‘All Whores are Jacobites’: Terror, Book, and Body in the Writings of John Dunton

Abstract

‘All Whores are Jacobites’: Terror, Book, and Body in the Writings of John Dunton Elizabeth Kubek (bio) The idea of the book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier; this totality of the signifier cannot be a totality, unless a totality constituted by the signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs, and is independent of it in its ideality. The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing. . . . If I distinguish the text from the book, I shall say that the destruction of the book, as it is now under way in all domains, denudes the surface of the text. That necessary violence responds to a violence that was no less necessary. —Jacques Derrida, “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing”1 The Sword which you bear is the Lord’s, and ought to be drawn against those who live in Contempt of his Laws. . . . This Paper how inconsiderable and despicable soever it may seem in your Eyes, will appear amongst other Witnesses in Judgment against you, if you neglect your duty, in punishing and suppressing this raging Sin. —John Dunton, “To the Magistrates of London and Westminster: Epistle Dedicatory,” The Night-Walker for February 16972 Poststructuralist accounts of the production and reception of printed texts tend to assume that books at least aspire toward the coherence and intelligibility typical of other systematic social structures. The application of structuralist principles in effect valorizes those texts to which can be attributed an attempt to create a discursive space based in intersubjective relations. But this description of the agencies of the book fails to consider the impact of texts that seem bent upon not the creation of mutually intelligible subject positions, but rather their destruction. Such traumatic texts need not be the product of a self-conscious modernism, [End Page 451] since the deconstruction of the subject is simply the actualization of a potential contained in all language-objects. This potential can be exploited as style, or isolated as representing “outsider” art, but it can also be linked to underlying processes in the author’s psyche and in the cultural and material circumstances surrounding the text’s production. Still, even if we identify these processes as productive systems, how are we to respond when the subject positions they appear to define are quickly revoked or distorted by, and simultaneously distort, the text itself? Can a book be mad, in a way that reveals counter-subjective and incoherent elements at work in the very production, through writing, of culture itself? The written “projects” of the early modern Whig printer, bookseller, and author John Dunton exemplify the troubled relationship between subjectivities and texts, and the potential offered by mass media for their production and deconstruction. Dunton’s use of participative modes of writing, as in the discursive community created by his Athenian Mercury, by destabilizing individual authorship already undercuts the imaginary totalizing energies of the signifier; however, the disruptions inherent in writing itself become fully evident when Dunton simulates such a polysemic discourse. The pretense of group authorship engages the paradoxical metacommunicative elements of signification identified by Gregory Bateson in his discussion of as-if behaviors, throwing both “the relationship between the speakers” and the non-linguistic contextual reference of utterances into high relief.3 Thus Dunton’s 1696–97 serial “project” (as he terms it) The Night-Walker: or, Evening Rambles in search after Lewd Women, offers to represent and interpolate its readers, but also threatens “bad” readers as well as members of the general public with the possibility of genuine acts of vigilante violence. In terms of its attitude towards readers, this text resembles “reality” mass media forms: it solicits an audience that simultaneously derives pleasure from the humiliation of others and from fantasies of its own exposure. In so doing, it invokes a self-destructing subjectivity signified not only by psychologically-charged content but also by irregularities of material form, both structural and typographical. Vainly seeking to contain the reader-in-the-text as both constitutive of and subordinate to a transtextual locus of meaning, The Night-Walker (again...

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