Loving Literature: A Cultural History

Abstract

In the best-selling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, the Japanese organizing consultant Marie Kondo urges a now-famous program of domestic decluttering, in which each possession is assessed for whether it “sparks joy.” Under this criterion, Kondo claims to have pared her own library down to some thirty essential volumes. Such minimalism (not to mention the treatment of books alongside sweaters and kitchen implements) might seem like another index of the Way We Live Now, in an era of Kindles, vanishing bookstores, and smartphone-size chunks of textual “content.” Yet it is also possible to see Kondo’s approach as reflecting an older form of book love: one that combines a reverence for books as talismanic objects with a personal devotion to the stories and characters they contain; one that is predicated not on the thrill of novelty but on the pleasure of familiarity, the habit of rereading, and the comfort of a bedtime ritual.Deidre Shauna Lynch’s new book Loving Literature offers a rich and lively cultural history of these sentiments and practices. More precisely, it traces a post-Enlightenment history of secular book love, which can at times resemble older sacred rituals of textual devotion. Though it might sound strange to mention a scholarly monograph in conjunction with a self-help manual, it is very much in line with Lynch’s own critical practice, which has long been engaged in studying the porous boundary between specialized literary discourse and popular readership—as well as displaying its own intellectual enthusiasm and affection.Lynch’s edited collection Janeites focused on that boundary, and in her introduction to that volume she wryly noted that “a customary method of establishing one’s credentials as a reader of Austen has been to regret that others simply will insist on liking her in inappropriate ways” (Lynch 2000: 7). It is a habit common among academics and amateurs alike, and in her latest book Lynch broadens and deepens her investigation of such claims. Samuel Johnson serves as a particularly apt focus for her story of vexed and ambivalent love: his Lives of the English Poets offered intimate biographical glimpses of authors, yet to some readers, his warts-and-all portraits and critical strictures seemed bent on “throwing cold water on other readers’ ardors” (46). Anna Seward accused him of having what she called “a morbid deficiency . . . in the affections” (75), and if she were alive today, Lynch suggests, she might have been a combative blogger, ever vigilant about other people’s failure to show proper literary admiration (55).Lynch contributes a welcome new affective dimension to now-familiar economic and sociological narratives of the emergence of “Literature” as a distinct category of writing—of canon formation, cultural capital, marketplaces, and mass production. “Loving” entails domestic intimacy, filial connection, possessiveness, fetishization, monogamy, escapist fantasy, and ancestor worship. Literature as transmissible intellectual property ran up against literature as cherished object, as in Romantic familiar essays that celebrate a physical attachment to books in the masculine sanctuary of the private library. Without the financial means of serious collectors, Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt “played at being bibliomaniacs on a budget” (129). To illustrate her claim that book collecting was “an amorous activity” (117), Lynch adduces two different anecdotes of book kissing and one (involving the young William Shenstone) of what can only be called book cuddling.Lynch’s intervention puts canon formation and literary professionalization in a new light. Jonathan Kramnick (1998) argues in Making the English Canon that Thomas Warton’s project of scholarly curation in his History of English Poetry brought English literature into the sanctuary of the university and its priestly professoriate and drew a line between mere enjoyment and academic discipline. But Lynch portrays Warton’s project as an elaborate performance of private literary pleasure: an act of “personalization” (78) and “an exercise in sympathetic initiation” (88). In tracking down the literary references in John Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, for instance, Warton finds a kindred spirit—a lover of romance hidden within the Calvinist poet and pamphleteer.Similarly, William Henry Ireland’s claim in 1796 to have found Shakespeare’s lost library draws on “a fantasy centered on being at home with the Bard and so knowing the author from the inside out” (89). Without disputing the premise that eighteenth-century literary scholarship and antiquarianism professionalized the subject of literature, Lynch argues that this movement also turned literary reading into “an after-hours, extracurricular affair, an experience by its nature inimical to the experience of formal schooling” (95). The historicism of Warton and Ireland, then, was also a kind of escape from the regime of classical learning (93). In light of Lynch’s argument, I thought of the hue of affection or personalizing attachment in Caroline Spurgeon’s study of Shakespeare’s imagery, for underlying that taxonomic study was the conviction that a vivid metaphor is a vestigial trace of Shakespeare’s everyday sensory experience.As personal, affective engagement with fiction displaces the Kantian ideal of disinterestedness and critical detachment, so habitual familiarity supplants Addisonian “surprise and delight” in artistic novelty. Novel plots seem to depend on the forward propulsion of plot and narrative incident and the sudden jolt of plot revelations. Once you discover a character’s true paternity or see what lies behind a curtain, you cannot go back and experience the same surprise twice. Or, as Samuel Richardson suggested in a letter to a friend, there might be painful scenes, such as those in Clarissa, that readers would not willingly reread. Hence William Wordsworth privileged lyric poetry, for its rhythmic and aural effects modulated by Richardsonian suffering or gothic sensation, allowing it to be endlessly reread with a kind of pleasure rather than pain. But Lynch shows that in the Romantic era the novel began to be accorded the kind of pleasurable repetition and ritual that Wordsworth claimed for poems. The secular practice of rereading lies at the heart of what Lynch means by “loving literature”: it springs from the assumption that a novel offers a world to inhabit, a set of characters to know as real people, and a discourse that can act as a steadying, healthful influence on the mind. Novels could be as salubrious and therapeutic as poems.In his essay “On Reading Old Books,” for example, Hazlitt offers an implicit rebuttal to Wordsworth when he writes of blissfully rereading Clarissa from beginning to end (178–79) and thus begins to “redefine literature as an object of everyday love” (191). Similarly, John Clare dedicated himself to reading The Vicar of Wakefield every year (154), and Walter Scott loved to revisit Pride and Prejudice (186). Lynch sees the cyclicality of these quasi-liturgical gestures as anticipating the communal practices of Victorian readers who committed to an annual reading of all six of Austen’s novels (155). Such repetition can be seen as a form of academic mastery and specialization, but Lynch places it in the context of Victorian-era programs of self-improvement and medical claims about the benefits of domestic regularity (188). The practice of what she calls “going steady” with books correlates with the well-established shift in the long eighteenth century toward exalting conjugal intimacy, companionate marriage, and family bonds.It is no accident that Austen in particular inspired such devotion, for in Lynch’s argument, Austen’s fiction preeminently demands and rewards rereading, in that its educational project involves tracking and correcting characters’ misperceptions and misjudgments. I would add that some of Austen’s predecessors could be seen to promote forms of rereading, too: Henry Fielding’s strategic withholding of information in Tom Jones invites the reader to reconsider earlier scenes in the context of new revelations, and Laurence Sterne hectors his reader into paying closer attention to his narrative switchbacks and causal connections, even offering a graphic reconstruction in his famous linear diagram of the story line. But Lynch is surely right to focus on Austen as the first author who consistently features situations of rereading and reappraisal within her novels.The seeds of Lynch’s argument can be recognized in The Economy of Character, which proposes that literal and figurative acts of rereading in Austen’s novels model the kind of attention that Austen demands of her audience. In this way, readers and lovers (such as Darcy and Lizzy Bennet or Wentworth and Anne Elliot) converge in the act of pleasurable reinterpretation, lingering over recalled events and finding new or latent meaning in them. In Persuasion the representation of Anne’s interiority is constituted by what Lynch (1998: 213) calls “a reader’s language” of unvoiced feeling, while the narrative of the novel itself constitutes a kind of “second novel,” or sequel to the off-the-record story of Anne and Wentworth’s shared history. In both her earlier study and her latest book, Lynch makes deft connections between the formal and mimetic properties of fiction and the habits and institutions that perpetuate the love for and mastery of it. In effect, Austen’s narratives both represent and promote the critical practice of close reading and the pedagogical insistence on rereading. “Professors of literature,” Lynch remarks, “get a wonderful ego boost from Austen when she appears to be ratifying our insistence to our students that they distance themselves from their interpretive habits and become self-conscious rereaders” (186).Lynch advances a similarly metafictional reading when she turns her attention to gothic romance. Here she identifies numerous variations on the theme of book love: the discovery of old manuscripts, the appearance of inscriptions, the use of libraries as narrative points of origin, the paratextual filigree of poetic epigraphs, and the attention to scenes of reading and their cognitive states of trancelike absorption. Lynch makes several arguments about these tropes and conventions. In terms of the sociology of genre, she notes the paradox that books written for consumption in circulating libraries flaunted their love of private, ancestral libraries; that prose narratives compulsively quoted poetry; that a “sub-canonical” form worshipped the canonical (211). These can be seen as defensive attempts to borrow an aura of prestige, but Lynch also wants to see them as reflecting what she calls “the spooky side to the love of literature” (201).Textual relics or written testaments in gothic fiction tell a story about the power of literary language, even when housed in moldering artifacts, or what Wordsworth called “shrines so frail.” Such artifacts stand for the “sheer durability” of books, which can lie dormant for ages and then be picked up and reawakened in the act of reading (209–10). It is not just ghosts that haunt characters in gothic fiction but text itself, and gothic novelists frequently register the “hallucinatory phenomenology of reading” (199).The spectral nature of writing has been noted by critics before, of course, but Lynch invokes the truism to make a compelling case for understanding gothic scenes of reading within the context of canon formation and legal history. What became codified in British copyright law was not only the notion of intellectual property belonging to an originating author but also the notion of a public domain, in which canonical literature could be seen as a gift bestowed by dead authors on the British people (215). The idea of a gift is only one among many possible metaphors, however, and Lynch proposes that gothic tropes—of haunting, resurrection, hallucination, and telepathic control—offer a way of understanding the idea of canonicity as a “supernatural phenomenon” (201). T. S. Eliot’s assertion of the deep connection between living poets and dead ones has always had a sepulchral cast, but it takes on a particularly gothic resonance under Lynch’s argument.Lynch’s study thinks in fresh ways about book love and author love from the eighteenth century up through the present day. What about criticism love? If scholars can model and even profess their affection for books, then the work of some scholars might itself be an object of similar feelings. In this spirit, Loving Literature moved me to revisit Lynch’s brilliant readings of Austen’s novels in The Economy of Character. Though Loving Literature does not offer the same kind of sustained interpretive readings of familiar texts, it has already inspired a panel devoted to discussing it at the 2016 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference. In the world of academic canon formation and professional fandom, there is surely no higher form of book love than that.

Cite this

Christopher R. Miller (2016). Loving Literature: A Cultural History. Modern Language Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-3652691

@article{r2016loving,
  title  = {Loving Literature: A Cultural History},
  author = {Miller, Christopher R.},
  year   = {2016},
  journal = {Modern Language Quarterly},
  doi    = {10.1215/00267929-3652691}
}

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