Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age

Afterword: The Novel Collective

The paperwork that has concerned us in this study cannot be identiWed with paper in the sense suggested by Carlyle’s metaphor of the “Paper Age.” Carlyle’s phrase relies on the digraphic metaphor put in question by the failure of mass mediacy to present itself substantially. In Dickens’s attempts to exploit the distracting effects of novel reading, as in Poe’s related efforts to work with aesthetic concentration or “absorption,” we have traced the movements of a mass medium marked by the decline of what Benjamin calls the “here and now” of the traditional work of art. By trying to read carefully scenes involving paper and exploring Benjamin ’s thesis about mass mediacy, we have also been responding to the insistence on reading in his criticism. Mass mediacy, we have been suggesting , takes place in a way that parallels the loss of presence and loss of place in reading. This is what connects the mass media to the novel in Benjamin’s work.1 Reading in this sense is a matter, not of metaphors or concepts, but of the especially dynamic images of which Benjamin writes in his Arcades Project: “The image that is read, which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded.”2 The exceptional forcefulness of this image imperils the when and where of its reception. For the image can be read only at points when and where the traditional sense of a self-consistent when and where is itself shaken. This is what occurs when the collective becomes receptive to mass mediacy: what Benjamin calls “the decline of the aura.” The collective that emerges at such moments is a paradoxical one bound together as an irreducible plurality of lonesome readers.3 While the “now” of the mass media really does take place, then, its occurrence depends upon an intensely scattering empirical moment that cannot be identiWed with a self-consistent material support. This is what happens in connection with paper in the works we have been reading. In Poe’s “The Gold Bug,” for instance, what Legrand draws from his pocket withdraws at the start and is “taken” right away: Legrand, seated at a small table “on which were pen and ink, but no paper . . . looked for some in a drawer, but found none . . . and drew from his waistcoat pocket a scrap of what Afterword: The Novel Collective I took to be very dirty foolscap” (GB 74). Reading at this point—for the narrator and for the readers of the tale—depends upon an empirical moment and thus needs a material support. Yet this support is not selfcontained and self-consistent, but rather divided and divisible into alternating terms with which it cannot Wnally be identiWed. At the very instant of its appearance in Poe’s tale the material support is in this sense immediately scrapped—scratched out by an inWnite series of oscillating digraphic Wgures in the tale: foolscap or paper, on the one hand, parchment or gold, on the other. The novel collective to which the preceding chapters point cannot be assimilated to a theory of the genre based on the ironic integration of estrangement into experience—what Lukács calls “transcendental homelessness .” In Lukács’s theory, the “mass” of “lived experiences” (Erlebnisse), and with it the “mass” of “isolated individuals,” is given “uniWed articulation ” in the transmissible “form” of the “problematic” life.4 This is the life on which, as Benjamin writes, the isolated readers of the novel seek to warm their hands, that is to say, precisely the kind of experience that is denied to them by their own lives.5 The novel is, as Benjamin might say, a barbaric genre: the literary mode of a collective that outlives culture understood along the traditional lines of a community based on the reciprocal exchange of experience and of the wisdom gained from it.6 Thus the novel starts, and indeed repeatedly anew, where experience means nothing.7 No wisdom or insight can Wll in this gap, not even the wisdom of the docta ignorantia that Lukács attributes to the irony of the novelist.8 Self-conscious professions of ignorance, however well advised under normal circumstances, are inadequate to the shock waves produced by the shattering of tradition in which the reading of the novel participates.9 The source of the novel collective is the distracted public. Novel readers...