Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Christina Lupton

Abstract

Christina Lupton. Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Series in Material Texts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. xi+184. $55. Christina Lupton has written a deeply intelligent about what it means, in her words, to cede consciousness, even agency, to medial (ix). She returns us to a time and place--mid-eighteenth-century Britain--during which a great deal of writing concerned itself not only with composition, but with the way written objects assumed, and perhaps even usurped, a certain agency within our lives. Far from a more familiar scholarly narrative in which an incipient realism and empiricism takes shape in this period, for Lupton the significance of mid-century British literature is, pace Cliff Siskin, its deep self-consciousness about mediation. Knowing books in Lupton's title does not just refer to the way individuals thought about their books. It also concerns the way books came to know themselves. Lupton opens her account with attention to an under-identified subgenre of novels produced between the 1750s and 1770s that she labels self-conscious fiction, the many precursors to the literary event that would subsequently be known as Tristram Shandy. These are works that announce that they are boring, bad, sentimental, or written only for profit and yet get on with it, producing an effect of what Lupton calls wry understanding (19). According to Lupton, such novels do two important things for readers. First, they invite readers to do work, rather than simply lose themselves in a book. Self-conscious readers, as the name implies, are more active, more agential in their reading. Ellipsis is one of the more prominent narratological devices used to produce this effect, as when in The Brothers (1758) Susan Smythies writes, choose to leave to the imagination, rather than attempt the description of the tender, generous, grateful things, which were thought and said on this affecting occasion. Lupton is also interested in the way such fiction is not just about our cognitive agency while reading, but the consciousness of our loss of agency. In a section where she discusses the popular eighteenth-century analogy of the novel with the mail coach, novels gradually come to be understood, like coaches, as forms of powerless transport, what it means to be trapped in the medium of the book (41). Reading self-conscious fiction is a way of coming to terms with the limits of readerly agency in an expanding literate environment. Lupton makes clear the extent to which her work is in conversation with, and largely a repudiation of, Marxist paradigms accounting for the legacy of eighteenth century literature. Self-conscious readers replace the falsely conscious ones of the Frankfurt School or those fully conscious ones of Habermas' idealized print public sphere. In chapter two, Lupton moves to that increasingly popular genre (then and now) of it-narratives and what it means not just to talk about commodities, but to come to terms with commodities talking. For Lupton, this is not a sign of some sort of critical form of consciousness, but a recognition of the chill that objects assume in assuming a life of their own. Their agency signals the diminishment of our own. I kept thinking that another useful interlocutor here would be the post-Frankfurt polemicist, Peter Sloterdijk, in particular his work on the Critique of Cynical Reason, which attempts to reckon with the cognitive dissonance between critical acknowledgment and personal acceptance that seems to categorize modern mediation. In Lupton's acute reconstruction, we are critically brought out of the transparent public sphere of Habermasian lore and into the deeply cynical one we now all inhabit. Lupton's third chapter moves from the imagined materiality of books (or more specifically novels) to the more elementary medium of paper. Focusing largely on Hume and one of his primary combatants, James Beattie, Lupton is interested in the way their writing gives birth to a tension concerning the materiality of writing--as both an irreducible substrate of thought and always more than itself--that informs much of the post-structural work of thinkers like Derrida and de Man. …