Portraits of Delegation

Critical discussions of the animation of objects in literature and culture have persisted in seeing agency as a human attribute, which is extended or applied to nonhumans. By contrast, Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory defines action as a matter of delegation, or making others—and being made to—do things. These processes connect humans and nonhumans together in networks. Reminding us that Latour’s notion of the actor is derived from literary structuralism’s concept of the actant, this essay argues that eighteenth-century prose fiction and material technology are domains in which the processes of delegation between humans and nonhumans come to be codified. In particular, I read it-narratives—eighteenth-century novels told by objects—not as works of fiction extending narrativity to nonhuman protagonists, but as networks in which the functions associated with third-person narration (omniscience, omnipresence, omnitemporality) are assigned to mechanical devices. A Latourian reading of the narration of it-narratives, including The Golden Spy (1709), The Sedan (1757), and Chrysal, or Adventures a Guinea (1760-64), reveals these objects to be the forerunners of omniscient narrators, and presents human characters as objects of delegation within narrative networks.