. Studying the notes of these Victorian

193

194

CONCLUSION

writers against the backdrop of the contemporary world, however, I have come to think that the marginal inscriptions made about ephemeral or minor experiences make up a locus of reserve value made necessary by the changeable existential texture of our lives. In these writings, personalities, environments, and texts blur together, previously unseen connections might be imagined, and such “grace notes” of our lives can vary and linger without our hastily prodding them on to more supposedly useful ends. For who knows what life they could live.

NOTES

Notework: An Introduction

1. Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 97. 2. “The Leonardo da Vinci Codex Hammer,” sale 8030, Christie’s New York (11 November 1994). 3. “Turing, Alan Mathison, 1912–­54, Autograph Ms s.” American Book Prices Current, accessed September 30, 2019, www.bookpricescurrent.com 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Theory of Life,” Collected Works, Vol. 11: Shorter Works and Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 378. 5. Cleanth Brooks, “The Formalist Critics,” The Kenyon Review 13, no. 1 (1951), 72. 6. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 44. 7. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Selections from the Note-­Books of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. T. Weiss (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1945), 5. 8. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933). 195

196

N O T E S T O I nt r od u ction

9. Suzanne Briet, What Is Documentation?, trans. Ronald Day and Laurent Martinet with Hermina G.B. Anghelescu (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2006), 29. 10. Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (New York: Random House, 2010), 364. 11. Marielle Macé, Styles: critique de nos formes de vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2016), 34. 12. D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 29. 19, 10, 17. 13. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–­1844: Geology, Transmutation, Metaphysical Inquiries, ed. Paul H. Barrett and Peter J. Gautrey, et al. (London: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 599. 14. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volume III: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks, ed. Leslie Higgins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 517. 15. Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 54. 16. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Editions, 2004), 47, 93. 17. Seth Lerer, Error and the Academic Self (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 103–­74. 18. Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, eds., Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-­textes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 2–­3. 19. Anne-­Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008), 25, 64. Anna Kornbluh has recently put this dilemma in different terms, critiquing the “destituent chaos” celebrated by so many contemporary literary critics and seeking to account for how literature and its critics might seek to build rather than dismantle. I wish to thank Kornbluh for allowing me to preview her introduction. Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 2. 20. Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 63; Richard Yeo, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 71; William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), xv; Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990), 30–­78; David Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3–­22. 21. Darwin, Notebooks, 1836–­1844. 22. Linda Hughes, “George Eliot’s ‘Greek Vocabulary’ Notebook as Commodity and Rare Artefact,” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 84, Fall (2016). https:// journals.openedition.org/cve/2973

N O T E S T O I nt r od u ction

23. Ronald Day, Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 11. 24. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 428. 25. Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 109,” http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-109 26. See Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Sam See, Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020); Joan Richardson, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 27. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (New York: Verso, 2007). 28. Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 3. See also Lisa Gitelman, “Holding Electronic Networks by the Wrong End,” amodern 2: Network Archaeology (October 2013): http://amodern.net/article/ holding-electronic-networks-by-the-wrong-end/ 29. Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 2. 30. Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971); Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia, trans. David W. Wood (Albany: The State University of New York Press, 2011). 31. Schlegel, Lucinde, 150. 32. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2006), 50. 33. Roland Barthes, Prétexte: Roland Barthes: colloque de Cerisy, ed. Antoine Compagnon (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1978), 368. 34. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 22. See also Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 35. Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 171. 36. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 9. 37. Yury Tynyanov, “The Literary Fact,” in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (London: Routledge, 2000), 39. 38. Ibid., 31, 32. 39. Ibid., 33. 40. Ibid., 32.

197

198

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 1

41. Emily Van Buskirk, Lydia Ginzburg’s Prose: Reality in Search of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 2, 3, 5. 42. Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 2. See Yopie Prins, “What is Historical Poetics?” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 1 (2016), 13–­40; Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Meaning (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 125. On genre as an aesthetic judgment unto itself, see Justin Sider, “Aesthetic Categories and the Social Life of Genre,” Victorian Studies 59, 3 (Spring 2017): 450–­56. 43. Samuel Butler, The Note-­Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Hans-­Peter Breuer (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 363.  44. Alan Liu, Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 48–­49. 45. François, Open Secrets, 21. 46. David Sarno, “Twitter Creator Jack Dorsey Illuminates the Site’s Founding Document. Part I,” Los Angeles Times, 18 February 2009. https://latimesblogs. latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-creator.html 47. Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011); Siva Vaidyanathan, Antisocial: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019). 48. Barthes, Preparation, 90–­91. 49. Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 124. 50. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry, rev. ed. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1950), 526–­27. Chapter 1: Styles of Inconsequence

1. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Diary of the Voyage of the H.M.S. “Beagle,” ed. Nora Barlow (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933). 2. Gavin de Beer, ed. “Darwin’s Notebooks on Transmutation of Species. Part 1. First Notebook [B] (July 1837–­February 1838),” Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) 2, 2 (January 1960): 23–­73. 3. Charles Darwin, Metaphysics, Materialism & the Evolution of Mind: Early Writings of Charles Darwin, ed. Paul H. Barrett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 4. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–­1844: Geology, Transmutation, Metaphysical Inquiries, ed. Paul H. Barrett et al. (London: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 180, 375–­76. 5. Ibid., 8.

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 1

6. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species: A Fascimile of the First Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 149. 7. Darwin, Notebooks, 1836–­1844, 84. 8. Darwin, Origin, 81, emphasis added. 9. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction, 3rd ed. (London: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3, xiv. 10. George Levine, Darwin the Writer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1. 11. See David Amigoni, Colonies, Cults, and Evolution: Literature, Science, and Culture in Nineteenth-­Century Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Cannon Schmitt, Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 12. On analogy and Darwin, see Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 13. Dorothy Mermin and Herbert Tucker, eds, Victorian Literature 1830–­1900 (Boston: Thomson Heinle, 2002), 505, 508 14. Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 2. 15. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Editions, 2004), 242. 16. In this I am in agreement with recent arguments for a strongly disciplinary (rather than interdisciplinary) concept of form. See Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, “Form and Explanation,” in Jonathan Kramnick, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 37–­56. 17. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks from the Voyage of the Beagle, ed. Gordon Chancellor and John van Wyhe (London: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1. 18. Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 29,” accessed on 19 September 2018, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-29 19. Charles Darwin, Autobiographies (London: Penguin Books, 1986), 10, 31, 33. 20. Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 110,” accessed on 19 September 2018, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-110 21. Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 109,” accessed on 19 September 2019, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-109 22. Darwin, Autobiographies, 45.

199

200

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 1

23. Darwin, Notebooks from the Voyage, 4. 24. Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Diary, vii, viii. 25. Ibid., vii 26. Darwin, Notebooks from the Voyage, 45–­46. 27. Ibid., 42, 44, 46, 84, 145 28. Patricia Curd, ed., A Presocratics Reader (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), 49. 29. Darwin, Notebooks from the Voyage, 26. 30. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 257; Griffiths, Age of Analogy, 211–­12. 31. Darwin, Notebooks from the Voyage, 24. 32. Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, trans. Robert Hurley et al (New York: The New Press, 1997), 212. 33. On the mix of reading notes and observations in scientific notebooks, including Darwin’s, see Lorraine Daston, “Taking Note(s),” Isis 95, 3 (2004): 443–­48. 34. Darwin, Notebooks, 1836–­1844, 195, 187, 195. 35. Ibid., 224, 310, 300. 36. Darwin, Autobiographies, 46. 37. Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, transcr. and ann. Paul H. Barrett (London: Wildwood House, 1974), 122. 38. George Levine, Dying to Know: Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5. 39. Darwin, Notebooks, 1836–­1844, 539. 40. Charles Darwin, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 14. 41. Darwin, Notebooks, 1836–­1844, 529, 222–­23, 372, 233. 42. Ibid., 420, 257, 263, 291. 43. Ibid., 591, 523, 554. 44. Ibid., 350–­51. 45. Darwin, Notebooks from the Voyage, 122. 46. Charles Darwin, “Beagle Animal Notes,” The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, ed. John van Wyhe. 2002–­. http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/Keynes_Animal_notes_Intro.html 47. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (New York: Modern Library 1993), 47. 48. Ibid. 49. Darwin, Notebooks, 1836–­1844, 352. 50. Ibid., 192. 51. Ibid., 556. 52. Ibid., 555. 53. Ibid., 589.

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 1

54. Ibid., 542. 55. Ibid., 434. 56. Ibid., 211. 57. Ibid., 192. 58. Ibid., 350, 351. 59. While most natural historians affirmed the commonplace that “nature does nothing in vain,” one of Darwin’s British antecedents took a slightly different view of the subject. I have already mentioned the great debt that Darwin owed to William Paley, a debt acknowledged in the former’s autobiography. Paley’s Natural Theology includes an account of apparently useless parts. It is likely within this text that Darwin first encountered the notion during his time at Cambridge. Paley writes of the spleen: “It is possible that the spleen may be merely a stuffing, a soft cushion to fill up a vacancy or hollow, which unless occupied, would leave the package loose and unsteady.” William Paley, Natural Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 105. 60. John van Wyhe, “Mind the Gap,” in The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, ed. John van Wyhe. 2002–­. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset? viewtype=text&itemID=A544&pageseq=1 61. Darwin, Origin, 81. 62. Other critics have proposed ways of reading Darwin as a theorist of variable plenitude instead of ruthless competition. See in particular Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 63. Darwin, Origin, 149–­50. 64. Ibid. 65. See Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1897) and Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics: Thoughts on the Application of “Natural Selection” and “Inheritance” to Political Society (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1916). 66. van Wyhe, “Mind the Gap.” 67. Compare Leonardo’s fears about his findings in his own notebooks: “How by a certain machine many may stay some time under water. And how and wherefore I do not describe my method of remaining under water and how long I can remain without eating. And I do not publish nor divulge these, by reason of the evil nature of men, who would use them for assassinations at the bottom of the sea by destroying ships, and sinking them, together with the men in them.” Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, ed. Jean P. Richter and R. C. Bell (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 11. 68. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th edition (London: John Murray, 1872), 401.

201

202

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 2

69. Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth S. Vrba, “Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science of Form,” Paleobiology 8, no. 1 (1982): 4–­15. 70. See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 9–­10. 71. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 255. 72. Darwin, Notebooks, 1836–­1844, 170, 81, 85, 599. 73. Ibid., 599. 74. Ibid., 604–­5, 617. 75. Ibid., 602. 76. Ibid., 606, 603, 600, 602. 77. Ruth Millikan, “Useless Content,” in Teleosemantics, ed. Graham MacDonald and David Papineau, 100–­114 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 78. See Dennis Dutton, The Art Instinct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Chapter 2: Thinking Pieces

1. “Leaf picked by George Gissing and sent to Morley Roberts from Lago Averno [Naples] [1888 Nov. 9] flora (1 item),” George Gissing Collection, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. 2. George Gissing, New Grub Street (Peterborough: Broadview Editions, 2007), 176. 3. Ibid., 118. 4. Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge, eds., George Gissing: The Critical Heritage (Boston: Routledge, 1972), 518, 533. 5. Aaron Matz, “George Gissing’s Ambivalent Realism,” Nineteenth-­Century Literature 59, no. 2 (2004): 212–­48. See also Aaron Matz, Satire in an Age of Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 6. On the relation between positivism and the social project of literary realism, see Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-­American World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). For an account of the novel as a purposive form intended to generate “social harmony” through processes of identification, see Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000) as well as Rachel Ablow, Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007).

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 2

7. By “plot” I intend the definition given by Peter Brooks: “the design and intention of narrative, what shapes a story and gives it a certain direction or intent of meaning.” Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), xi. 8. Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 18. 9. For an account of Barthes’s late work as hedonistic, see Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (London: Oxford University Press, 2002), 76–­86. On Gissing’s “decadence,” see Diana Maltz, “Practical Aesthetics and Decadent Rationale in George Gissing,” Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 1 (2000): 55–­71. 10. Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose, 7. 11. Jaffe, Scenes, 29. Others view positivist sociology as an attempt to establish itself as a reconciliation of fictional and scientific practices. Lepenies, for instance, argues that “it has oscillated between a scientific orientation which has led it to ape the natural sciences and a hermeneutic attitude which has shifted the discipline towards the realm of literature.” Between Literature and Science, 1. 12. Auguste Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 13. 13. George Gissing to Algernon Gissing, May 9, 1880, in The Collected Letters of George Gissing, eds. Paul F. Matthiessen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas, 9 vols. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990–­96), 1:269. 14. Pierre Coustillas, introduction to Essays and Fiction, by George Gissing, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 17. 15. George Gissing, Essays and Fiction, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 94. 16. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 1. 17. Maltz, “Practical Aesthetics,” 57. 18. Gissing, Essays and Fiction, 90, 97. 19. George Gissing to Algernon Gissing, July 18, 1883, in The Collected Letters of George Gissing, 2:146. 20. Heather Love, “The Natural History of Reading” (presented at New Sociologies of Literature seminar, ACLA Annual Meeting, Victoria College, Toronto, 5 April 2013). 21. Gissing, New Grub Street, 82, 447. 22. Ibid., 56. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 417–­18. For an account of this moment, and how it relates to the novel’s larger effort to interpellate its readers and manipulate their sympathetic

203

204

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 2

identifications, see Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-­Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 329–­43. 25. Gissing, New Grub Street, 431. 26. Oxford English Dictionary, “Organ, n.1,” June 2020. 27. Gissing, New Grub Street, 157. 28. Ibid., 60–­61, emphasis added. 29. Ibid., 175, emphasis added. 30. Ibid., 233. 31. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 3. 32. Gissing, New Grub Street, 176, 177, 176. 33. Ibid., 233. 34. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, 141–­48 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc, 1986). 35. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, “Notation After ‘The Reality Effect’: Remaking Reference with Roland Barthes and Sheila Heti,” Representations 125, no. 1 (2014): 80–­102. 36. Barthes, Preparation, 11. 37. Ibid., 4. 38. Ibid., 5. 39. Ibid., 14. 40. Ibid., 14–­15. 41. Ibid., 17, emphasis in original. 42. Ibid., 19, emphasis added. 43. Ibid., 76–­101. 44. Ibid., 90-­91, emphasis in original. 45. Ibid., 18, emphasis in original. 46. Ibid., 18, 30. 47. Ibid., 88, 18, 109, emphasis in original. 48. George Gissing, “Commonplace Book,” The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. 49. Jacob Korg, “Introduction,” in George Gissing’s Commonplace Book: A Manuscript in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, ed. Jacob Korg (New York: New York Public Library, 1962), 10. 50. George Gissing, George Gissing’s Commonplace Book: A Manuscript in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library (New York: New York Public Library, 1962), 54. 51. Ibid., 53

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 3

52. George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 52. 53. Gissing, Commonplace Book: A Manuscript, 67. 54. David Grylls, The Paradox of Gissing (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 6. 55. Gissing, Commonplace Book: A Mansucript, 22. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 26. 58. Ibid., 39, 29, 23. 59. Ibid., 66, 22. 60. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 4–­6. 61. Gissing, Commonplace Book: A Manuscript, 67. 62. Gissing, Ryecroft, 5, 6, 7. 63. This idea owes something to Audrey Jaffe’s way of linking desire, fantasy, and form in The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 64. Gissing, Ryecroft, 21. 65. Ibid., 44 66. Ibid., 66. 67. Ibid., 39. 68. Ibid., 111, 12, 49, 29. 69. Ibid., 12. 70. Ibid., 110–­11. 71. Coustillas and Partridge, George Gissing. Chapter 3: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Microsocial Form

1. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord,” The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman H. MacKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 201. 2. Lisa Gitelman, “Holding Electronic Networks by the Wrong End,” amodern 2: Network Archaeology (October 2013): http://amodern.net/article/holdingelectronic-networks-by the-wrong-end/ 3. Richard Cross, “Medieval Theories of Haecceity,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2014 Edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2014/ entries/medieval-haecceity/ 4. Dennis Sobolev, “Inscape Revisited,” English 51, no. 201 (2002), 227. 5. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 54.

205

206

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 3

6. Howard Fulweiler, Here a Captive Heart: Studies in the Sentimental Journey of Modern Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993), 109. 7. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volume III: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks, ed. Leslie Higgins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 366, 462, 457. 8. Oxford English Dictionary Online, “inscape, n.,” accessed June 15, 2020. 9. Hopkins, Poetical Works, 141. 10. Hopkins, Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks, 531–­32. 11. “It is the coexistence of the singular and the plural that seems to be the site of inscape for Hopkins,” Brian Willems writes, drawing on W. A. M. Peters’s notion of inscape as a “unified complex” of the qualities of an object (Brian Willems, Hopkins and Heidegger [London: Bloomsbury, 2010], 4). On these and other similar readings, inscape refers less to any specific element or property of an object than to the force that composes elements together. Thus W. H. Gardner writes that inscape can run through a “group of things” (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and Norman H. MacKenzie [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974], xx). J. Hillis Miller goes so far as to say that inscape means “just the opposite of Scotist haecceity,” arguing “it can be a group of objects which together form a pattern” (J. Hillis Miller, “The Creation of the Self in Gerard Manley Hopkins,” ELH 22, no. 4 [1955]: 293–­319). 12. Hopkins, Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks, 526. 13. Martin Dubois, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 12. 14. Hopkins, Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks, 439, 575. 15. Catherine Phillips argues that Hopkins initially practiced his descriptions in visual media, where we find “inscape in practice, felt and used in his drawings before he included the term in his notes.” Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 34. 16. Hopkins, Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks, 484, emphasis added. 17. Ibid. 18. In his commentary on this passage, Sobolev writes that “the unity that is revealed is not the unity of any physical entities but rather the ‘unity’ of their combination. The verb ‘to inscape’ designates the act of revelation of this transient unity.” “Inscape Revisited,” 13. 19. Hopkins, Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks, 446–­47, emphasis added. 20. Anthony Mortimer, “Hopkins: The Stress and the Self,” The Authentic Cadence: Centennial Essays on Gerard Manley Hopkins (Fribourg, Switzerland: University Press Fribourg, 1992), 11. 21. Hopkins, Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks, 503, emphasis added.

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 3

22. Ibid., 509, emphasis added. 23. Ibid., 479, 480, emphasis added. 24. Ibid., 379. 25. Ibid., 587, 589. 26. Ibid., 513. 27. Ibid., 612. 28. Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 90, 32. 29. Harold Garfinkel, “Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Accountable Phenomena of Order, Logic, Reason, Meaning, Method, etc. In and As Of the Essential Haecceity of Immortal Ordinary Society,” Sociological Theory 6, no. 1 (1988): 104. 30. Latour, Reassembling, 54, 13, 64–­65. 31. Heather Love, “Reading the Social: Erving Goffman and Sexuality Studies,” Theory Aside, ed. Jason Potts and Daniel Stout (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 241. 32. Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology, 23, 65. 33. Garfinkel, “Evidence,” 103, emphasis added. 34. Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology, 66. 35. See Heather Love, “Close But Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (2010): 371–­91. 36. Dubois, Poetry of Religious Experience, 4. 37. Fulweiler, Captive Heart, 109. 38. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volumes I & II: Correspondence, ed. R. K. R. Thornton and Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 334. 39. Hopkins, Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks, 289. 40. Sobolev, “Inscape Revisited,” 230. 41. Dubois, Poetry of Religious Experience, 14. 42. Norman White, Hopkins in Ireland (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2002), 23. 43. Hopkins, “The Windhover,” Poetical Works, 144. 44. Hopkins, “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” Poetical Works, 169–­70. 45. Hopkins, “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” Poetical Works, 190. 46. White, Hopkins in Ireland, 24. 47. Dubois, Poetry of Religious Experience, 142. 48. Helen Vendler, The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 40.

207

208

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 4

49. Joseph J. Feeney, SJ, The Playfulness of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 129. 50. White, Hopkins in Ireland, 40–­41. 51. Hopkins, “To Seem the Stranger Lies My Lot, My Life,” Poetical Works, 181. 52. Leslie Higgins and Michael Suarez, SJ, “Introduction,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volume VII: The Dublin Notebook, ed. Leslie Higgins and Michael Suarez, SJ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2. 53. Virgil, Virgil’s Aeneid: Books I, II, and VI, trans. John Dryden, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 64. 54. Hopkins, Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks, 382. 55. Emil Schürer, A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ Vol. 3, trans. Sophia Taylor and Rev. Peter Christie (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1886), 276. 56. Vendler, Breaking, 38. 57. Miller, “The Creation of the Self,” 306, 298. 58. Hopkins, Correspondence, 840. Chapter 4: A Computer Program Called “Wilde”

1. “Unsigned Review, Pall Mall Gazette,” in Karl Beckson, ed., Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1997), 90. 2. Gary Saul Morson, The Long and the Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012), 87. 3. W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger, eds. The Viking Book of Aphorisms (London: Penguin Books, 1981), 1. 4. M. J. Cohen, ed. The Penguin Dictionary of Epigrams (London: Penguin, 2001), 4. 5. Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, eds. Philip E. Smith and Michael Helfand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Regenia Gagnier, “Wilde and the Victorians,” in The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Julia Prewitt Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997); Iain Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 6. My references to the “Commonplace Book” and the “Notebook Kept at Oxford” refer to the page numbers of Smith and Helfand’s Oxford Notebooks. The

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 4

references to the “Notebook on Philosophy” refer to my own transcription and pagination. 7. Richard Jenkyns, “The Beginnings of Greats, 1800–­1872,” in The History of the University of Oxford Vol VI: The Nineteenth Century Part 1, eds. M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 513. 8. M. G. Brock, “A Plastic Structure,” in The History of the University of Oxford Vol VII: The Nineteenth Century Part 2, eds. M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3. 9. W. H. Walsh, “The Zenith of Greats,” in The History of the University of Oxford Vol VII: The Nineteenth Century Part 2, eds. M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 317. 10. Brock, “A Plastic Structure,” 18–­19. 11. Dowling, Hellenism, 119. 12. Jillian M. Hess, “The Scholar’s Scrapbook: Reading Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century,” Book History 21 (2018): 214–­17. 13. Montagu Burrows, Pass and Class: An Oxford Guide-­Book through the Courses of Literae Humaniores, Mathematics, Natural Science, and Law and Modern History (Oxford and London: J. H. and Jas Parker, 1860), 43, 46, 48. 14. For a different take on how to “re-­ethicize” aphoristic speech through readings of the social comedies, see Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 147–­76. 15. Oscar Wilde, “Trinity College Notebook,” MS W6721M3 E96. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Oscar Wilde and His Circle. Los Angeles. 16. Oscar Wilde, “Notebook on Philosophy,” 1876–­1878. MS W6721M3 N9113. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Oscar Wilde and His Circle. Los Angeles. 17. On how the “eclectic” Victorian personality “risks the integrity of his or her knowledge” for an “expansive vision” of democratic possibility, see Christine Bolus-­Reichert, The Age of Eclecticism: Literature and Culture in Britain 1815–­1885 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009). 18. Dowling, Hellenism, 119. 19. Wilde, Oxford Notebooks, 113, 125, 121, 137. 20. Other critics have elegantly addressed the way in which Wilde’s interest in collections extends from his utopianism, and that this interest is not reducible to a fully commodified capitalist order. In Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), Carolyn Lesjak reads Wilde’s celebration of “collection” as a desire for use that is detached from “use-­ value,” taking her lead from Walter Benjamin. In “‘One Single Ivory Cell’: Oscar

209

210

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 4

Wilde and the Brain,” Journal of Victorian Culture 17, no. 2 (2012): 183–­205, Elisha Cohn tracks Wilde’s interest in the early neurosciences, arguing that he treats brain cells (in this period still theoretical) as aesthetic objects that retain their autonomy even as they assemble in the minds of individuals. 21. Wilde, “Notebook on Philosophy,” 1. 22. Wilde, Oxford Notebooks, 163. 23. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5, emphasis in original. 24. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 246. 25. Latour, Reassembling, 134–­35. 26. On the turn to relationality as a response to the constriction of critique, see Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). The link Felski draws between the refusal of periodization and sociality places her in league with many other critics trying to generate new sociality out of broken methodologies. 27. Wilde, “Notebook on Philosophy,” 4–­6. 28. Wilde, Oxford Notebooks, 117, 109. 29. Ibid., 125, 97. 30. Philip E. Smith and Michael Helfand, “Introduction,” in Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, edited by Philip E. Smith and Michael Helfand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 5. 31. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 118. 32. Oscar Wilde, Complete Works Vol. V: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man, ed. Josephine Guy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 83, 136, 246. 33. Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003), 1242. 34. Wilde, “Notebook on Philosophy,” 16. 35. Ibid., 12. 36. Ibid., 22. 37. Dowling, Hellenism, 64. 38. Walsh, “Zenith,” 316. 39. Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 137–­39. 40. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, trans. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 25. 41. Francis Bacon, “The Advancement of Learning,” The Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press), 243.

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 4

42. Bacon, New Organon, 81. 43. Bacon, “Advancement,” 243. 44. Jonathan Smith, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-­ Century Literary Imagination (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 19. 45. Walter Pater, Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1889), 2. 46. Wilde, “Notebook on Philosophy,” 289. 47. Wilde, Oxford Notebooks, 158. 48. Wilde, “Notebook on Philosophy,” 289. 49. Wilde, Complete Works, 1252. 50. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1. 51. Bacon, New Organon, 20, 80. 52. Wilde, “Notebook on Philosophy,” 151. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 179. 55. Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 154–­55. 56. Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe and Jean-­Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 45. 57. Schlegel, Lucinde, 189. 58. Beckson, Critical Heritage, 81, 71, 37. 59. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 220; Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in Discourse 1850–­1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 110. 60. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 170. 61. Ibid., 183–­84. 62. Ibid., 184. 63. Pater, Appreciations, 106. 64. Wilde, Dorian Gray, 189. 65. Ibid., 202. 66. Ibid., 204–­5. 67. Ibid., 205. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 251, 342. 70. Ibid., 279–­80. 71. Ibid., 274–­75.

211

212

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 5

Chapter 5 : Unrecovering Vernon Lee

1. Vernon Lee, The Enchanted Woods (London: John Lane, 1895), 170. 2. Vernon Lee, The Spirit of Rome: Leaves from a Diary (London: John Lane, 1906), 9–­10. 3. Vernon Lee, Althea (London: John Lane, 1910), x. 4. Vernon Lee, The Beautiful (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 131. 5. Benjamin Morgan, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 250. 6. Many articles and books about Lee include statements about her untimeliness and neglect. I offer Richard Dellamora’s formulation as an example: “Vernon Lee is a prolific, imaginative writer whose moment came neither in the nineteenth-­century fin de siècle, in which she wrote her best-­known work, nor in the following century although she continued to publish until the 1930s. Will her moment come in the twenty-­first century? For now, the answer appears to be yes.” “Vernon Lee’s Moment,” Nineteenth-­Century Gender Studies 2, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 1–­12, https://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue22/dellamora.htm 7. Kristen Mahoney, “Pacifism and Post-­Victorian Aestheticism: Vernon Lee at the Margins of the Twentieth Century,” English Literature in Transition 56, no. 3 (2013), 314. 8. Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 1 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1975–­1980), 400. 9. OED, s.v. “garrulous,” accessed October 1, 2019, https://www.oed.com/ view/Entry/76891?redirectedFrom=garrulous 10. For important articulations of Lee’s relationship to science, see David Sweeney Coombs, Reading with the Senses: Victorian Literature and Science (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019); Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Morgan, Outward Mind. 11. Lee, “Limbo,” in Limbo and Other Essays (London: Grant Richards, 1897), 18, 4, 5, 4. 12. Ibid., 10, emphasis in original. 13. Ibid., 6. 14. Ibid., 7, emphasis added. 15. See Angela Leighton, “Seeing Nothing: Vernon Lee’s Ghostly Aesthetics,” in On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 99–­124. 16. Vernon Lee, Hortus Vitae (London: John Lane, 1904), 189, 194–­95. 17. Woolf’s comment is cited above. James critiqued her “ferocity” and

N O T E S T O C ha p te r 5

sexuality: Henry James: Letters. Volume III: 1883–­1895, ed. Leon Edel (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974–­1984), 83. Max Beerbohm called Lee a “dreadful little lady” on his copy of Gospels of Anarchy, which is quoted in Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856–­1935 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 3. 18. Vernon Lee, Baldwin (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1886), 209. 19. Morgan, Outward Mind, 5–­6. 20. Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-­Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London: John Lane, 1912), 2, 1. 21. Lee, The Beautiful, 130, emphasis added. 22. Ibid., 132. 23. David Sweeney Coombs, “Uncommon Sense: Aesthetics, Liberalism, and Late Victorian Cognitive Science” (PhD diss, Cornell University, 2011), https:// ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/33514, 111. 24. Morgan, Outward Mind, 230. 25. Lee, The Beautiful, 48-­49, emphasis in original. 26. Clive Bell, Art (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1914), 8. 27. Clementina Anstruther-­Thomson, Art and Man: Essays and Fragments (London: John Lane, 1924), 46. 28. Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, 131. 29. Ibid., 339, 293, 339, emphasis in original. 30. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 28. 31. Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, 251, 314, 243. Emphasis in the original. 32. Ibid., 303, emphasis in original. 33. I am grateful to Andrew Blackley for these references. 34. Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 173–­74. 35. Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, 313. 36. Ibid., 259, emphasis in original. 37. Ibid., 260. 38. Jonah Siegel, “Material of Form: Vernon Lee at the Vatican and Out of It,” Victorian Studies 55, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 192–­93. 39. Lee and Anstruther-­Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, 268. 40. Ibid., 22–­23, 253, 257. 41. Ibid., 289–­90. 42. Ibid., 270. 43. Ibid., 294-­95. 44. Ibid., 304, 300.

213

214

NOTES TO CONCLUSION

45. Vernon Lee, The Handling of Words (London: John Lane, 1923), 107, 53. 46. Ibid., 99. 47. Ibid., 97–­98. 48. Ibid., 105. 49. Ibid., 37, 53-­54. 50. Ibid., 46, 55, 45. 51. Ibid., 76–­77. 52. Dames, The Physiology of the Novel, 176–­90, 205, 168. 53. Lee, Handling, 136. 54. Ibid., 86–­87, 93. 55. Anstruther-­Thomson, Art and Man, 53–­54, emphasis added. 56. Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, 324–­25. Conclusion: Asymmetry

1. Alex Garland, dir., Ex Machina (Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 2014), Netflix, 16:20. 2. Ibid., 1:10:00. 3. Ibid., 1:19:00 4. Dennis Tenen, Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2017), 2, 25. 5. Samuel Butler, “Darwin among the Machines,” in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement with Other Early Essays, 179–­85 (London: A. C. Fifield, 1914). http:// nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html 6. Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (London: Trübner & Co., Ludgate Hill, 1878), 59. 7. Samuel Butler, The Note-­Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1917) , 13–­15. 8. Samuel Butler, Erewhon, or, Over the Range (London: Penguin Classics, 1974), 218. 9. Samuel Butler, The Note-­Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Hans-­Peter Breuer (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 81, 126. 10. James Paradis, “Butler after Butler,” in Samuel Butler: Victorian Against the Grain. ed. James Paradis, 362–­63 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 11. Samuel Butler, Further Extracts from the Note-­Books of Samuel Butler, ed. A. T. Bartholomew (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), 171. 12. Hans-­Peter Breuer, “Introduction,” in Samuel Butler, The Note-­Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Hans-­Peter Breuer, 1–­48 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984). 13. Henry Festing Jones, “A Preface to the Original Edition,” in Samuel

N O T E S T O C oncl u sion

Butler, The Note-­Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1917), x. 14. Butler, Note-­Books, ed. Breuer, 57. 15. Butler, Note-­Books, ed. Jones, 215. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 374. 18. Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 90. 19. John Cheney-­Lippold, We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 9.

215

This page intentionally left blank

BIBLIOGR APHY

Ablow, Rachel. Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. New York: Verso Books, 2006. Allan, David. Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Amigoni, David. Colonies, Cults, and Evolution: Literature, Science, and Culture in Nineteenth-­Century Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Anstruther-­Thomson, Clementina. Art and Man: Essays and Fragments. London: John Lane, 1924. Auden, W. H., and Louis Kronenberger, eds. The Viking Book of Aphorisms. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Bacon, Francis. “The Advancement of Learning.” The Major Works. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. ———­. The New Organon, translated by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 217

218

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bagehot, Walter. Physics and Politics: Thoughts on the Application of “Natural Selection” and “Inheritance” to Political Society. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1916. ———­. The Preparation of the Novel, translated by Kate Briggs. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. ———­. Prétexte: Roland Barthes: colloque de Cerisy, edited by Antoine Compagnon. Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1978. ———­. Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard, 141–­48. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc., 1986. ———­. S/Z, translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Beckson, Karl, ed. Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1997. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction. 3rd Edition. London: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Bell, Clive. Art. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1914. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Bersani, Leo. Is the Rectum a Grave? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Blair, Ann. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Bolus-­Reichert, Christine. The Age of Eclecticism: Literature and Culture in Britain 1815–­1885. Columbia: Ohio State University Press, 2009. Breuer, Hans-­Peter. “Introduction.” In The Note-­Books of Samuel Butler, edited by Hans-­Peter Breuer, 1–­48. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984. Briet, Suzanne. What Is Documentation?, translated by Ronald E. Day and Laurent Martinet, with Hermina G. B. Anghelescu. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2006. Brock, M. G. “A Plastic Structure.” In The History of the University of Oxford Vol VII: The Nineteenth Century Part 2, edited by M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Brooks, Cleanth. “The Formalist Critics.” The Kenyon Review 13, no. 1 (1951): 72–­ 81. ———­, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Poetry. Revised Edition. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1950. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage Books, 1985.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Julia Prewitt. Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997. Browne, Janet. Charles Darwin: Voyaging. New York: Random House, 2010. Burrows, Montagu. Pass and Class: An Oxford Guide-­Book through the Courses of Literae Humaniores, Mathematics, Natural Science, and Law and Modern History. Oxford and London: J. H. and Jas Parker, 1860. Butler, Samuel. “Darwin among the Machines.” In A First Year in Canterbury Settlement with Other Early Essays, 179–­85. London: A. C. Fifield, 1914. http:// nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html ———­. Erewhon, or, Over the Range. London: Penguin Classics, 1974. ———­. Further Extracts from the Note-­Books of Samuel Butler, edited by A. T. Bartholomew. London: Jonathan Cape, 1934. ———­. Life and Habit. London: Trübner & Co., Ludgate Hill, 1878. ———­. The Note-­Books of Samuel Butler, edited by Hans-­Peter Breuer. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984. ———­. The Note-­Books of Samuel Butler, edited by Henry Festing Jones. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1917. Buurma, Rachel Sagner, and Laura Heffernan. “Notation After ‘The Reality Effect’: Remaking Reference with Roland Barthes and Sheila Heti.” Representations 125, no. 1 (2014): 80–­102. Cheney-­Lippold, John. We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Claybaugh, Amanda. The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-­American World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. Cohen, M. J., ed. The Penguin Dictionary of Epigrams. London: Penguin, 2001. Cohn, Elisha. “‘One Single Ivory Cell’: Oscar Wilde and the Brain.” Journal of Victorian Culture 17, no. 2 (2012): 183–­205. Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Works, Vol. 11, Shorter Works and Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Comte, Auguste. Introduction to Positive Philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988. Coombs, David Sweeney. Reading with the Senses: Victorian Literature and Science. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. ———­. “Uncommon Sense: Aesthetics, Liberalism, and Late Victorian Cognitive Science.” PhD. diss., Cornell University, 2011. https://ecommons.cornell.edu/ handle/1813/33514 Coustillas, Pierre and Colin Partridge, eds. George Gissing: The Critical Heritage. Boston: Routledge, 1972.

219

220

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Craft, Christopher. Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in Discourse 1850–­1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Cross, Richard. “Medieval Theories of Haecceity.”  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  Summer 2014 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2014/entries/medieval-haecceity/ Culler, Jonathan. Roland Barthes: A Very Short Introduction. London: Oxford University Press, 2002. Curd, Patricia, ed. A Presocratics Reader. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011. Dames, Nicholas. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Darwin Correspondence Project. “Letter no. 29.” Accessed on 19 September 2018. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-29 ———­. “Letter no. 109.” Accessed on 19 September 2018. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-109 ———­. “Letter no. 110.” Accessed on 19 September 2018. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-110Darwin, Charles. Autobiographies. London: Penguin Books, 1986. ———­. “Beagle Animal Notes.” The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, edited by John van Wyhe. 2002–­. http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/Keynes_Animal_notes_Intro.html ———­. Charles Darwin’s Diary of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, edited by Nora Barlow. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933. ———­. Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–­1844: Geology, Transmutation, Metaphysical Inquiries, edited by Paul H. Barrett et al. London: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ———­. Charles Darwin’s Notebooks from the Voyage of the Beagle, edited by Gordon Chancellor and John van Wyhe. London: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———­. Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. ———­. Metaphysics, Materialism & the Evolution of Mind: Early Writings of Charles Darwin, edited by Paul H. Barrett. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. ———­. On the Origin of Species: A Fascimile of the First Edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. ———­. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th edition. London: John Murray, 1872. ———­. The Voyage of the Beagle. New York: Modern Library, 1993. Daston, Lorraine. “Taking Note(s).” Isis 95, no. 3 (2004): 443–­48. da Vinci, Leonardo. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, edited by Jean P. Richter and R. C. Bell. New York: Dover Publications, 1970.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Dawson, Gowan. Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Day, Ronald. Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. de Beer, Gavin, ed. “Darwin’s Notebooks on Transmutation of Species. Part I. First Notebook [B] (July 1837–­February 1838).” Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) 2, no. 2 (January 1960): 23–­73. Dellamora, Richard. “Vernon Lee’s Moment.” Nineteenth-­Century Gender Studies 2, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 1–­12, https://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue22/dellamora.htm Deppman, Jed, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, eds. Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-­textes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Dubois, Martin. Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Dutton, Dennis. The Art Instinct. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Editions, 2004. Feeney, Joseph J., SJ. The Playfulness of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Foucault, Michel. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, translated by Robert Hurley et al. New York: The New Press, 1997. François, Anne-­Lise. Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008. Fulweiler, Howard. Here a Captive Heart: Studies in the Sentimental Journey of Modern Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 1993. ———­. “Wilde and the Victorians.” In The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Garfinkel, Harold. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002. ———­. “Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Accountable Phenomena of Order, Logic, Reason, Meaning, Method, etc. In and As Of the Essential Haecceity of Immortal Ordinary Society.” Sociological Theory 6, no. 1 (1988): 103–­9.

221

222

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Garland, Alex, dir. Ex Machina. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 2014. Netflix. Gissing, George. “Commonplace Book.” The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. ———­. The Collected Letters of George Gissing, edited by Paul F. Matthiessen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas. 9 vols. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990-­96. ———­. Essays and Fiction, edited by Pierre Coustillas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970. ———­. George Gissing’s Commonplace Book: A Manuscript in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, edited by Jacob Korg. New York: New York Public Library, 1962. ———­. New Grub Street. Peterborough: Broadview Editions, 2007. ———­. The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———­. Workers in the Dawn. Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2010. Gitelman, Lisa. “Holding Electronic Networks by the Wrong End.” amodern 2: Network Archaeology (October 2013): http://amodern.net/article/holding-electronic-networks-by-the-wrong-end/ ———­. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Gould, Stephen Jay, and Elizabeth S. Vrba. “Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science of Form.” Paleobiology 8, no. 1 (1982): 4–­15. Griffiths, Devin. The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Gruber, Howard E., ed. Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, transcribed and annotated by Paul H. Barrett. London: Wildwood House, 1974. Grylls, David. The Paradox of Gissing. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986. Gunn, Peter. Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856–­1935. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Hess, Jillian M. “The Scholar’s Scrapbook: Reading Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century.” Book History 21 (2018): 214–­44. Higgins, Leslie, and Michael Suarez, SJ. “Introduction.” In Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volume VII: The Dublin Notebook, edited by Leslie Higgins and Michael Suarez, SJ. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volumes I & II: Correspondence, edited by R. K. R. Thornton and Catherine Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———­. The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volume III: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks, edited by Leslie Higgins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. ———­. The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volume VII: The Dublin Notebook, edited by Leslie Higgins and Michael Suarez, SJ. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. ———­. Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by W. H. Gardner and Norman H. MacKenzie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. ———­. The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Norman H. MacKenzie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ———­. Selections from the Note-­Books of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by T. Weiss. New York: New Directions, 1945. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002. Hughes, Linda. “George Eliot’s ‘Greek Vocabulary’ Notebook as Commodity and Rare Artefact,” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 84, Fall (2016). https://journals. openedition.org/cve/2973 Huxley, Thomas Henry. Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1897. Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Meaning. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Jaffe, Audrey. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. ———­. The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Jagoda, Patrick. Network Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. James, Henry. Henry James: Letters. Volume III: 1883–­1895, edited by Leon Edel. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974–­1984. Jardine, Lisa, and Anthony Grafton. “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy.” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30–­78. Jenkyns, Richard. “The Beginnings of Greats, 1800–­1872.” In The History of the University of Oxford Vol VI: The Nineteenth Century Part 1, edited by M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Jones, Henry Festing. “A Preface to the Original Edition.” In Samuel Butler, The Note-­Books of Samuel Butler, edited by Henry Festing Jones, ix–­xiv. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1917. Joubert, Joseph. The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, translated by Paul Auster. New York: New York Review of Books, 2005. Korg, Jacob. “Introduction.” In George Gissing’s Commonplace Book: A Manuscript

223

224

BIBLIOGRAPHY

in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, edited by Jacob Korg. New York: New York Public Library, 1962. Kornbluh, Anna. The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Kramnick, Jonathan, and Anahid Nersessian. “Form and Explanation,” in Jonathan Kramnick, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness, 37–­56. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Lacoue-­Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-­Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute, translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———­. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–­48. “Leaf picked by George Gissing and sent to Morley Roberts from Lago Averno [Naples] [1888 Nov. 9] flora (1 item).” George Gissing Collection. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Lee, Vernon. Althea. London: John Lane, 1910. ———­. Baldwin. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1886. ———­. The Beautiful. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913. ———­. The Enchanted Woods. London: John Lane, 1895. ———­. The Handling of Words. London: John Lane, 1923. ———­. Hortus Vitae. London: John Lane, 1904. ———­. Limbo and Other Essays. London: Grant Richards, 1897. ———­. The Spirit of Rome: Leaves from a Diary. London: John Lane, 1906. ———­, and Clementina Anstruther-­Thomson. Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. London: John Lane, 1912. Leighton, Angela. “Seeing Nothing: Vernon Lee’s Ghostly Aesthetics.” In On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Lepenies, Wolf. Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Lerer, Seth. Error and the Academic Self. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Lesjak, Carolyn. Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Levine, George. Darwin the Writer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———­. Dying to Know: Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Liu, Alan. Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Love, Heather. “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn.” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (2010): 371–­91. ———­. “The Natural History of Reading.” Presented at New Sociologies of Literature seminar. ACLA Annual Meeting. Victoria College, Toronto. 5 April 2013. ———­. “Reading the Social: Erving Goffman and Sexuality Studies.” Theory Aside, edited by Jason Potts and Daniel Stout. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Macé, Marielle. Styles: critique de nos formes de vie. Paris: Gallimard, 2016. Mahoney, Kristen. “Pacifism and Post-­Victorian Aestheticism: Vernon Lee at the Margins of the Twentieth Century.” English Literature in Transition 56, no. 3 (2013): 313–­42. Maltz, Diana. “Practical Aesthetics and Decadent Rationale in George Gissing.” Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 1 (2000): 55–­71. Matz, Aaron. “George Gissing’s Ambivalent Realism.” Nineteenth-­Century Literature 59, no. 2 (2004): 212–­48. ———­. Satire in an Age of Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Mermin, Dorothy, and Herbert Tucker, eds. Victorian Literature 1830–­1900. Boston: Thomson Heinle, 2002. Miller, D. A. Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005 Miller, J. Hillis. “The Creation of the Self in Gerard Manley Hopkins.” ELH 22, no. 4 (1955): 293–­319. Millikan, Ruth. “Useless Content.” In Teleosemantics, edited by Graham MacDonald and David Papineau, 100–­114. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. New York: Verso, 2007. Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011. Morgan, Benjamin. The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Morson, Gary Saul. The Long and the Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012. Mortimer, Anthony. “Hopkins: The Stress and the Self.” The Authentic Cadence: Centennial Essays on Gerard Manley Hopkins. Fribourg, Switzerland: University Press Fribourg, 1992.

225

226

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia, translated by David W. Wood. Albany: The State University of New York Press, 2011. Paley, William. Natural Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Paradis, James. “Butler after Butler.” In Samuel Butler: Victorian Against the Grain, edited by James Paradis, 362–­63. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pater, Walter. Appreciations. London: Macmillan, 1889. Phillips, Catherine. Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World. London: Oxford University Press, 2007. Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Prins, Yopie. “What Is Historical Poetics?” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 1 (2016): 13–­40. Richardson, Joan. A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Ross, Iain. Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Sarno, David. “Twitter Creator Jack Dorsey Illuminates the Site’s Founding Document. Part I.” Los Angeles Times. 18 February 2009. https://latimesblogs. latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-creator.html Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000. Schlegel, Friedrich. Lucinde and the Fragments, translated by Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971. Schmitt, Cannon. Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Schürer, Emil. A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ. Vol. 3, translated by Sophia Taylor and Rev. Peter Christie. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1886. See, Sam. Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Sherman, William. Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Sider, Justin. “Aesthetic Categories and the Social Life of Genre.” Victorian Studies 59, no. 3 (Spring 2017): 450–­56. Siegel, Jonah. “Material of Form: Vernon Lee at the Vatican and Out of It.” Victorian Studies 55, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 189–­201. ———­. Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-­Century Literary Imagination. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Smith, Philip E., and Michael Helfand. “Introduction.” In Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, edited by Philip E. Smith and Michael Helfand. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Sobolev, Dennis. “Inscape Revisited.” English 51, no. 201 (2002): 219–­34. ———­. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-­Century British Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Tenen, Dennis. Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2017. “Turing, Alan Mathison, 1912–­54, Autograph Ms s.” American Book Prices Current, accessed September 30, 2019. www.bookpricescurrent.com/ Tynyanov, Yury. “The Literary Fact.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 29–­49. London: Routledge, 2000. Vaidyanathan, Siva. Antisocial: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Van Buskirk, Emily. Lydia Ginzburg’s Prose: Reality in Search of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. van Wyhe, John. “Mind the Gap.” In The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, edited by John van Wyhe. 2002–­. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frames et?viewtype=text&itemID=A544&pageseq=1 Vendler, Helen. The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Virgil. Virgil’s Aeneid: Books I, II, and VI, translated by John Dryden, edited by A. Hamilton Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911. Walsh, W. H. “The Zenith of Greats.” In The History of the University of Oxford Vol VII: The Nineteenth Century Part 2, edited by M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. White, Norman. Hopkins in Ireland. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2002. Wilde, Oscar. Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. London: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003. ———­. Complete Works Vol. V: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man, edited by Josephine Guy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———­. “Notebook on Philosophy.” 1876–­1878. MS W6721M3 N9113. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Oscar Wilde and His Circle. Los Angeles. ———­. Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, edited by Philip E. Smith and Michael Helfand. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. ———­. The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Joseph Bristow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

227

228

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———­. “Trinity College Notebook.” MS W6721M3 E96. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Oscar Wilde and His Circle. Los Angeles. Willems, Brian. Hopkins and Heidegger. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 1. London: The Hogarth Press, 1975–­80. ———­. Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Yeo, Richard. Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

INDEX

actor-­network theory, 98, 108 Adorno, Theodor, 15, 141 aesthetic experience: ethics of, 182; everyday factors and associations affecting, 163–­66, 180; evolution and, 55–­56, 160, 178; Hopkins and, 103, 106, 117, 119–­20, 124–­ 25; Lee and, 25, 156–­58, 161–­77, 184–­85; notetaking as crucial in examining, 163–­66, 170, 183; psychology of, 166–­68, 170–­71, 174, 178–­81; scientific approach to, 161–­ 62, 166–­67, 170, 183–­84; and storage function of art, 178–­83; subjective aspect of, 168; therapeutic function of, 170–­71, 183 Allan, David, 10 Anstruther-­Thomson, Clementina (Kit), 158, 164, 166, 170, 177, 183;

Art and Man, 184–­85; Beauty and Ugliness (with Vernon Lee), 171, 174, 177, 184 anti-­systematic thinking: Bacon and, 138–­40; Barthes and, 75–­ 76; counter-­Victorian nature of, 7–­9; Darwin and, 13, 32, 39, 46–­52; Garfinkel and, 97–­98, 108–­10; Gissing and, 22, 61–­62, 68, 88–­89; Hopkins and, 14; Lee and, 182–­84; Romanticism and, 15, 143; sociology critiqued from standpoint of, 66–­67, 98, 107–­9, 118, 135; Wilde and, 135. See also method, critiques of; sociology, critiques of systemizing tendencies in aphorism, 24, 126–­29, 131, 138–­43, 149. See also epigrams 229

230

INDEX

Apollo Belvedere, 171 Apollo of the Tiber, 168–­70 artificial intelligence, 26, 187 Athenaeum (journal), 15, 143 Auden, W. H., 127–­28 Bacon, Francis, 24, 129, 138–­43; The Advancement of Learning, 139; Novum Organum, 138 Barlow, Nora, 4, 29, 36–­37, 39 Barrett, Paul, 41–­42 Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida, 72; on inconsequentiality/uselessness of notes, 21–­22, 192; A Lover’s Discourse, 72, 73; Michelet, 72; Mourning Diary, 72; notework practices of, 63–­64; on the novel, 73–­75, 77; The Preparation of the Novel, 63, 73–­75, 77, 83; “The Reality Effect,” 73; Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 73; on textuality, 84; on the value of notework, 1, 21–­22, 63, 72, 75–­77, 82; on the value of the fragment, 15, 72; Vita Nova, 73, 78 HMS Beagle, 5, 34–­35 beauty, 2 Beer, Gillian, 32–­33, 39 Beerbohm, Max, 161 Bell, Clive, 165 Benjamin, Walter, 15, 52 Berlant, Lauren, 67, 71 Bersani, Leo, 15–­16 Blair, Ann, 10 Blanchot, Maurice, 12 body: in Lee’s aesthetic responses, 5, 166–­67, 175–­76; traces of, in notebooks, 5–­6 Boyle, Susan, 167 Briet, Suzanne, 5 Brontë, Charlotte, 61 Brooks, Cleanth, 2–­3

Browne, Janet, 6 Browne, Thomas, 47 Burrows, Montagu, 130–­31 Butler, Samuel: connection as theme in works of, 189–­90; and Darwin, 20, 26, 189–­90; “Darwin and the Machines,” 190; and documentation, 190–­91; Erewhon, 26, 189–­90; fragments generated in notework of, 191–­92; inconsequentiality/uselessness in notework of, 191–­92; Note-­ Books, 190; notework embraced by, 5, 190–­91; and publicness of notework, 26, 191–­92; reflections on his notework practices, 191–­92; and temporality of notework, 19–­ 20, 24–­26, 192–­93; The Way of All Flesh, 190 Buurma, Rachel Sagner, 73 Cage, John, 88 Cheney-­Lippold, John, 193 Claybaugh, Amanda, 65–­66 Cohen, M. J., 128 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 2–­3 Comte, Auguste, 66 Coombs, David Sweeney, 162, 164 Coustillas, Pierre, 66 Cowley, Abraham, “Ode to the Royal Society,” 140 Craft, Christopher, 145 Dames, Nicholas, 16, 162, 181 Dark Mirror (television show), 129 Darwin, Charles: aesthetic properties of notework of, 4, 22, 34, 38–­39, 52; on HMS Beagle, 5, 36–­38, 48; Beagle Notebooks, 36–­40, 45, 54, 56; Butler and, 20, 26, 189–­90; Charles Darwin’s Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, 4, 29, 36; Charles

INDEX

Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–­1844, 11, 29; Charles Darwin’s Notebooks from the Voyage of the Beagle, 29, 31; on choirs, 7; and collecting function of notework, 32, 38–­39; The Descent of Man, 33, 49, 53; and documentation, 31, 36, 52, 54, 55; education and interests of, 34–­35; emotional expression in notebooks of, 37–­44, 54–­56; ethical meanings of the work of, 50–­52, 56; The Expression of the Emotions, 42, 49, 53; fragmentation in notework of, 30; freedom/disorder in notebooks of, 34, 39–­44, 49; and God, 40–­41, 43, 47–­48, 54–­55; his works as literature, 32–­34; inconsequentiality/uselessness in notework of, 21–­22, 31, 40–­42, 50–­ 51, 53–­57; instrumental approach to notework of, 30; leisure enjoyed by, 12; limits and misapplication of theory of, 50–­52, 62; notework practices of, 6, 10–­11, 30–­31, 36–­ 37; notework’s role in scientific contributions of, 13, 37, 48–­49, 52–­53; “Old and Useless Notes,” 53–­57, 191; On the Origin of Species, 8, 22, 31–­33, 48–­51, 53; playfulness in notework of, 13, 22, 31, 34, 39, 42, 49, 55, 56; publication of unpublished material of, 4, 11, 29–­ 30; and publicness of notework, 41; social/antisocial characteristics of, 31, 34, 41–­42, 49, 51–­52, 54; “Transmutation Notebooks,” 29, 31, 40–­46, 48, 54, 56; uselessness in natural world of interest to, 8, 12–­13, 22, 31–­32, 44–­52, 56, 136, 159–­60; and variability, 13, 18, 19, 31–­32, 44–­50; The Voyage on the Beagle, 36

Darwin, Emma, 48 Darwin Correspondence Project (digital project), 30 Darwin Online (digital project), 30 data. See information da Vinci, Leonardo, 33, 201n67; Codex Leicester, 2 Day, Ronald, 12 de Beer, Gavin, 29, 53 defamiliarization, 16 Deppman, Jed, 9 Derrida, Jacques, 136 Dickens, Charles, 61 digital age: affordances of, 11; asymmetries in, 188–­89; Ex Machina and, 187–­89; fragmentation of thought and experience in, 2, 193; information in, 187–­89; publication of notes in, 187; subjectivity in, 191, 193; Victorian literature from perspective of, 20. See also social media digitization, 11, 19, 30 documentation: Butler and, 190–­91; Darwin and, 31, 36, 52, 54, 55; ethics of, 25; Gissing and, 58, 61–­62, 67, 72, 79, 82, 84, 87–­89; Hopkins and, 9, 14, 23, 96, 102, 105, 125; personal involvement with, 5; practices of, 5; present-­day significance of, 12; Wilde and, 129 Dollimore, Jonathan, 145 Dorsey, Jack, 20 Dowling, Linda, 130, 132 Dubois, Martin, 100–­101, 111 Durkheim, Emile, 109 Edelman, Lee, 16 Eichenbaum, Boris, 16 Eliot, George, 61; Adam Bede, 33; Daniel Deronda Notebooks, 8;

231

232

INDEX

Middlemarch, 7–­9, 34; Middlemarch Notebooks, 8; Quarry for Middlemarch, 8 empathy, 164, 174 epigrams, 127–­28, 144–­51. See also aphorism ethics: of aesthetic experience, 182; in Darwin’s work, 50–­52, 56; of the inconsequential/useless, 50–­52, 56; of notework, 63, 76, 77; of the novel, 77; of publicness of notework, 14–­15, 25–­26; of trivial details, in Gissing’s life and work, 62 everyday life: aesthetic experiences in, 163–­66, 180; Gissing’s notework and, 5, 22, 79, 81–­82 evolution: and aesthetics, 55–­56, 160, 178; Butler and, 189–­90; literary theory and, 16–­18. See also Darwin, Charles Ex Machina (film), 25, 187–­89, 193 Ferrer, Daniel, 9 Fleury, Gabrielle, 81 formalism: expanding the use of, 3; and the formless, 3, 10, 16; notework studied from perspective of, 2–­3, 4, 10, 13, 16–­17, 32. See also style fragmentation: aesthetic response to, 170; Bacon and, 139; Butler and, 191–­92; in Darwin’s notework, 30; in digital age, 2, 193; Gissing’s notework and, 83, 90; Hopkins and, 111, 117–­18, 122–­23; Lee and, 178–­83; nonlinear style associated with, 16; notework characterized by, 10, 12, 16; as post-­novel aesthetic, 68; Romanticism and modernism associated with, 7, 15–­16, 143; traditional theories of beauty opposed to, 2–­3; in

twenty-­first-­century narratives, 129; value of, 15, 72; in Victorian psychological theories, 181; Wilde and, 129 François, Anne-­Lise, 9–­10, 20 Frankfurt School, 15 freedom. See anti-­systematic thinking; Darwin, Charles: freedom/ disorder in notebooks of; play, notework as; present/non-­ teleological view of life Freud, Sigmund, 103 Fulweiler, Howard, 111 Gardner, W. H., 100 Garfinkel, Harold, 24, 97–­98, 108–­10, 117, 118, 135 Gates, Bill, 2 Gautier, Théophile, 141 genetic criticism, 9 genre: conceptual approaches to, 15, 16–­17; historical factors in, 18–­19; nonlinear style in relation to, 15; notework as, 2, 3, 5, 8–­10, 14–­15, 18, 186; vicissitudes of, 17 Ginzburg, Lydia, 18 Gissing, George: Commonplace Book, 63, 78–­87; “Commonplace Book,” 19, 22; detail-­oriented prose of, 60; and documentation, 58, 61–­62, 67, 72, 79, 82, 84, 87–­89; everyday-­ life notes of, 5, 22, 79, 81–­82; “The Hope of Pessimism,” 66–­67; inconsequentiality/uselessness in notework of, 21–­22, 82–­84, 88–­90; life of, 60, 85; The Nether World, 61, 89; New Grub Street, 8–­9, 22, 60, 62, 63–­64, 68–­73, 77, 78, 86; notework practices of, 78–­79; and the novel, 22, 60–­62, 64–­66, 68–­72, 78, 85–­86, 90; The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, 14, 22, 63, 78, 79,

INDEX

84–­91, 95; purpose and meaning of notework of, 62; and realism, 60–­61, 63; social/antisocial characteristics of, 61, 62, 67, 79, 81–­83, 86, 90–­91; value of trivial details for, 62, 67–­68, 70–­72, 79, 87–­88; Workers in the Dawn, 61, 66; worldview of, 66–­67, 79, 81 Gitelman, Lisa, 18, 96 God: Darwin and, 40–­41, 43, 47–­48, 54–­55; Hopkins and, 98, 111, 113, 115–­19, 124 Goffman, Erving, 97, 109 Google, 187 Gould, Stephen Jay, 51 Grafton, Anthony, 10 grand narratives. See anti-­systematic thinking Gray, Thomas, “Elegy on a Country Courtyard,” 159 Greats curriculum, 5, 129, 130, 138 Griffiths, Devin, 39 Groos, Karl, 174 Gruber, Howard, 41–­42 haecceity/thisness, 23, 97–­98, 100–­102, 106–­8, 110, 117 haiku, 75–­76 Hardy, Thomas, 181 Heffernan, Laura, 73 Helfand, Michael, 136 Henslow, John, 36 Heraclitus, 39, 138 Hess, Jillian, 130 Higgins, Leslie, 104, 120, 122 homo documentator, 5 Hopkins, Gerard Manley: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” 99–­ 100, 117; connections/networks in notework of, 14, 97–­105; connections/networks in poetry of, 111–­12, 114, 116–­17, 120, 123–­24,

125; and documentation, 9, 14, 23, 96, 102, 105, 125; Dublin Notebook, 98, 106, 120–­21; and fragments, 111, 117–­18, 122–­23; and God, 98, 111, 113, 115–­19, 124; and haecceity/ thisness, 23, 97–­98, 100–­102, 106–­7, 117; and inscape, 97–­105, 112; “The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo,” 98, 113–­17, 119–­20; nature notes of, 5, 7, 23; poems in relation to notework of, 9, 106, 111–­13, 120, 122, 125; punctuation used by, 104–­5; relation between poetry and notes of, 23–­24; Selections from the Note-­Books of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4; social/antisocial characteristics of, 95–­96, 125; “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” 8, 98, 118–­20, 122–­25; Terrible Sonnets, 118; “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and Of the Comforts of the Resurrection,” 118, 124; “The Windhover,” 113, 117; “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” 106, 117 Horkheimer, Max, 141 inconsequentiality/uselessness: Barthes on, 21–­22, 192; of Butler’s notework, 191–­92; in Darwin’s notework, 21–­22, 31, 40–­42, 44, 50–­51, 53–­57; in Darwin’s study of nature, 8, 12–­13, 22, 31–­32, 44–­52, 56; in Gissing’s notework, 21–­22, 82–­84, 88–­90; haiku associated with, 76; Lee and, 157, 159–­60; notework associated with, 4–­5, 8–­9, 12–­13, 19, 21–­22, 76, 95, 192–­93; in post-­novel literary world, 68–­72; of social media content, 20; style associated with, 6; value of, 50–­52, 56, 70–­72, 89–­90; variation and, 13, 18; Wilde and, 141–­42, 151

233

234

INDEX

information: in the digital age, 187–­89; Hopkins and, 24, 118, 124; Lee and, 180, 183; use/uselessness of, 143; Wilde and, 24, 128–­32, 134–­38, 145, 148–­50 inscape/scaping, 97–­105, 112 Jackson, Virginia, 18 Jaffe, Audrey, 66 Jagoda, Patrick, 14 James, Henry, 161, 181 Jardine, Lisa, 10 Jena Romantics, 129 Jevons, William Stanley, 140 Johnson, Samuel, 138 Joubert, Joseph, 23 Jowett, Benjamin, 138 Joyce, James, 60 Kant, Immanuel, 141, 151, 156, 162, 165 Keynes, Richard Darwin, 36 Kipling, Rudyard, 181 Korg, Jacob, 83–­84 Kornbluh, Anna, 196n19 Kronenberger, Louis, 127–­28 Lacoue-­Labarthe, Philippe, 143 La Rochefoucauld, François, Duc de, 138, 151 Latour, Bruno, 98, 108, 134–­35 Lawler, Louise, 170 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 8; on aesthetic responses, 25, 156–­ 58, 161–­77, 184–­85; Althea, 155; Baldwin, 161–­62; The Beautiful, 163, 166; Beauty and Ugliness (with Clementina Anstruther-­ Thomson), 171, 174, 177, 184; and collecting as function of writing, 157, 178–­83; compensation for notework of, 12; critical neglect of, 156–­57, 161; embrace of notework

by, 155–­56, 182–­85; The Enchanted Woods, 155; and fragmentation, 178–­83; “Gallery Diaries,” 25, 158, 166–­77, 182, 184–­85; The Handling of Words, 25, 158, 177–­83; humiliation and vulnerability as characteristics of writings of, 156, 158, 161, 163, 166, 171, 182–­83; inconsequentiality/uselessness in notework of, 157, 159–­60; life of, 156–­57; “Limbo,” 158–­61; literary theory of, 158–­60, 177–­ 83; and marginality, 25, 157–­61; personal aesthetic responses of, 5, 166–­77, 184–­85; and psychology of aesthetics, 166–­68, 170–­71, 174, 178–­81; and publicness of notework, 14–­15, 25, 156; social aspect of work of, 158, 165, 167, 176, 180–­82; The Spirit of Rome, 155; and temporality of notework, 24–­ 25, 160–­61, 193 Leopardi, Giacomo, Zibaldone, 143 Lessing, Gotthold, 55 Levine, Caroline, 16 Levine, George, 33, 42 Lippincott’s Magazine, 151 Liu, Alan, 20 Love, Heather, 68, 109 Lyell, Charles, 33 Macé, Marielle, 6 MacLeay, William Sharp, 47, 50 Mahoney, Kristen, 157 Malthus, Thomas, 30 Martineau, Harriet, 66 The Matrix (film), 189 Matz, Aaron, 61 Meredith, George, 138, 181 method, critiques of, 24, 107–­10, 131–­33, 135, 137–­39. See also anti-­ systematic thinking

INDEX

micro-­sociology, 24, 97–­98, 108–­10. See also sociology, critiques of systematizing tendencies in Miller, D. A., 6 Miller, J. Hillis, 100, 123–­24 Millikan, Ruth, 56 Milton, John, 33 modernism: fragmentation associated with, 7; Lee and, 156; notework associated with, 7, 18 Monaco, Lorenzo: Coronation of the Virgin, 173; Large Madonna and Saint, 172–­73 Moore, Marianne, 4 Moretti, Franco, 14 Morgan, Benjamin, 157, 162, 164 Morozov, Evgeny, 21 Morson, Gary Saul, 126–­27 Mortimer, Anthony, 102–­3 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 143 naturalism, 61–­62, 89 natural selection, 31–­32, 49–­52, 56, 189 New Criticism, 2–­3, 23 New Directions, 4 Newton, Isaac, 33, 43 Ngai, Sianne, 136, 167 nonlinear style: authenticity associated with, 16; defined, 4; as an ethos, 62; fragmentation associated with, 16; genre in relation to, 15 notework: aesthetic properties of, 4, 7, 34; aesthetic response made accessible through, 163–­66, 170, 183; the body in relation to, 5–­6; collecting impulse underlying, 14, 23, 32; concept of, 10–­15; content of, 4–­5; criticisms and suspicions of, 7–­8, 24; as ethical practice, 63, 76, 77; formalist approaches to, 2–­3, 4, 10, 13, 16–­17, 32; as a

genre, 2, 3, 5, 8–­10, 14–­15, 18, 186; incoherence characteristic of, 2–­3, 8–­9; inconsequentiality/ uselessness associated with, 4–­5, 8–­9, 12–­13, 19, 21–­22, 76, 95, 192–­93; as information technology, 1, 8, 10, 190; instrumental approach to, 3, 6, 8, 9, 21, 23, 30, 52–­53; material factors in, 10–­11; meanings of, 11; modernism associated with, 7, 18; the novel in relation to, 8, 62–­63, 68–­72, 75–­77, 84–­86; publication of, 2; queerness of, 9; and realism, 63, 76–­77; scholarly/critical study of, 1–­4, 8–­10; in scholarly settings, 130–­31; social media likened to, 186–­87; sterility associated with, 7–­8, 9; stylistic study of, 4, 6, 32; subversive character of, 8, 10; temporality of, 14, 19–­20, 24–­25, 194; utopian character of, 6, 9–­10, 24; value and purpose of, 1–­5, 76, 194; variability as characteristic of, 13; as work, 11–­13 Novalis, 15, 143 the novel: Barthes on, 73–­75, 77; decline of, 68–­72, 78; ethics of, 77; Gissing and, 22, 60–­62, 64–­66, 68–­72, 78, 85–­86, 90; notework in relation to, 8, 62–­63, 68–­72, 75–­77, 84–­86; social purpose ascribed to, 65–­66, 68, 72 Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), 138 Oxford University, 130–­31 Paley, William, Natural Theology, 35, 201n59 Palgrave, F. T., 130 Pall Mall (magazine), 144, 151 Paradis, James, 190 paradox, 127, 128, 132, 141, 146, 148

235

236

INDEX

Pater, Walter, 67, 112, 140, 147, 157 Peters, W. A. M., 100 play, notework as, 13, 22, 34, 39, 42, 49, 55, 56 positivism, 61, 65–­67 presentism, 20 present/non-­teleological view of life: Barthes and, 22, 63, 74–­76, 82; Butler and, 26; Darwin and, 31, 34, 39; Gissing and, 22, 62, 67, 71–­72, 88–­89 Price, Leah, 33–­34 Prins, Yopie, 18 Proust, Marcel, 74 psychology of aesthetics, 166–­68, 170–­ 71, 174, 178–­81 publicness/publication of notework: Barthes and, 63, 82; Butler and, 19–­20, 26, 191–­92; Darwin and, 41, 54; in digital age, 187; ethical and aesthetic consequences of, 14–­15, 25–­26; gains and losses of, 23; Gissing and, 63, 79, 81–­86, 90–­91; Lee and, 14–­15, 25, 156; Wilde and, 129, 151 Punch (magazine), 144 queer theory, 15–­16, 144–­45 realism: Barthes on, 73; Gissing’s attitude toward, 60–­61; Gissing’s notework as, 63; notework and, 63, 76–­77; social purpose ascribed to, 61 Reynolds, Joshua, 55 Roberts, Morley, 58–­60, 90 Romanticism, 15–­16, 143 Ruskin, John, 157 Russian Formalism, 13, 16–­18 Sade, Marquis de, 74 Schiller, Friedrich, 156, 162, 165

Schlegel, August, 15 Schlegel, Friedrich, 15, 143 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 66 Schürer, Emil, 123 Scotus, John Duns, 97, 100 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 187, 189 Sherman, William, 10 Shklovsky, Viktor, 16–­17 “The Sibylline Oracles,” 122–­23 Sider, Justin, 18 Siegel, Jonah, 171–­72 The Sleeping Ariadne, 171–­72 Smith, Philip K., 136 Sobolev, Dennis, 97, 112 social/antisocial characteristics of writers: Bacon, 139, 142; Darwin, 31, 34, 41–­42, 49, 51–­52, 54; Gissing, 61, 62, 67, 79, 81–­83, 86, 90–­91; Hopkins, 95–­96, 125; Lee, 158, 165, 167, 176, 180–­82; Wilde, 128, 134–­ 35, 137–­38, 141–­42, 151 Social Darwinism, 51, 62 social media: aesthetic responses published on, 167; information conveyed through, 20; notework likened to, 186–­87; temporality of, 21; vocabulary suitable for describing use of, 110. See also digital age sociology, critiques of systematizing tendencies in, 66–­67, 98, 107–­9, 118, 135. See also method, critiques of; micro-­sociology Star Trek (television show), 189 Stein, Gertrude, 7, 161 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 181 Stoler, Ann Laura, 3 style, 6, 32. See also formalism; nonlinear style systems thinking. See anti-­systematic thinking

INDEX

teleology. See present/non-­teleological view of life temporality: Butler and, 19–­20, 24–­26, 192–­93; Lee and, 24–­25, 160–­61, 193; of notework, 14, 19–­20, 24–­25, 194; of social media, 21 Tenen, Dennis, 188–­89 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 62 Terminator films, 189 theory. See anti-­systematic thinking; method, critiques of thisness. See haecceity/thisness time. See temporality Titian, Venus of Urbino, 175 Tolstoy, Leo, 74 triviality. See inconsequentiality/ uselessness Turing, Alan, and the Turing Test, 2, 187 Twitter, 20, 127 Tynyanov, Yury, 16–­18 unity, 2–­3 universalism. See anti-­systematic thinking uselessness. See inconsequentiality/ uselessness useless organs, 8, 12–­13, 31–­32, 44–­52, 56, 136, 159–­60 utopia: aphoristic utterances and, 143; Bacon and, 140; Butler and, 189; as characteristic of notework, 6, 9–­10, 24; Gissing and, 62, 83, 90; Hopkins and, 111; Wilde and, 24, 129, 137–­38 Vaidyanathan, Siva, 21 Van Buskirk, Emily, 18 Van Hulle, Dirk, 9 van Wyhe, John, 48, 51 variation/variability: as characteristic

of notework, 13; Darwin and, 13, 18, 19, 31–­32, 44–­50; in evolutionary theory, 17, 19; inconsequential, 13, 18; in literary theory, 17 Vendler, Helen, 123 Victorian literature: characteristics of, 7; conventional approaches to, 6; Darwin and, 32–­33; Gissing and, 61, 64; notework in relation to, 7; Lee and, 156–­57 Virgil, Aeneid, 122 Vrba, Elizabeth, 51 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 33 Whewell, William, 140 White, Norman, 113, 120 Wilde, Oscar: aphorisms of, 24, 126–­29, 131, 138, 149; and Bacon, 24, 129, 138–­42; “Commonplace Book,” 128, 130–­33, 136, 140; computer-­ generated imitations of, 126–­27; “The Critic as Artist,” 128, 134, 137; critiques of, 126–­27; “The Decay of Lying,” 128, 137; De Profundis, 136; and documentation, 129; epigrams’ danger explored in Dorian Gray by, 144–­51; “A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Overeducated,” 151; and fragmentation, 129; gender/sexuality critique of, 144–­45; inconsequentiality/ uselessness as a value for, 141–­42, 151; and information, 24, 128–­32, 134–­38, 145, 148–­50; Intentions, 128, 129; “Notebook Kept at Oxford,” 128, 130, 136; “Notebook on Philosophy,” 5, 19, 24, 128–­ 33, 137–­38, 140–­42, 149; Oxford Notebooks of, 128–­38; “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of

237

238

INDEX

the Young,” 151; The Picture of Dorian Gray, 8–­9, 15, 24, 88, 127, 129, 131, 144–­51; social aspect of work of, 128, 134–­35, 137–­38, 141–­42, 151; “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” 136, 137; Trinity College Notebook, 131 Willems, Brian, 100

Williams, William Carlos, 4 Winckelmann, Johann, 171 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 187 Woolf, Virginia, 7, 60, 157, 161 Yeo, Richard, 10 Zuboff, Shoshana, 21

STANFORD

TEXT TECHNOLOGIES

Elaine Treharne and Ruth Ahnert, Series Editors

Blaine Greteman Networking Print in Shakespeare’s England: Influence, Agency, and Revolutionary Change Yohei Igarashi The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication Elaine Treharne and Claude Willan Text Technologies: A History