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  • Eternity and the Everyday
  • Brian Michael Norton
Jacob Sider Jost, Prose Immortality, 1711–1819 (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia, 2015). Pp. viii + 239. $45

There is something counterintuitive in the very idea of a prose immortality. Prose concerns itself with this world—with the mundane rather than the spiritual, with the temporal rather than the eternal. Indeed, prose is closely identified with the prosaic, a term that originally signified nothing other than this relation (“of or relating to prose”), but over time came to encompass the conditions and qualities with which prose itself was associated: the unexceptional, the commonplace, the everyday. Prose’s commitment to the local and the particular only seemed to deepen over the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, driven by the rise of such genres as the novel, diary, and periodical paper, and by the advent of ever more detailed practices of textual description, which, as Cynthia Wall and others have demonstrated, may serve as an index of how and what a culture sees. Of course, there have always been critics who have questioned the costs of these developments. In the same essay where he stingingly calls the eighteenth century an “age of prose,” Matthew Arnold grants that while “a fit prose was a necessity,” it could not occur “without some touch of frost to the imaginative life of the soul.” For Arnold, it was self-evident that the eighteenth century’s embrace of prose entailed relinquishing [End Page 126] “higher” things. And for us, too, it may seem equally obvious that a turn to the prosaic, for better or worse, is a turn away from eternity.

Jacob Sider Jost invites us to rethink this picture. His cogent and original book serves not only as a reminder of the period’s ongoing interest in everlastingness—in the senses of both literary immortality and spiritual eternity—it also locates prose at the heart of a new understanding of these concepts. Perhaps the clearest example of this can be seen in the century’s method of memorializing the dead, one that conceives the literary monument not as a “lapidary lyric tablet,” but as a “massive cairn of stones,” accumulative and circumstantial, which uses “documentary writing” to “preserve a particular individual in such detail that he or she is felt to survive beyond physical death” (3). “For the first time,” Sider Jost observes, writing “is imagined as a way of immortalizing . . . the rhythms and events of daily life” (2). While James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) “epitomizes this paradigm,” Sider Jost shows the logic of prose immortality to be at work in eighteenth-century literary and religious culture more broadly, inscribed in an array of acts of preservation: of souls, persons, characters, reputations, time.

The opening chapters on Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator (1711–12) and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–45) lay out the book’s case for the intimate relation between daily time and what the eighteenth century called “futurity.” Covering considerable ground, they gloss the humanization of heaven, the Anglican emphasis on morality, the formal implications of periodicity, and the analogical links between literary immortality and spiritual eternity (the two work in concert for Addison and stand in some tension for Young). Sider Jost’s most important argument here concerns the “theology of time.” Like Benedict Anderson, Charles Taylor, and Stuart Sherman, Sider Jost holds modern time (what Walter Benjamin called “homogenous, empty time”) to be abstract, sequential, and chronometric. But his rather daring contribution to the discussion is to insist that eighteenth-century Britons fundamentally understood this “horizontal” time as stretching out into a limitless futurity, the daily flowing inexorably into the eternal. In fact, Sider Jost suggests that the flattening, standardizing logic of the new secular time actually worked to bring the eternal into closer proximity with the daily, placing the two on a smooth continuum, making the daily itself an increment of eternity. Locating Addison and Steele in the “vanguard” of these transformations, Sider Jost persuasively argues that The Spectator “reimagines the Christian afterlife not as a judgment, but as a continuation of life lived on earth” (22)—as “an extension to its logical conclusion of a...

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