The Cultural Revolution of the Nineteenth Century

Theatre, the Book-Trade and Reading in the Transatlantic World

Márcia Abreu, Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva, Márcia Abreu, Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857729958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The beginnings of what we now call 'globalization' dates from the early sixteenth century, when Europeans, in particular the Iberian monarchies, began to connect 'the four parts of the world'. From the end of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries, technical advancements, such as the growth of the European rail network and the increasing ease of international shipping, narrowed the physical and imagined distances between different parts of the globe. Books, printed matter and theatrical performances were a crucial part of this process and the so-called 'long nineteenth century' saw a remarkable increase in readership and technological improvements that significantly changed the production of printed matter and its relationship with culture. This book analyzes this sea-change in knowledge and sharing of ideas through the prism of the transatlantic diffusion of French, Brazilian, Portuguese and English print-cultures. In particular, it charts the circulation of printed matter, publishers, booksellers and actors between Europe and South America. Featuring a new original essay from Roger Chartier, The Cultural Revolution of the 19th Century is an essential new benchmark in global and transnational history.

PART I

METHODOLOGY ISSUES

CHAPTER 1

LITERATURE AND WRITTEN CULTURE: STABILITY OF WORKS, MOBILITY OF TEXTS, PLURALITY OF READINGS

Roger Chartier

At this conference, I would like to show the possible approaches of cultural history and textual criticism when they look at texts, books and readings. First, it appears to me that we should think about the ever-present tension between, on the one hand, the identity of the works, recognisable and perpetuated outside their materiality, and on the other hand, the mobility of texts, a mobility ensured by the multiplicity of their readings, of their material forms and modes of attribution.

Attribution

In his famous 1968 lecture, ‘What is an author?’ Foucault stated that, far from being relevant to all texts and genres, the attribution of a work to a proper name is neither universal nor constant: ‘The author-function is characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation and functioning of certain discourses in society.’¹ The attribution of a proper name to a discourse was for him the result of ‘specific and complex’ operations that place the unity and coherence of a work (or group of works) in relationship with the identity of a constructed subject. These operations merge in a dual process of selection and exclusion. First, the discourses attributable to the author-function – the ‘work’ – should be separated from the ‘millions of traces left by someone after their death’. Then, the elements pertinent to defining the author's position need to be selected from the innumerable events that constitute the life of an individual.

Today, the presence of abundant literary archives makes it more complex to delimit the work itself and the separation between literary texts recognised as such and the ‘millions of [written] traces left behind by an individual’. For Foucault, the problem is just as theoretical as it is technical:

When undertaking the publication of Nietzsche's work, for example, where should one stop? Surely everything must be published, but what is ‘everything’? Everything that Nietzsche himself published, certainly? And what about the rough drafts for his work? Obviously. The plans for his aphorisms? Yes. The deleted passages and the notes at the bottom of the pages? Yes. What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry list: Is it a work, or not? Why not? And so on, ad infinitum.²

‘Is it a work or not?’ Foucault's question about the infinite ‘proliferation’ of Nietzsche's writing should now be inverted to consider the possibility or necessity of its ‘rarefaction’ – to use Foucault's vocabulary from L'ordre du discours.³ As convincingly proven by Mazzino Montinari, Nietzsche's most canonical book, Der Wille zur Macht, was never written by him and must be considered a ‘falsification’ by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. She cut up, gathered and ordered into book form several fragments (notes, sketches, thoughts) left behind by her brother, who, for his part, had not had any intention of transforming these into a book.⁴ So does The Will to Power⁵ exist as a work and should it be included in Nietzsche's works or not?

Let us take another example of the textual manipulations made possible by an author's decision. Repeatedly, Jorge Luis Borges determined the limits of his ‘work’.⁶ He excluded from his Obras completas (Complete Works) published by Emecé in 1974, three books he had published between 1925 and 1928: Inquisiciones, El tamaño de mi esperanza and El idioma de los argentines, and he prohibited any republication of these three books, which were published again only in 1993 and 1994 by Maria Kodama, seven years after Borges’ death – and not without ferocious controversy. On the other hand, Borges chose with his publisher – in this case Jean-Pierre Bernés, who published his Oeuvres complètes (Complete Works) in French in the ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’ published by Gallimard – all of the texts he considered part of his ‘work’, not only books and anthologies, but also reviews of books and films, prologues, articles, chronicles and the first printed version of many poems or pieces of fiction.⁷

Modern literary archives, which allow such manipulations, produce effects on publishing practices concerned with works printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the one hand, they have inspired the search to identify the type of manuscript used to publish the printed texts and an obsession with lost manuscripts. On the other hand, the unstable delimitation of ‘work’ has inspired novel decisions for authors from early modernity; for example, the publication of two texts for a single play, such as the case of King Lear in the Complete Oxford Shakespeare or of A game at chess in the Oxford Middleton's Collected Works, or even the recent and provocative inclusion by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino in Middleton's work of plays that are generally published under another name, such as The Tragedy of McBeth or Measure for Measure, plays in which both publishers consider that Shakespeare was not the only author.⁸

The most important consequence of the conceptual configuration that produced the need for the presence of the ‘author-function’, according to Foucault's expression, is the relationship established between the literary work and the writer's life. Since the mid-seventeenth century, literary compositions ceased to be thought of as being based on stories that were reused, shared common places or collaborations imposed by patrons or theatre companies or entrepreneurs and began to be seen as original creations that expressed the most intimate feelings and most decisive and singular experiences of their author. The first consequence was the desire to publish works in accordance with the author's life chronology; the second was the writing of literary biographies. Regarding Shakespeare, Edmond Malone was the first to associate the two undertakings. He based his Life of Shakespeare (printed only in 1821)⁹ on ‘original and authentic documents’, breaking away from the compilations of anecdotes printed by Nicholas Rowe in his 1709 edition,¹⁰ and established the first (supposed) timeline of Shakespeare's works. According to him, the plays should be published in the order Shakespeare wrote them and not according to the distribution of the plays in the tradition of the Folio, between comedies, historical plays and tragedies. Boswell followed this desire (except for the historical plays) in the 1821 new edition of Malone's The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare published in 1790.¹¹

But it was no easy task, considering the absence of autograph and autobiographical documents – and the existence of very little information about Shakespeare's life. In order to compensate for this scarcity of information, Malone inaugurated a fundamental device for any literary biography: locating the works in a life requires finding the life in the works. As Margreta de Grazia wrote:

Life gave way to the work which passed back into life, all on a single temporal continuum. In lieu of archival documents, the plays were positioned to serve as the primary sources for information about Shakespeare's life during his years in London. The arrangement itself suggested that only by scrutinizing the plays exhaustively, as if they were archival documents, could Shakespeare's life in its entirety – from the beginning through the end – be known.¹²

After Malone, all Shakespeare biographies – including those coming from the ‘New Historicism’ – were now at the mercy of the traps of the retrospective imposition of an interpretive paradigm made possible only by the existence of literary archives and of a new comprehension and reading of literary compositions. A ‘radical incompatibility’, to use Margreta de Grazia's expression, exists between romantic and pre-romantic aesthetics – when the work was written, as Diderot said, by the author's heart – and a regime of earlier textual production that did not consider that ‘literature’ (a concept that did not even exist) should be attributed to an individual singularity. And it is with this incompatibility in mind that we should comprehend the effects produced on publishing practices and literary criticism by the conceptual mutations that, beginning in the eighteenth century, transformed them and invented ‘literature’.

Materiality

Such a perspective presupposes the erasure of the frontier previously established between the most common productions and practices of written culture and literature, understood as a particular field of creations and experiences. Such an erasure demands approximation of two aspects that western tradition has long separated: on the one hand, interpretation and comment on the works; on the other, analysis of the technical or social conditions of their publication, circulation and appropriation. There are several reasons for this dissociation: the neo-Platonic permanence of the opposition between the purity of the idea and its inevitable corruption by matter, the definition of ‘copyright’, which establishes the author's ownership of a text always considered identical to itself,¹³ whatever the form of its publication, and even the triumph of a post-Kantian aesthetic¹⁴ that judges works regardless of the materiality of their support.

Paradoxically, in the twentieth century, the two critical perspectives that have brought to bear the most sustained attention to the material modalities of the inscription of discourses have reinforced rather than combatted this process of textual abstraction. Analytical bibliography or New Bibliography has rigorously investigated the different printed forms of a single work (editions, issues, copies) with the aim of recuperating an ideal text, free from the alterations inflicted by the publication process and identical to the text as it was written, dictated or dreamed of by the author. Hence, the radical distinction between ‘essentials’ and ‘accidentals’, the work in its essence and the accidents that have deformed or corrupted it.¹⁵

The deconstructionist perspective placed great emphasis on the materiality of writing and the different forms of inscribing language.¹⁶ Nevertheless, in its efforts to abolish the most immediate oppositions (between orality and writing, between the singularity of speech acts and the reproducibility of writing), it built conceptual categories (archi-writing and iterability) that necessarily distance the perception of the effects produced by the empirical differences that characterise the different modalities of publication of texts.

Against such an abstraction of discourse, it is worth recalling that the production, not only of books, but also of the texts themselves, is a process that, beyond the writing, implies different moments, different techniques, and different interventions. The transactions between the works and the social world do not consist, then, only in the aesthetic and symbolic appropriation of common objects, of languages and of ritual or daily practices, as the New Historicism¹⁷ has demonstrated. They mainly concern the multiple, mobile, unstable relations between the work and its multiple appropriations and incarnations. The process of publication, whatever its modality may be, is always a collective process, which implies numerous interventions and that does not separate the materiality of the text from the textuality of the book or from the ‘performance’. Thus it is useless to want to distinguish the work's ‘essential’ substance, considered forever similar to itself, and the text's ‘accidental’ variations, considered unimportant and that the modern publisher should erase in order to bring the work back in its original identity.

However, these multiple variations do not destroy the idea that a work conserves a perpetuated identity, immediately recognisable by its readers or listeners. David Kastan characterised as ‘Platonist’ the perspective according to which a work transcends all its possible material incarnations, and as ‘pragmatic’ the one affirming that no text exists outside of the material forms that make it be read or heard.¹⁸ This contradictory perception of texts divides both literary criticism and editorial practices and opposes those for whom it is necessary to recover the text exactly as its author wrote, imagined or desired it, mending the wounds inflicted upon it by manuscript transmission or typographic composition, against those for whom the multiple textual forms in which a work has been published and circulated constitute its different historical states that should be respected, comprehended or published in their irreducible diversity.

Like others, or better than others, the Spanish authors of the Golden Age were aware of the processes that are the very object of every history of written culture. The first is given by the plurality of the interventions that characterise the publication of the texts. Authors do not write books, not even their own. Books, manuscripts or printed, are always the result of multiple operations that presuppose very diverse decisions, techniques and skills, for example, in the case of books printed in the age of the ‘old typographic regime’ between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the copy of the author's manuscript by a professional scribe, the examination of this copy by censors, the choices of the bookseller-publisher regarding the paper, format or print run, the organisation of the labour of composition and printing in the print shop, the preparation of the copy and composition of the text by typesetters, the reading of the proofs by correctors and finally the printing of copies that, in the age of manual presses, did not rule out corrections over the course of the print run. What is at stake here is not only the production of the book, but of the text itself in its material and graphic forms.

The role of the scribes in the publication process was one of the reasons for the loss of authorial manuscripts at the beginning of the modern age. In the Castile of the Golden Age, manuscripts sent to the Royal Council to receive licence and privilege were never autograph manuscripts, but always copias en limpio, fair copies written by a professional amanuensis and at times corrected by the author, who may have wanted to change several words or sentences, introduce notes in the margins, cut several lines or even add loose pages to the manuscript.¹⁹ Once approved, and at times corrected, by the censors, the manuscript was sent to the publisher and then the printer. The printer's copy was called the original in Spanish and submitted the text to a first series of transformations of both spelling and punctuation. While manuscripts in the author's hand (for example, their letters) in general had very few punctuation marks and presented great irregularity in the spelling of words, the scribe's originals (which were not in fact originals, but fair copies) needed to lend greater legibility to the text being sent to censors and typesetters. Once at the typographic stage, the scribe's copy of the autographed manuscript was prepared by correctors, who added accents, upper-case letters and punctuation.²⁰ After these textual interventions made by the copyist, censor or copy-editor, the autograph manuscript lost all its importance and was not preserved.

Thus prepared, the copy was then transformed and deformed by the work of the print shop. Frequent errors by typesetters introduced multiple distortions: inverted letters or syllables, forgotten words and skipped lines. Not only that, but a single copy read by different proofreaders or compositors could lead, on the printed pages, to great variations in the use of pronouns, verb tense concordances and respect of grammar rules. Effectively, authors did not write their own books, even if some of them did intervene during reissues of the works and were fully aware of the effects produced by the material forms of their texts.

This is the reality that Don Quixote perceived when he visited a printing shop in Barcelona (part 2, chapter 62) where he ‘saw them drawing sheets in one place, correcting in another, setting up type here, revising there; in short all the work that is to be seen in great printing offices’.²¹ In the seventeenth century, treatises dedicated to the art of typography insisted on this division of tasks in which authors did not play the main role. In 1619, Gonzalo de Ayala, who was himself a print corrector, emphasised that correctors ‘should know grammar, spelling rules, etymology, punctuation, accent placement’.²² In 1675, Melchor de Cabrera, a lawyer who defended the privileges of the printers of Madrid, pointed out that compositors should know ‘where to place question marks, exclamation points and parentheses; because frequently the writers’ intention becomes unclear by the absence of these elements, which are necessary and important to the intelligibility and comprehension of what is written or printed, because if one or the other is lacking, the meaning changes, is inverted or is transformed’.²³ Several years later, circa 1680, Alonso Victor de Paredes, express...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Introduction: Connecting people through books, periodicals and theatre – a cultural revolution
• Part I Methodology Issues
• Part II Editing, selling and reading books between Europe and Brazil
• Part III Cultural exchanges through periodicals
• Part IV Plays and novels between Europe and Brazil
• Notes
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors