Overwhelmed

Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution

Maurice S. Lee

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691194219
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

An engaging look at how debates over the fate of literature in our digital age are powerfully conditioned by the nineteenth century's information revolution What happens to literature during an information revolution? How do readers and writers adapt to proliferating data and texts? These questions appear uniquely urgent today in a world of information overload, big data, and the digital humanities. But as Maurice Lee shows in Overwhelmed, these concerns are not new—they also mattered in the nineteenth century, as the rapid expansion of print created new relationships between literature and information.Exploring four key areas—reading, searching, counting, and testing—in which nineteenth-century British and American literary practices engaged developing information technologies, Overwhelmed delves into a diverse range of writings, from canonical works by Coleridge, Emerson, Charlotte Brontë, Hawthorne, and Dickens to lesser-known texts such as popular adventure novels, standardized literature tests, antiquarian journals, and early statistical literary criticism. In doing so, Lee presents a new argument: rather than being at odds, as generations of critics have viewed them, literature and information in the nineteenth century were entangled in surprisingly collaborative ways.An unexpected, historically grounded look at how a previous information age offers new ways to think about the anxieties and opportunities of our own, Overwhelmed illuminates today's debates about the digital humanities, the crisis in the humanities, and the future of literature.

CHAPTER ONE

Reading

I have chosen my boat, and laid in my scant stores. I have selected a few books; the principal are Homer and Shakespeare—But the libraries of the world are thrown open to me—and in any port I can renew my stock.

—MARY SHELLEY, THE LAST MAN (1826)

Alas! the days of desolate islands are no more!

—EDGAR ALLAN POE, 1836 REVIEW OF ROBINSON CRUSOE

HERE’S SOMETHING SUPPOSEDLY FUN: If you were stranded on a deserted island and could have only one book, which would you choose? The appeal of this question for lovers of literature seems obvious enough, as most of us like to talk about books and express our aesthetic sensibilities. Less obviously fun is the deserted island gambit, which is actually quite grim. Do we need a shipwreck or plane crash and all our fellow travelers killed just to enjoy some close reading? It might feel that way sometimes, and not simply because formal explication has come to share explanatory power with historical context, theoretical mindfulness, and familiarities across the disciplines. Negotiations of this sort have been going on for half a century without leading to imagined extremes (the disintegration of texts, the end of the canon, the death of aesthetics, and so on). These days, a supposedly new anxiety haunts the prospects of literature. As our current information revolution reaches what can feel like terminal velocity, the most significant threat to the kind of attentive, interpretive, pleasurable reading generally associated with literature is the inconceivable quantity of texts so easily retrieved from digital databases, a superabundance that when managed with computational tools makes capacities for close reading seem measly by comparison. Every unread text on HathiTrust, every unclicked link on Google Books, every unheeded recommendation from Amazon can feel like an admonishment to those whose profession is textual mastery, sometimes—and absurdly—regarded as a combination of comprehension and comprehensiveness.

Under such conditions, careful reading may become a fading fetish, nonreading will extend its rich literary history, and Franco Moretti’s statement from two decades ago appears increasingly prophetic: “Reading ‘more’ is always a good thing, but not the solution.”¹ Literary scholars have good reasons to sense a sea change in our relations with texts, and yet for all the hand-wringing and euphoria over ongoing shifts in reading and interpretive practices, close reading has proven remarkably resilient under various literary-critical methods, and most scholars of literature still find themselves drawn to the scrutiny of specific works, just as most students still find themselves responsible for—and even excited about—individual texts.² When enthusiasm for our information revolution falters, and when one reflects on what makes literature meaningful and wonderful, one still might dream of a deserted island with just one book to command attention.

If fantasies of close reading and anxieties of textual superabundance are, as I’m suggesting, mutually constituted, then literary scholars who value intensive hermeneutics should not offhandedly reject methods of criticism that take up large numbers of texts. Over the last decade, reading has become a flood subject for historical, theoretical, and empirical inquiry, spurred in part by work in and around the digital humanities that presents the starkest alternatives to close reading today. Debates over the fate of books in our distracted age of screens often focus on how we are or should be or will be reading.³ Katherine Hayles’s “hyper reading” describes a hermeneutic that jumps Parkour-like among multiple sources of information.⁴ The distant reading now practiced in various forms subjects thousands of texts to statistical analyses often performed by teams of scholars that do not read the writings they study. Data-mining projects algorithmically read for allusions, collocations, and topic clusters, while quantitative print histories and some aspects of “surface reading” share affinities with DH criticism.⁵ If in the middle of the twentieth century, punch-card-driven stylometric analysis was largely regarded as a curiosity, today’s computer-assisted literary study now enjoys a status that warrants more serious engagement, particularly as the internet supercharges worries over shallow knowledge and information overload and as commentators react fiercely to the very suggestion of conceptualizing literature as data.⁶

The disruptions of the digital have pushed literary scholars to pay renewed attention to reading, but it is also becoming increasingly clear that the nineteenth century anticipates twenty-first-century concerns over superabundance and the reading practices it generates. How reading fared under the proliferation of texts and information is a multifaceted question that this chapter takes up with three case studies: (1) an account of what I call “deserted island reading” in Robinson Crusoe (1719) and the novel’s nineteenth-century reception; (2) a reconsideration of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s aesthetics in relation to textual excess, and (3) a look at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s attitude toward extensive reading practices and his handling of large numbers of texts. These diachronic cases show how some literary thinkers approach reading as a negotiation between the literary and the informational. Taken together, they not only sketch a spectrum of responses to the challenge of information overload; they also trace a rough historical trajectory of reading that conditions twenty-first-century anxieties about the status of literature in our information age.

Crusoe’s Book(s)

Before turning to the nineteenth century, a backward glance can acknowledge a longer history in which muddled continuities temper desires for clean narratives of origin and epistemic rupture. The nineteenth century was hardly the first to experience textual excess and information overload, a point rigorously demonstrated by historians of print such as Robert Darnton (“every age was an age of information”), Roger Chartier (we have inherited from the Middle Ages the “anxiety” of organizing books), Ann Blair (who traces concerns over textual superabundance from Seneca to medieval reference books to early modern notation systems), and Chad Wellmon (who studies the emergence of Enlightenment bibliography, including the trope of scholars being killed by falling bookshelves).⁷ More specific to the question of how the proliferation of print and information influences conceptions of the literary, Lennard Davis, Michael McKeon, and especially Mary Poovey have focused on the eighteenth century, placing Daniel Defoe at a historical juncture where the mass production of texts and emergence of modern factuality begin shaping literature in a complex range of forms.⁸ Poovey draws on Defoe’s Essay upon Projects (1697) to discuss how informational methods undergird a liberal subjectivity fundamental to the rise of the novel, and she argues that Roxana (1724) as an exemplary print culture artifact points toward the construction of fiction as a genre. Poovey carries her arguments into the early nineteenth century where literary authorities, threatened by print culture, define disciplinary practices of close reading and canonization against the spread of facts and information. Nineteenth-century relations between the informational and the literary do indeed have much in common with those of the eighteenth, indicating not so much a moment of epistemic shift (as Friedrich Kittler and Geoffrey Nunberg would generally have it) as inflections in what Lisa Gitelman and Andrew Piper see as a more continuous evolution in print and media history.⁹

One inflection that distinguishes the nineteenth from the eighteenth century involves the application of informational methods to literature itself, a dynamic evident in Robinson Crusoe and its reception history. Indicating how information and its management spread irregularly across disparate domains, Defoe’s novel does not extend its informational practices to the status of books themselves, though the nineteenth century worried over such possibilities, finding in Crusoe an object lesson and even totem for readers overwhelmed by mass print. Before the digital humanities, the Frankfurt school, and Weber’s bureaucratized, rationalist modernity, nineteenth-century commentators on Defoe’s deserted island novel wondered how literary reading could survive in an age of information.

Robinson Crusoe is famously packed with enumerated facts, but its treatment of books is oddly uneven. Marx and Weber were not wrong to see Crusoe as a proto-Enlightenment bookkeeper, and scholars from Ian Watt to Maximillian Novak and beyond have situated Crusoe’s investment in numbers within broader informational discourses of accounting and political economy.¹⁰ Space, time, money, goods, animals, men, and Crusoe’s own spiritual estate—such diverse and multiplying interests are all subject to Defoe’s enumerations in a genre marked from its English origins by generative tensions between aesthetic enchantment and measurable materialism. Along with his robust will to inventory, Crusoe has “a competent Knowledge of the Mathematics,” and Defoe himself studied under Charles Morton, who later became an influential mathematician and Baconian naturalist at Harvard College.¹¹ More than a merely practical accountant, Defoe appreciated computational schemes at a conceptual and imaginative level. In what seems today an otherwise straightforward section on double-entry bookkeeping in The Complete English Tradesman (1726), Defoe cannot help but admire an illiterate, innumerate shopkeeper who keeps his accounts by making notches on sticks and placing them in a series of shelves, drawers, and boxes, some of them painted with customers’ faces. The man uses spoons as a kind of crude abacus, but because he owns only six, he invents for himself a base-six numeral system, which—Defoe insists with admiration—serves him perfectly well. As suggested by Crusoe’s struggles to keep accurate records, Robinson Crusoe reflects Defoe’s long-standing interests in material and methodological aspects of bookkeeping, though books themselves are largely excluded from an informational worldview that, as McKeon has generally argued, lacks “quantitative completeness.”¹²

Despite the presence of multiple volumes on the island, and excluding Crusoe’s own metaliterary journal, only one text essentially matters in Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe initially lists the books he salvages from his shipwreck—“Books of Navigation,” “three very good Bibles,” “some Portugueze Books,” “three Popish Prayer-Books,” and (as if Defoe’s interest in the specificity of formal realism has been exhausted) “several other Books” (59). Yet outside of the Bible, none of these volumes is mentioned again, even in the bill of lading Crusoe makes when leaving his island. Alberto Manguel has noted that Crusoe, unlike Defoe, is not an “assiduous reader.”¹³ Except, I think, in the case of the Bible, which Crusoe initially happens upon randomly but eventually comes to read closely: “I took the Bible, and beginning at the New Testament, I began seriously to read it, and impos’d upon my self to read a while every Morning and every Night, not tying my self to the Number of Chapters, but as long as my Thoughts shou’d engage me” (89). Self-imposed, regulated, linear study sounds like the Robinson we know (no flakey hyper reading for him), though importantly Crusoe refuses to tie himself to numbers, instead allowing inclination and even chance to determine his reading, which we see later when he engages in bibliomancy at moments when his calculative reason fails. Crusoe may lack exegetical sophistication, and he provides a nonscholarly model of heroism, but his hermeneutic practices are actually quite nuanced, alternating between comprehensive, systematic methods we might associate with informational discipline and more intuitive, serendipitous, imaginative interpretation—a dialectic of head and heart, works and grace, typical not only of Puritan autobiography and Protestant exegesis, but also (as we shall see) of emerging reading practices associated with textual excess.

Significantly less modulated than Crusoe’s reading habits is the object of his reading insofar as Robinson Crusoe, its paradigmatic setting notwithstanding, actually does not think to dramatize the question: If you were stranded on a deserted island and could have only one book, which would you choose? A modern reader of Crusoe can imagine rich thematics arising from the load of salvaged texts. Will those popish prayer books compete with the Bible or become an occasion for Puritan commentary? (No, Crusoe’s thoughts on Catholicism are mixed, but they are neither agonistic nor polemical.) Will those Portuguese books invite meditations on differences in language, culture, and nation? (No, that role, howsoever limited, is mainly reserved for Friday.) Will the navigation manuals prove crucial to Crusoe’s return to civilization in a mode of scientific self-reliance and middle-class self-cultivation? (No, Crusoe had already learned navigation as a youth.) Does the multiplicity of Bibles raise questions about translation or scriptural authenticity or the materiality of texts? (No, Crusoe is neither an exegete nor a book historian.) That the Bible is the primary text on Crusoe’s island should come as no surprise. For the vast majority of Defoe’s contemporaries, and given the salvific trajectory of Robinson Crusoe, the Bible is the only possible answer to the deserted island question.

Or more precisely, and as indicated by a search of Google Books, the deserted island question was not a real question until the twentieth century, and even in that supposedly secular era, the most popular answer is the Bible.¹⁴ All this is to say that Crusoe’s “choice” of reading is not really a choice at all, for despite its initial inclusion on a list, the Bible is less the Book of Books and more the One and Only Text as the soon-to-be-forgotten other volumes on the island serve as temporary props to material realism, not alternate courses of readi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Reading
• Chapter 2: Searching
• Chapter 3: Counting
• Chapter 4: Testing
• Notes
• Index
• A Note on the Type