The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Jonathan Senchyne

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Jonathan Senchyne Alexandra Socarides JONATHAN SENCHYNE The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. xiv+194 pp. Long before Jonathan Senchyne published The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), I knew him as the nineteenth-century paper expert. Whenever I had a question about paper, I went to him, and whenever somebody I knew was thinking about paper, I’d ask them if they had talked to him. You might think that this is a small world–people who care about paper–but just a few months ago, a hybrid panel called “Interesting Stuff! Techniques and Approaches to Research with Paper” was held at Harvard University, and the event organizer reports that over a hundred people were in attendance. Why, you might ask, are so many people drawn to thinking and talking about paper? Senchyne’s book helps us answer this question, as it posits paper as a substance both around and within which so much happens. In literary studies, we are always pitching one thing against another: content/form, aesthetics/ideology, public/private, sound/sense. On the one hand, the very presence of paper invites more of these: material text/alphabetic text, bibliographic code/linguistic code, substrate/inscription. In other words, the very presence of paper as a subject of analysis forces us to think about the paper itself versus what the paper holds. Although he acknowledges that many people have been tempted to read paper in this way, Senchyne’s approach to paper is rooted in his desire to undo such a dichotomy. In his words: “Paper is the thin plane where presence and meaning, the ontic and mimetic, the bibliographic and the linguistic cohere and become mutually constitutive” (3). Or, later, “The way paper cuts across, or under, as it were, the division between manuscript and print dissolves the hold of that division on the mind” (19). Thinking about paper in this way sets Senchyne up to challenge theories of the print public sphere that depend on such binaries, arguing, eventually, against Habermas’s limited inclusion of public sphere subjects, since Senchyne shows that considering paper allows us to think instead about “a more diverse range of actors, [End Page 40] many of whom are women and laborers” (29). Paying attention to paper is, in this sense, a transformative experience on multiple levels. The opening chapter of The Intimacy of Paper provides the reader with everything they need to know about how paper was made in America between 1690 and 1867, and simply for this reason alone this book is an incredibly valuable contribution and will be used by a variety of different kinds of scholars for years to come. This period of rag paper production can be split into two periods: 1690–1817, when rag paper was made by hand, and 1817–1867, when rag paper was made by machine. Then, in 1867, “a wood-based pulp replaced a rag-based pulp as the primary ingredient in the majority of paper making” (12) and “ways of writing about one’s relation to paper changed markedly” (13). During this long rag paper period, an “intimacy” of, within, and because of paper is possible precisely because the traces of people who brought it into existence–the people who handled, collected, and worked with the rags–are present within it. And, as this book goes on to prove, literary texts that feature paper and papermaking bear this out. On the one hand, this intimacy is personal, since “writing about rag paper animates thought about readers’ sensual relationships with material texts, revealing similarities in ways of writing and feeling” (4), and, on the other hand, it is political, as Senychne argues that “rag paper drew people together into recognizably political, even national, affiliation before it circulated and was read as a printed text, or even as a precondition of a printed text’s circulation” (37). Once we understand that paper is not subsumed by meaning-making, and that its very presence in the lives of...