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Article Excerpt
Some will have it, that I often write to my sell and am the only punctual correspondent I have. This objection would indeed be material, were the letters I communicate to the public stuffed with my own commendations, and if, instead of endeavouring to divert or instruct my readers, I admired in them the beauty of my own performances.
--Joseph Addison, Spectator 271
In an area of historical inquiry that has traditionally been resistant to theory, the post-Restoration periodical has suffered from acute neglect by the practitioners of rhetorical or formalist cultural studies. There are important exceptions to this rule, to be sure, but their scarcity indexes the power of the historicist rule from which they deviate. (1) In a recent article in PMLA, Sean Latham and Robert Scholes offer an incisive assessment of both the promising and the potentially troubling dimensions of what they term "The Rise of Periodical Studies." Ultimately, though, their account of this emerging field of inquiry perpetuates a number of unquestioned assumptions about how these textual objects should be interpreted and why they should be of interest to scholars invested in a cultural-studies approach to the early Enlightenment. (2) In the course of celebrating and suggesting improvements for the increasing digitization of the periodical archive, Latham and Scholes repeatedly (and rightly, I think) insist that these recovered documents should be viewed as coherent cultural objects in their own right, requiring "new methodologies" and "new types of collaborative investigation." (3) The authors imagine a brave new world of academic research organized in "genuinely interdisciplinary or even multidisciplinary" spaces that could be thought of as "humanities labs" modeled after those in the sciences, places where "collaborative networks of researchers and institutions [would] lend their collective expertise to textual objects that would otherwise overwhelm single scholars." (4)
As exciting as this new model of scholarly inquiry sounds, it turns out to be motivated by assumptions about the referential epistemological status of the periodical that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years--assumptions about the "factual" quality of these textual representations that were created by the early periodicalists themselves as an effective and fundamentally misleading strategy for marketing their wares. For Latham and Scholes, periodicals function as "containers of discrete bits of information" for scholars "to mine," or, in a much more elaborate trope, as time-travel-inducing "windows" onto the cultures of the past: in the rapturous conclusion to their otherwise brilliant analysis of how advertising and moralizing get jumbled together on the folio pages of Spectator 75 (May 25, 1711), the authors cannot refrain from claiming of this archival document that "Queen Anne's England is here, and we are invited to enter it through this precious door, which periodical studies can open for us." (5) These metaphors of the mine and the window simply reinforce the longstanding notion that the essays of writers like Addison and Steele are useful primarily as repositories of sociohistorical data about early eighteenth-century English life. According to this commonly-held understanding, periodicals function as a kind of textualized living museum, with narrators like the genial Mr. Spectator leading us through Addison's London as if he were its Virgilian docent. Donald Bond, editor of the standard five-volume Spectator papers, anticipates exactly the kind of language used by Latham and Scholes when he argues for present-day interest in early eighteenth-century periodicals based on the "vivid picture" they give of "ordinary life," how they provide "an inexhaustible source of information on the way people lived ... and re-create the world of Queen Anne's day before our eyes." The "truth" of the Spectator papers lies in their material-cultural details, in pictures so powerful that Bond compulsively re-displays their contents in a catalog of his own--"the size of the hoop-petticoat," "the pinch of Barcelona and the ounce of right Virginia," "the laced and knotted cravat," and "the beaver hat edged with silver"--because these "bits," as he puts it, are the essayistic means through which the world of the periodical is "re-created" for readers. (6)
Indeed, formalist neglect of the periodical has stemmed from at least two still-pervasive assumptions about the genre--not only this emphasis on the papers' factualness, but also the critical assumption that the essays circulating in the early public sphere lack aesthetic complexity. As Brian McCrea (among others) has pointed out, Addison and Steele's works became an object of scholarly neglect as a result of precisely that professionalization of literary criticism which their own essays helped to inaugurate. (7) Viewed as ephemera to be hastily gobbled up by readers avid for the latest reflection on matters of topical import, Addison and Steele's essay periodicals have been left out of many rhetorical readings of early eighteenth--century culture because of their apparent formal and ideological simplicity--notwithstanding their epigraphs in Latin, their relentless allusions to classical literature, their adherence to a consistent sonata-like formal structure of maxim-exemplification-and-recapitulation, their argumentative reliance on figurative language, rhetorical devices, and so forth. In literary-critical discourse, the essays have assumed a kind of false transparency in relation to, say, the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and Swift, all of whose works advertise their own aesthetic self-reflexivity in a way that has guaranteed a long history of form-attentive interpretation by both the New Criticism and scholars associated with the "New Eighteenth Century." This situation is particularly ironic, since Addison and Steele were themselves practitioners--admittedly from a somewhat high-browed, boundary-policing perspective--of work that might easily fit under the rubric of cultural studies: they were perfectly at ease with the idea that the formal characteristics of things like advertising, fashion, popular entertainments, and commodities should be as much the object of serious analytic attention as the works of Milton and Shakespeare.
Much historicist work on the early periodical, then, presents us with an image of writers like Addison and Steele that emphasizes the transparent referentiality and the democratizing implications of their public-sphere discourse, an image that Latham and Scholes's ostensibly "new" methodologies seem unlikely to displace or to complicate. In what follows, I attempt to articulate how and why we should read the early periodical from a rhetorical-formalist perspective, one that is attentive both to the performative dimension of these texts that gives them their effet de reel, and to the ideological import of these papers' tendency to allegorize their own operations--their conditions of production and reception--within themselves in what amounts to a kind of self-conscious theory of publicness comparable to but different from the more systematic theories (like those of Habermas, for instance) that scholars have used to interpret these texts. (8) In doing so, I borrow from the contextualization offered by Lennard J. Davis's Foucauldian genealogy of the "news/novels" discourse that emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to distinguish texts that could be called "factual" from those that should be read as "fictional." (9)
Davis argues that the English government's efforts to legislate against subversive critique through juridical codes regarding seditious libel actually restrained freedom of the press in the decades immediately after the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695--a period in English cultural history often thought of as embodying a more open, less censored public culture than that of the decades that preceded it. For Davis, these post-Restoration legal codes, which offered increasingly specific definitions of what could count as "news," ended up "developing a powerful system within the courts to tighten the limits of narrative," creating a cultural milieu which "made it more difficult for narratives to rest in some grey area between fact and fiction." The novel then becomes the generic home for those who wanted "to write about the world away from such overtly political modes as the one offered by the newspaper": the novel provides the legal alibi of "fictionality" that would enable "ideological description of the state of life in a particular country." (10)
What Davis describes as the "ideological" dimension of the early novel applies perhaps even more strictly to the periodicals that appeared just before the novel's emergence--texts absent from Davis's analysis--because the periodical inhabits precisely that moment of historical transition (before the revised Stamp Act of 1724) when it was legally easier for narrative forms to dwell in that liminal space "between fact and fiction." Because of its relevance to the argument being made here, Davis's account of novelistic ideology is worth quoting at some length:
Early novelists ... were trying in effect to naturalize the nature of their production by claiming that it was life they were producing and not some simulacrum of it. That is, authorial disavowal, insistence on verity, false editorship, and so on were the material grounds for the later nineteenth-century assumption that literature is a more penetrating depiction of life than life. Novels work, then, by denying their own mode of production as mere fictions and also by creating the illusion through the use of the median past tense...
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