The Death of the Book: Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading

The Death of the Book

Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading

John Lurz

Fordham University Press     New York    2016

This book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press

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Excerpt(s) from Jazz by Toni Morrison, 1992 by Toni Morrison. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.

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First edition

To my parents (who else?)

Contents

Introduction: Opening the Book

1. The Books of the Recherche

2. The Reader of Ulysses

3. The Dark Print of Finnegans Wake

4. The Pages in Jacob’s Room

5. The Binding of The Waves

Coda: The Afterlives of Reading

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

. . . . look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

Toni Morrison, Jazz

Introduction

Opening the Book

I

In the end this is a book about reading books. Indeed it is about the end of book reading—or, as my title proclaims, about what is so often and so lightly called its death. It examines the ways that the experimental novels of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf imagine a particular relationship between literature and extraliterary life by exploring the dynamic between an embodied readerly subject and the physical object of the book. Analyzing the varied metaphorics mobilized by these novels to highlight the book’s materiality, these reflections on the book’s mediation of a literary text insistently involve a more serious meditation on transience and temporal progress than is implied in the glib forecasts of its demise. In doing so they trace a temporality of reading based less in the subjective experience of time than in an impersonal ephemerality with which both reader and book are bound up. As I reveal the determining role played by reading—and specifically reading books—in these novels’ famed interrogation of the subject’s status in the world, I cut across current debates surrounding aesthetic autonomy, modernist temporality, and the relation between literary and media studies. Ultimately developing a particularly modernist conception of literary experience not accounted for by either rigorously historicist or traditionally formalist accounts of the period, my project investigates a set of twentieth-century considerations of what it means that the texts we read are embodied in and mediated by the object of the book.

An early moment in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway offers a preliminary illustration of the argument to come. As Clarissa is on the way to famously buy the flowers herself, she passes a bookstore where a volume catches her eye and interrupts her urban reverie. Before she directs her attention to the unidentified Shakespearean quotation she finds there (whose own significance I will address in a moment), the narrative lingers over her encounter with the book. Woolf writes, But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchard’s shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open.¹ As the white dawn of Clarissa’s recollection merges with her perception of the book, the spread open expanse of its page provides a physical, real-world materialization of the mental image that she is attempting to recall. On the linguistic level the fragmentary construction of the final sentence performs this coincidence grammatically as it runs the image of white dawn into the description of the book at which she is staring. These lines thus stage the act of reading as a visual encounter and an affective experience that blends the internal and the external: her mental visualizations dovetail with her perception of the world outside her own interiority. More than this the lines create this portrait of reading through a quiet appeal to the object of the book spread open and suggest the extent to which this novel views the mental work of linguistic deciphering and imagination as bound up with, indeed dependent on the physical or perceptual relationship Clarissa has with that language’s material support.

This books focuses on just this kind of readerly physical attunement, one that finds its articulation and performance in the careful ways that the modernist novels in my study plot their own readerly consumption. In elaborating this book-based understanding of reading, my argument opens up new ways to consider key issues at stake in the novels of this period, including modernism’s famous investigation of time and subjective experience. For if this moment from Mrs. Dalloway begins to indicate the place held by the book in this study, the narrative context of this moment, along with the Shakespeare quotation itself, addresses the other operative term in my title, namely death. As she comes upon the book, Clarissa is significantly thinking about her own mortality. Right before she looks into the shop window, she observes that what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her, and wonders did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her. She imagines that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived and envisions herself laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist. While the vaporous immateriality of the arboreal mist allows her to dream that it spread ever so far, her life, herself, the book’s own spread is decidedly more concrete (9). It brings her back from this fantasy of subjective immortality to both the finite, material world of objects and to the inescapable march of time which the rhythm of this, here, now make so perspicuous. At the same time, the Shakespearean lines that Clarissa finds there—Fear no more the heat o’ the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages—indicate that, far from sparking an existential crisis, the open spread of the book offers a sense of temporal forbearance, not exactly a consolation but a measured recognition of mortal finitude.

While it is Clarissa who is beginning to cultivate a stance of stoic endurance in the face of such finitude, it is Mrs. Dalloway’s reader who is asked to connect that cultivation with the attention paid to the book spread open. If the narrative content places subtle emphasis on her experience of the book, the way the quotation from Cymbeline is also set off from the novel’s otherwise continuous stream of text draws our attention, for a moment, to the format of the volume we are facing. And, though the page image from the Harcourt edition indicates that this kind of bookish attention occurs here only briefly, the other novels in my study use a number of comparable combinations of textual and material figures to expand and extend this awareness. The ways the works of Proust, Joyce, and Woolf not only work to develop such an awareness but also intertwine it with the sense of mortality and temporality suggested by this moment is part of what I’m alluding to in the figure of the book’s death and constitutes my own book’s intervention in our understanding of what reading entailed for these novels.

This was also, of course, the era when the more colloquial understanding of the phrase the death of the book was beginning to have some meaning. As a watershed moment in the development of media technologies that included the mass circulation of photography and the rise of film, not to mention the increasing use of telegraphy as well as the invention of the phonograph, the automobile, and the telephone, the early twentieth century presented these writers with an enlarged and diversified media landscape in which literature was no longer the undisputed cultural queen. Friedrich Kittler provides what is perhaps the best-known account of the effect that this meeting of diverse media forms had on literature, an influential reading that stands behind almost all subsequent discussions of modernism’s place in the history of mediation. He describes how Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, his development of the kinetoscope in 1892, and the operation of the latter by the Lumière brothers in France and the Skladanowsky brothers in Germany in 1895 as the first exhibition of cinema proper launched a two-pronged attack on . . . [the book’s] monopoly on the storage of serial data.² As the gramophone and film bypass the signifier-signified dynamic of language with their respective capabilities to aurally and visually record experience in real time, the privilege of creating a vivid fictional world for a reader, which had been mainly accorded to literature, is suddenly transferred to the new media—a situation that leaves writers and readers in what seems like a newly circumscribed position.

Figure 1. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), 9.

Using a structure that plays directly into the great divide that so many inquiries into modernism have worked to break down, Kittler proposes either complicity or rejection as the two options by which literature responded to this attack. On the one hand, literature could join the technological media by working to produce lyrics for phonographic hits and screenplays for films, while, on the other, it could reject [the new media], along with the imaginary and real aspects of discourse to which they cater (247–48). What results in this account is thus a split between writing for popular mass culture and a conception of high modernism characterized solely by what he calls the rituals of the symbolic, which focus on a language that represents nothing but its own play. Literature, he writes, became word art put together by word producers (248–49). One of the aims of this book is to take up what his view misses: Kittler’s conception of the gramophone, film, and literature as specialized means of storing experience, each with its own specific (and exclusive) content, disregards the way that each also functions as a technology of transmission that works to communicate and convey as much as it documents and records.³ Far from sequestering literature in an isolated realm of linguistic signification, the extreme experimentation of Proust, Joyce, and Woolf operates, in my argument, to renew our attention to the sensuous object on which the transmission of its writing relies. This perspective is at the heart of my introductory discussion of Mrs. Dalloway since it is what makes conceptual space for us to countenance the subject’s evanescent encounter with the more concrete space of the page, which might—and often does—otherwise go unnoticed.

Such a seemingly trivial feature of Woolf’s novel intimates how the novels I consider become aware of themselves as offering their own time-bound media experience, one that intertwines the register of the verbal with the object of the book in which the rituals of the symbolic unfold. Since reading is precisely the act in which this intertwining takes place, my ambition to draw out and illustrate these novels’ media awareness motivates my argument’s rabid reliance on close reading, as evidenced by my opening gambit with Mrs. Dalloway. By getting close to the texts of these novels, I show that they emphasize various aspects of their own bookish embodiment as part of an investigation of subject-object relations. In doing so I fill a glaring hole in accounts of modernism’s meditations on mediation. Works like Sara Danius’s The Senses of Modernism, Julian Murphet’s Multimedia Modernism, and Mark Goble’s Beautiful Circuits all focus on the analogical relationship among modernist literature and the new media of its moment and analyze how texts of this period begin to ape the formal and expressive resources of technological mediums that exceed the strictly verbal. As such they disregard the way these works are also thinking about the larger ramifications of literature’s own traditional format and mode of access, namely book reading itself.

In a recent article on the history of media discourse as such, however, John Guillory offers terms that help me to emphasize the way these novels leverage the linguistic register to reflect on what it means that a physical support is transmitting that language. Describing a more general intensification of media awareness at this moment, Guillory proposes that the development of new technical media perplexed thereafter the relation between the traditional arts and media of any kind. . . . The emergence of new media thus seemed to reposition the traditional arts as ambiguously both media and precursors to the media.⁴ In this account our approach to literary art—and to representation itself—undergoes a fundamental shift as literature (which, Guillory observes in a footnote, seems to be less conspicuously marked by medial identity than other media, such as film [322n3]) suddenly finds itself regarded in a new light: not only as an art but as a medium. Guillory’s argument brings literature’s mediality into focus by suggesting that the change in the status of fine arts to media forms as a response to these technological innovations demanded nothing less than a new philosophical framework for understanding media as such in contradistinction to the work of art (347). That is, these new media forms exceed the paradigm of imitation or mimesis through which the fine arts had been considered since Aristotle’s Poetics. Instead, as the category of the medium directs our attention first and foremost to the material and formal qualities of different kinds of expression and only second to the object of representation (346), it reveals the way mimetic representation of something like language also involves a multivalent process of mediation. From this perspective the linguistic play and formal experimentation for which a writer like Joyce is so famous become an implicit investigation of what is entailed in the communication of literature’s message. Identifying the entire problematic of mediation as the extrapolation of a communicative process from the physical medium, Guillory sketches the larger conceptual scaffolding that frames the way the novels in my study imagine the bodily relationship with the book on which the transmission of their texts depend (351).

My focus on reading’s intersection with issues of mediation extends attempts at renewing and reinvigorating close reading as a critical practice. For instance, as part of her recent discussion of the aesthetic and cultural resources modernism offers to contemporary electronic literature, Jessica Pressman mines modernist textuality in order to elaborate a formalist approach to digital literature. Routing her argument through the figure of Marshall McLuhan, Pressman follows McLuhan’s identification of modernism as the foundation for the first electronic age to show that the literature of this period and the New Criticism which it sparked were an integral part of the establishment of media studies itself. Literary modernism, she points out, invites media studies.⁵ Accordingly by examining the ways the novels in my study project their own consumption, which range from descriptions of the interpretive process to embedded examples like Leopold Bloom’s readerly doings during his trip to the outhouse early in Ulysses, I examine these works’ meditations on the materiality of their own media platform. This is less in the service of developing a foundation for the consideration of electronic media and more to show that the format of the book offers resources for rethinking the very idea of literary experience. Though the end of this introduction and the concluding coda will more clearly gesture at the connections between my argument and current conversations in computer-based new media aesthetics, the close textual discussion necessary for me to track the subtle staging of these novels’ bookish embodiments leaves little room for explicit discussions of new media themselves. Instead I develop the concern evinced by these novels for aspects of a book’s transmission—like the spacing of the page or the appearance of print—and show that this concern contributes directly to their larger projects of understanding the place of a mortal readerly subject in the world of inanimate objects.

At the same time, the privileged place this argument grants to the object of the book is not meant to dismiss the other material objects and sensuous relationships that crop up throughout the novels I consider. On the contrary, for the works under discussion the book functions as an avenue—even a medium—to consider the rapport we have with the external world precisely because it is an object that transmits the textual systems by which this rapport is described. By repeatedly referring readers to the volume they are holding in their hands, these novels stage the book as the object on which the representation of all other objects depend and grant it an implicit precedence that my project’s focus aims to make explicit. As this bookish epistemology of reading demands continual negotiations between the figures for the materiality of the book that so often set these novels into motion and the referent of the book facing the reader, my own argumentation moves back and forth between analyzing representations of materially sensitive reading in these narratives and demonstrating the concrete operation of such sensitivity on the part of readers themselves. In doing so I construct a portrait of modernist book reading that shows how deeply entangled the discursive and phenomenal domains of literary experience are for these early twentieth-century novels. My investment in these questions influences my obvious, even aggressive selection of canonical novels by Proust, Joyce, and Woolf since, more than any other works of the period, their texts offer explicit portrayals of the reading process and the entanglement between the body of the reader and the object of the book. My departure from more contextualist discussions of twentieth-century culture in favor of a closer reconsideration of the novel’s embodied textuality is meant to develop a modernist implied reader whose sensitivity to the physical book is elided by other media-centered approaches.⁶ Moreover my discussion of these particular novels locates the experience of book reading in the very heart of modernism itself (rather than on the margins of the period, where Leah Price locates it in her discussion of the Victorian book) and indicates the potential for considering moments, such as Clarissa’s experience at the bookshop window, which might otherwise seem to function rather peripherally within works less centrally concerned with the specificity of their format.

II

When Clarissa dawdles in front of the shop window, her deliberations help to clarify the singularity of her reaction to Cymbeline and to situate it in relation to a second important historical frame, namely the almost fully industrialized book market that the twentieth century inherited from the Victorian era. Just a few lines after Clarissa muses on the open page, the narrative states that, in the window, "there were Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapy Sponge and Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all spread open. Ever so many books there were; but none that seemed exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing home (10). Clarissa’s somewhat exasperated Ever so many books there were" signals the skyrocketing number of books available to readers on the day in June 1923 when Mrs. Dalloway takes place (not to mention the day in 1925 when the novel itself appeared in bookshop windows). Part of this proliferation of printed materials—newspapers, advertisements, and small literary magazines as well as books proper—was due to the technological innovations in papermaking and type-casting as well as to the rise in mechanized printing and binding, which decreased the cost and increased the yield of publishing throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.⁷

Leah Price has recently discussed the effect this flood of volumes had on the Victorians themselves, who, she shows, maintained a merciless opposition between book and text that privileged textual interior over bookish exterior.⁸ This seems to be exactly the direction in which Clarissa moves: the gentle emphasis on the book spread open cedes to a focus on content as the attention she pays to the expanse of the page is usurped by the linguistic signification labeling these volumes. Moreover the rather cursory, almost rapid-fire enumeration of the diverse titles in the shop window effectively levels out the specificity of the individual books; each one seems just as good (or, in this case, just as inappropriate) as the next. This seemingly endless and undifferentiated supply of books leads to a mode of inattention that rather starkly contrasts with the lingering consideration Clarissa demonstrated in the earlier passage. While Price’s project seeks to excavate Victorian alternatives to the worship of the text that demonizes the book and looks to now-forgotten genres and subcultures that remained sensitive to the materiality of the book (16), this scene in Mrs. Dalloway points to the notably less marginalized place that the book comes to have in the modernist literary imagination. In other words, whereas Price looks at moments of what she calls nonreading, moments in the Victorian age when the book’s material properties trump its textual content, the aesthetic projects of the novels I consider galvanize the connection between accessing literary form and encountering bookish format (8). Indeed rather than being banished to the periphery of the literary world, the situation here seems to be almost the reverse: not only do the Shakespeare lines affiliate the format of the book with the pinnacle of high literary culture (as opposed to the more frivolous titles Clarissa dismisses), but the way they reverberate in her mind throughout the novel also suggests that their literary and affective impact is due, in part, to the material attention with which she approaches them.

Nevertheless I want to stress that the distinction I’m developing between these high modernist novels and less serious literature is rooted not in particularities of literary content or even of physical format—Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities is as much a bookish object as Cymbeline or Mrs. Dalloway itself—but in Clarissa’s performance of two different and ultimately entwined readerly attitudes. We will see in fact that the novels in my study often illustrate the materially sensitive reading they’re attempting to cultivate by appealing to deliberately ordinary and unexceptional texts. In a similar way my argument looks away from special editions or luxury first runs and focuses on how these five novels imagined themselves to be exploiting the everyday material affordances of an object made at once exceedingly commonplace and quaintly outmoded through advances in both mass production and technological mediation.

The close reading approach I take to develop the role played by the book’s status as a material object also opens up the very concept of materiality as it’s mobilized in studies of the book. The customary understanding of materiality concentrates on the historical, particularly the economic circumstances influencing a work of literature. In the burgeoning field of book history, for example, materiality has often been used to address the way a host of agents, including authors, publishers, printers, shippers, booksellers, and readers, contribute to a conception of the book as a cultural form; this approach has grown to include a consideration of such issues as circulation and reception to further enrich our understanding of what and how knowledge is disseminated at various historical moments.⁹ From this perspective the book is as much a physical object as an abstraction figuring