Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Immediacy by Daniel Patrick
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Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Immediacy By Daniel Patrick Clinton A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Samuel Otter, Chair Professor Celeste Langan Professor David Henkin Fall 2013 1 Abstract Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Immediacy by Daniel Patrick Clinton Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Samuel Otter, Chair “Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Immediacy” examines the influence of technical media on the aesthetic categories that antebellum American authors inherited from British Romanticism. I argue that Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne turned to the optical devices of copyists and showmen as models for literary form, with the result that, in their writing, the reflective mind comes to resemble a machine. The viewing machines of nineteenth century popular culture — the diorama, the camera obscura, the daguerreotype — figuratively recast the imaginative eye of Romanticism as a construction to be scrutinized, disassembled, and tested. I argue that insistent invocation of technical media in the writing of America’s second-generation Romantics reveals a changing conception of literary form as less a record of experience than an objectification of the mind’s faculties at work. My first chapter, an introduction, traces the central place of copies and repetition in the Romantic aesthetic theory that formed the basis for antebellum American writing, and in particular the poetics of Wordsworth and Coleridge, for whom imagination always departs from simple duplication. After tracing their theories in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I make the case that the theory of photography offers a particularly useful model of study for the American authors who followed Emerson (or resisted him). My second chapter, “The Poet and the Pendulum,” tracks Edgar Allan Poe’s figurative recourse to the camera obscura as a model for his fictional settings and the metronome as a model for poetic meter, conceits that come together in his tales “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” Poe’s habit of sealing characters in dark rooms resembles the optical experiments performed by Newton and Goethe in the camera obscura, a chance to test the senses in isolation. While these tales aestheticize scientific instruments, I argue, the poetic theory expressed in “The Rationale of Verse” and “The Philosophy of Composition” suggests that literary experience, often regarded in Romantic criticism as an hallucination or a dream, can in fact be measured and quantified. My third chapter examines Herman Melville’s use of visual concepts such as foreshortening and outline as cognitive metaphors in his novel Pierre and his late book of poems Timoleon. For Melville, these terms of art approximate the workings of the mind as it forms a manageable 2 conceptual picture from the confused matter of experience. I compare Melville’s figurative outlines with the artistic theory and practice of William Blake, George Cumberland, and John Flaxman, whose popular illustrations of Homer and Dante feature prominently in Pierre. My fourth chapter argues that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun links his career-long meditation on the nature of guilt with the aesthetic question of how transitory impressions become fixed as images, a technical problem that surfaces frequently in the early theory of photography. To this end, The Marble Faun contrasts different degrees of vividness and permanence in the arts, comparing sketches with finished paintings, clay models with marble sculptures. In parallel, Hawthorne questions at what point a fancied crime becomes a fixed spiritual fact. 1 CHAPTER ONE HYSTERICAL ROMANTICISM Introduction Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Immediacy examines the influence of technical media on the aesthetic categories that antebellum American authors inherited from British Romanticism. I argue that Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne turned to the optical devices of copyists and showmen as models for literary form, with the result that, in their writing, the reflective mind comes to resemble a machine. These authors replace the contemplative pause between perception and expression with a series of deterministic effects that resemble both the rote process of professional copyists and the mechanism of photography. The viewing machines of nineteenth century popular culture — the diorama, the camera obscura, the daguerreotype — imposed a sense of rationalized order on the Romantic understanding of vision as a creative process. The strain of American fiction these developments influenced recasts the imaginative eye that half-perceives and half-creates the visible world as a construction to be scrutinized, disassembled, and tested. As a result, the conceptual shift from imitation to expression, characteristic of Romanticism, inspires paranoia and forensic attention in these authors rather than visionary conviction. And, further, the received notions of beauty, poetry, and imagination (concepts bound up in Walter Benjamin’s term of “aura”) lose their capacity to humanize the impersonal mediations through which images and texts found their audience. Literary perspectives and effects, in their artificial character, become less a record of experience than an objectification of the mind’s faculties at work. The insistent invocation of mechanical media and rationalized technique in the work of America’s second-generation Romantics signals a changing conceptual hierarchy between originals and copies that also manifests itself in a heightened fear of automatism. Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville wrote within a culture increasingly organized around mass circulation and technical media, a shift encompassing both the transformation of a decentralized reprinting trade into a national system of publishing and the emergence of the Daguerreotype as the basis of an industry consisting of both urban studios and itinerant craftsman.1 Studies that deal with reproducibility in the context of literature cluster around two objects of study: the print marketplace and the image. The first of these critical trajectories is located in the history of the book, the second in a range of studies spanning the disciplines of literary criticism and art history. Walter Benjamin has argued that as modern mass culture emerged during the first half of the nineteenth century technically produced copies of artworks began to disrupt the authenticity of their originals, with the result that associated concepts such as “creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery” lose their explanatory power.2 Reproduced artworks lose their place, both in 1 For the industrialization of American publishing see William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850 (Philadelphia,: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959). For the parallel history of photography see Beaumont Newhall, The Daguerreotype in America, 3d rev. ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1976), 33. 2 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations (New York: Shocken, 1968), 218. 2 the sense that “technical reproduction can put the copy into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself” and in the related sense that artworks displaced in this way shed their contextual values: “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” (221). For Benjamin, this phenomenon suspends artworks between aesthetics and politics. Yet in practice it also suspends them between different conceptions of aesthetics; while reproduction removes art objects from the material and conceptual enclosures that previously affirmed their aesthetic value, this decontextualization also creates the possible autonomy that would become central to modernist aesthetics. The fragmentary condition of art objects in a culture characterized by mechanical reproduction gets recuperated in modernist theories of medium-specificity and impersonality, in which texts functionally internalize a troubled tradition by means of self-reflexive technique. The effects that Benjamin attributes to the influence of technical media surface in the representational strategies of antebellum American fiction before photography had become fully industrialized. But the continuity between visual and verbal media renders the continuity between techniques of reproduction and strategies of representation more difficult to trace.3 While Benjamin sidelines printed literature as “a special, though particularly important, case,” this dissertation will examine the destabilizing influence of mechanical reproduction on both imitation and expression. In American fiction, this project will argue, reproducibility becomes the conceptual hinge between problems of evidence and the status of aesthetics. Whereas the representational codes of visual media may be naturalized as qualities of resemblance or presence, the code of language is less easily effaced. Print foregrounds the artifice as language yet easily masks the particulars of circulation. The cognitive content of literary works seems uniquely detachable from any material instantiation, even as textual meanings lean upon particular methods of circulation and scenes of reading. Further, printed literature occupies an intermediate position even within the history of mechanical reproduction,