Expertise Effects: Literary Performance and Professionalization in the Age of Barnum
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
EXPERTISE EFFECTS: LITERARY PERFORMANCE AND PROFESSIONALIZATION IN THE AGE OF BARNUM By Doug Tye A dissertation submitted to the Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland February 2016 © 2016 Douglas Allen Tye All rights reserved. ABSTRACT This dissertation explores a set of antebellum authors’ ambivalent responses to the increasing specialization of intellectual labor, and the corresponding proliferation of professions and vocations, in the context of the ongoing market revolution. In chapters on Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Martin Delany, I show how these writers engaged with, and critiqued, the intensifying specialization incubated by a splintering scientific discourse that militated against the new nation’s relative flattened social hierarchy. This crucial but gradual development in the antebellum division of labor – wherein the principle organizing social inequality shifted from the top-down model of mercantilism, to a liberal-individual market of entrepreneurs and aspirants – fostered, in knowledge-workers of all sorts, an imperative to appear institutionally legitimate in the eyes of the lay-public. The cultivation of this professional legitimacy depended on the creation of a perceived public need, and thereby a public market, for the specialist’s privileged information about some segment of reality that could be manipulated for the benefit of the non-professional, but not by the non-professional. As all three writers liked to point out, individual confidence (or gullibility) and tacit public consensus were all that distinguished legitimate experts from humbugs and hucksters. As a qualified rejection and partial appropriation of professional ideology, I argue, Poe, Melville, and Delany endeavored to generate what I call “expertise effects,” following Roland Barthes’s concept of the “reality effect,” those descriptive superfluities in French realist novels that create the illusion of reference, of connection to the real. In other words, these writers challenge the reader to experience, and in some ways to produce through interpretive labor, the impression that their texts outmaneuver and undermine putative expert ii discourses through their sheer overfreighting of formal indices of mastery and evasiveness. The characteristic double-gesture – critiquing disciplinary instrumentalization while assuming themselves a posture of access to a zone of privileged, esoteric acumen – is here particularly vexed, since these writers claim no concrete object of knowledge, no positive doctrine or quantifiable field of data. The aesthetic strategies of indirection and concealment – well documented, particularly in Melville’s case, by the critical tradition that valorizes ambiguity as the lodestone of literary quality – dovetail with their rhetorical strategies of argumentative obliquity and occult implication. While their French contemporaries aimed at creating an autonomous sphere of pure art and detached artists, this American vein of rhetorical jugglery renders the boundaries between aesthetic and civil discourses – art and critique, fiction and philosophy, poetry and politics – porous. The weakening of boundaries, of course, facilitated appropriation and invasion. Advisors: Christopher Nealon and Jared Hickman iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation was the hardest thing to write I’ve ever written. It would not have been possible, feasible, or even desirable without the wise and humane advisorial oversight of Christopher Nealon and Jared Hickman, who cheered me on most inspiringly when I did something smart and, with stupendous tact and deftness, let me know when I was maybe approaching the halo around the outer perimeter of the ballpark of doing something stupid. The JHU English Department has, since I’ve been here, been blessed with extraordinary administrators and coordinators: for almost a decade, Karen Tiefenwerth, Nicole Goode, and Sally Hauf have heroically kept me safe from my own occasionally remarkable ineptitude; fellow Iowa Hawkeye Tracy Glink has saved my skin more times than I can count, and become my go-to interlocutor when it comes to hashing out life’s Big Questions (though we remain deadlocked as to whether or not Leonard DiCaprio is too pretty). Innumerable peers and betters in the protean cohort of graduate students, to which I am proud to belong, have been so very nice and smart and good at talking and reading and writing: deepest thanks to Maggie Vinter, Robert D. Day, Nick Bujak, Patrick Fessenbecker, Kara Wedekind, Stephanie Hershinow, Rob Higney, Mark Noble, and many more. Pat Kain and Will Evans gave me the opportunity to teach, and made me so very much better at it. Anne-Elizabeth Brodsky always made everything better. Finally, and most importantly, endless appreciation to my long-suffering parents, who never seem to be suffering, even when I am insufferable. This is for you, mom and dad; I only wish it were more. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: Gilded Lilies, Paper Tigers, and Iron Cages: Antebellum America’s Invention of Expertise……………………………………………………... 1 CHAPTER ONE: The Abduction of Edgar Allan Poe: From Rigorous Connoisseurship to Intuitive Mastery in Poe’s Prose…………………………………………... 47 CHAPTER TWO: Irony as Expertise: Shell-Game Narration in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man…………………………………………………………… 107 CHAPTER THREE: “Arm Of The Lord, Awake!”: Democracy and Charismatic Authority in Martin Delany’s Blake…………………………………………………….. 150 CONCLUSION: When The Going Gets Weird, The Weird Turn Pro………………………. 202 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………… 216 v INTRODUCTION GILDED LILIES, PAPER TIGERS, AND IRON CAGES: ANTEBELLUM AMERICA’S INVENTION OF EXPERTISE A month before the publication of Walden (1854), his friend Thoreau’s masterpiece of “protest against the dogma that the division of labor is beneficial to the individual,” Emerson scribbled this semi-satirical, if factually accurate, list in his journal: The new professions. The phrenologist; the railroad man; the landscape gardener; the lecturer; the sorcerer, rapper, mesmeriser, medium; the daguerreotypist. Proposed: The Naturalist, and the Social Undertaker.1 Assuming for a moment that this list was both accurate and comprehensive – in the years since Samuel Johnson had stressed, in 1773, that the term profession “is particularly used of divinity, physick, and law,” the professional field had grown literally exponentially.2 The decades surrounding midcentury saw an explosion in the possible forms of professional vocation, which offered – in the authority-vacuum left by the deflation of the “liberal” professions – new paths of upward mobility as well as new sources of truth. “More than novel and imaginative solutions,” writes Arthur Wrobel, antebellum intellectuals of all political stripes “desired some form of authority. To many of them, phrenology, spiritualism, and mesmerism had the potential to design institutions based on 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1872, vol. 8, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1912), 574. 2 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition (London, 1773). For the development of professionalism in Britain, see W.J. Reader, Professional Men: The Rise of the Professional Classes in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld, 1966). Though it begins well after my own period concludes, Harold J. Perkin’s The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880 (London: Routledge 1989) is massively influential for studies of this type. 1 the finest intellectual tools available and to offer sound analyses of human nature.”3 Just as importantly, these fringe disciplines were on the cutting edge of scientific method – they were empirically redoubtable – when judged against the prevailing standards of the time. “For the first time,” writes Wrobel, “men seemed close to discovering empirical proof supporting ontological and teleological premises that their age had inherited from eighteenth-century discourses on natural law – that system of universal and invariable laws which sustain the visible creation.”4 The mid-nineteenth century serves as a crucial turning point in the history of expertise as a concept and a rhetoric. The field was filled, rather abruptly, with “new specialisms”: “accountants, surveyors and architects, scientists and engineers, opticians, and dentists – not to mention many on the fringes of professional status, such as actors, artists, writers, poets, journalists.”5 More than just new occupations, these new professions, quasi-professions, and even pseudo-professions promised new solutions to the problems of modernity – solutions mediated by increasingly specialized forms of expertise. In a sense, of course, expertise is a relatively new description of an immemorially old thing – as Tzvetan Todorov notes, “a notion may be legitimate even though no corresponding word may as yet exist to designate it.”6 Theories of expertise – and 3 Arthur Wrobel, “Introduction,” Pseudo-Science and Society in 19th-Century America, ed. Arthur Wrobel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 10. 4 Wrobel, Pseudo-Science, 7. 5 Penelope J. Corfield, Power and the Professions in Britain 1700-1850 (London: Routledge, 1995), 28. 6 Tzvetan Todorov, “The Notion of Literature,” New Literary History 38.1 (2007): 1-12, 1. 2 theorists posing as experts – seem in retrospect to saturate Western history. Four hundred years before Christ, Sophists wandered the streets