Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age (review)

Paperwork reads nineteenth-century Anglo-American fiction through the lens of Walter Benjamin's theory of "mass mediacy," in particular his celebrated notion of "the decline of the aura," which Kevin McLaughlin glosses as "the 'withdrawal' . . . of the 'here and now' of the traditional work of art into the dispersing or distracting . . . movement of the mass media" (2). McLaughlin argues that the works he discusses register and exploit this historical process, and do so most revealingly in scenes featuring a certain kind of attention to—which is to say, an inattention to, or distraction from, or withdrawal of—paper. Moving confidently between textual intricacies and large-scale historical developments, McLaughlin offers a richly suggestive account of nineteenth-century fiction's engagement with the mass media.

The introduction is the longest chapter of Paperwork ; it outlines the philosophical and historical contexts in which paper takes on the role McLaughlin sees it playing in the texts he reads. Beginning with Thomas Carlyle's well-known strictures on "the Paper Age" in The French Revolution (1837), McLaughlin argues that the introduction of mass-produced paper and its association with financial inflation in the nineteenth century intensified the play of materiality and ideality associated historically with paper. McLaughlin teases out the implications of this development by bringing together Jacques Derrida's comments about paper in a late interview titled "Le papier ou moi" (2001) and Benjamin's theory of mass media: just as for Derrida "Paper appears to enter into the subject . . . not in presenting itself in the manner of a self-consistent substance, but in withdrawing" (7), so too, for Benjamin, with the mass media "the subject is taken up in a medium that resists substantial self-presentation" (18). Paper thus becomes the paradigmatic "receding material support" (22) that "draws the subject into a movement that exceeds subjective limitation" (27).

The first of the five relatively short but dense chapters following the introduction explores this complex dynamic in several tales by Edgar Allan Poe. This chapter opens out from Poe's treatment of readerly absorption and distraction—briefly but provocatively contrasted with that of the early Charles Dickens—to his treatment of currency, arguing that the tales seek to establish connections between their own medium and the convertibility or inconvertibility of paper money. The next chapter unpacks what McLaughlin calls "the disappearing paper device" (55) in two of Robert Louis Stevenson's Polynesian tales, "The Bottle Imp" (1891) and The Beach of Falésa (1892), as well as the essay "My First Book" (1894). According to McLaughlin, Stevenson borrows the trope of the distracting and/or disappearing map from Poe's "The Gold Bug" (1843); however, whereas for Poe this trope enters into an exploration of American identity, for Stevenson it is the experience of European colonialism that is at issue—as well as the very question of his debts to other authors, as McLaughlin argues with the reflexiveness characteristic of his work. This chapter's dual concerns with authorship and colonialism come together in an ingenious reading of The Beach of Falésa that turns on Stevenson's effort to restore to the book edition of the story the text of a counterfeit marriage certificate cut from the serial version by the publisher.

The transatlantic dimension of McLaughlin's argument takes center stage in his third chapter, which returns to the mid-century American short story. Here McLaughlin uses several stories by Herman Melville to critique Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of "minor literature." McLaughlin's argument depends in part on the relationship of "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) to Bleak House (1852–53), and thus this brief chapter leads naturally to the next, on Dickens's novel itself. Here, though, McLaughlin moves away from the question of national identity. Introducing another theoretical interlocutor, he argues that Dickens "associates the proliferation of mass mediacy with the identity crisis that is central to Lukács's Hegelian interpretation of the novel as...