personal blog site of Prof Andrew King, University of Greenwich
Author Archives: blt19: Nineteenth-Century Business, Labour and Trade Periodicals
Nineteenth-Century Business, Labour and Trade Periodicals, a project run by Professor Andrew King (University of Greenwich). Understanding of how we think about work and where that understanding comes from.
My tenure as full-time Professor of English at the University of Greenwich ends today (31 August 2025). Inevitably, I find myself reflecting on what the institution and I have given each other. What follows is a development of a LinkedIn post in July, on the day I handed in the keys to my office.
images of saints with books from Antonio di Ceraiolo, Predella con 9 santi martiri in the sala del Biscione, Cortona MAEC
The Necessary Distance from Distraction
There’s something about institutional life that can make you forget what you actually came to do: the endless small urgencies, the way certain personalities demand so much psychic space (and clock time), the tendency to measure yourself against metrics that don’t capture why the work matters. I spent more time than I’d like to remember caught up in dynamics that, in retrospect, were beside the point.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural fields illuminates this phenomenon. Academic institutions exist as contested spaces where symbolic capital is constantly negotiated through both overt competition and subtler forms of legitimation. My work on nineteenth-century periodicals has consistently revealed how media markets create similar dynamics of cultural positioning, where producers and consumers engage in complex strategies of distinction and accumulation between them and amongst themselves. The parallels between Victorian periodical production and contemporary academic practice become particularly stark when one experiences both as participant-observer.
But perhaps Bourdieu is not the only theoretical framework that need appertain. I have learnt a lot from thinking about non-capitalist economies, especially from Lewis Hyde’s reflections on “The Gift” and creative responses to the world, and from late Derrida. Indeed, I wonder if learning to notice where our attention is directed, and then to redirect it toward what actually nourishes us is a supplement or inadvertent gift that, if we have the energy and time for reflection, we can receive from corporate work under capitalism. Never interested in territory in ways that some hold close and fight with tooth and tongue and bloody nails for, at first I got upset and actively resisted. But gradually I learnt to become less reactive to those clashes of value that tear and scratch so painfully: competitive individualism versus collaborative community; fetishisation of impersonal quantification versus commitment to real human quality; abstract iron diktats versus the possibilities of vulnerable flesh; sometimes even individual rage and arrogance versus collective solutions – all manifestations of Bourdieusian competitiveness amongst perceived scarcity allied in its most extreme forms with less rational, even darker, factors and fears, shames and loves (for love isn’t always a good thing). The inadvertent gift is not indifference but distance.
Transforming Friction into Purpose
Reaction to such grating abrasion helped energise my determination to offer something new to the discipline and to sustain actively communities of ideas and practice whose people and ethos I genuinely believe in. The Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA) exemplifies this commitment—a scholarly community that really does prioritise intellectual generosity over territorial defensiveness, collaborative inquiry over competitive accumulation, and welcome over exclusion, precisely in line with its commitment to questioning the violence of the canon and to broadening the syllabus.
The courage to commit to holding space for genuine collaboration and intellectual generosity; a renewed conviction that choosing to circulate rather than hoard energy, ideas, opportunities, joy, is not only its own reward but its investment; a clarified rather than just felt belief in the value of economic systems beyond and in addition to the extractive, quantitative and individually accumulative.
This conviction finds concrete expression in projects like BLT19, my digitisation initiative focused on nineteenth-century trade periodicals, to which PhD students, undergraduates and school pupils all contributed. Designed to demonstrate maximum social and academic value for minimal financial investment, and inspired in its conception by the Italian arte povera movement of the 1970s, it challenges the equation of monetary expenditure with scholarly worth. The project embodies a commitment to public access and pedagogical generosity, refusing to accept paywall restrictions as inevitable features of knowledge production.
And resilience, of course. As it turns out, resilience might be less about developing armour or invisibility and more about learning to distinguish signal from noise, turning away and tuning out so as to clear the space for creative joyful thinking without imposition but with clear and realistic acknowledgement of what we need to do to achieve what we really want. Again, not indifference but distance.
The Epistemological Stakes
This distinction between signal and noise carries methodological implications for humanities scholarship more broadly. My work at the intersection of literature, history, media studies and sociology has consistently emphasized unexpected areas of cultural exchange between popular and élite forms, across national and linguistic borders. Such interdisciplinary vision requires precisely the kind of attention management I have learned through institutional experience—the capacity to filter out disciplinary territoriality in favour of substantive intellectual engagement.
The challenge facing contemporary humanities research lies not in defending traditional boundaries but in developing new methods for understanding cultural transmission and transformation. Digital humanities methodologies, quantitative analysis, and data visualisation offer powerful tools for examining reception patterns and cultural circulation at scale. Yet these approaches remain underutilised in many corners of the academy, often due to the very institutional dynamics that privilege familiar over innovative methods, immediately profitable over speculative, the squeaky over the working wheel.
Beyond Extractive Models
It’s well known now that the contemporary university increasingly mirrors the extractive capitalism it ostensibly critiques. Faculty energy is harvested for administrative functions that do not seem to align with substantive educational or research goals. Scholarly labour is commodified through impact metrics that reduce intellectual complexity to quantifiable outputs and gamification. Student debt financing transforms education into a consumer transaction rather than a collaborative inquiry.
Yet within these constraints, alternative practices remain possible. My experience supervising five doctoral completions between 2020-2021, and my current set of six, demonstrates, I hope, how committed mentorship can embody non-extractive pedagogical relations. It’s not for me to claim this, but I hope each supervision relationship was and is based on intellectual generosity and conversation so as to prioritise student development over supervisor advancement, to create space for genuinely new thinking.
Methodological Implications
The experience of academic departure has clarified certain methodological commitments that have emerged from my research practice.
First, the importance of understanding cultural production as fundamentally collective rather than individualistic. My work 30 years ago on the London Journal revealed how seemingly individual authorial voices emerged from complex networks of editors, publishers, contributors, and readers. Contemporary academic authorship functions similarly, despite myths of solitary genius that persist in humanities culture. And today, that collaboration certainly includes AI which must, like all tools and collaborators, be treated respectfully yet critically.
Second, the necessity of attending to economic structures underlying cultural production. My chapter on periodical economics in the Routledge Handbook extended beyond publishers’ accounts to examine broader questions of cultural circulation and value creation, as does an as yet unpublished piece on the transnational economics of periodicals over the last two centuries. Such analysis is essential to my mind for understanding how knowledge production currently functions and how it might be transformed.
Third, the value of crossing geographical and linguistic boundaries in cultural analysis. My early experiences teaching in Italy, Romania and Poland, including leadership of the Crossing Cultures project that introduced gender, class, sexuality and ethnicity studies into Romanian secondary education (and which I’m still proud of for all its many faults – see here ), demonstrated how intellectual frameworks can translate across contexts while remaining attentive to and respectful of cultural specificity.
The Long View
Institutional departure offers a retrospective perspective unavailable during the urgency of daily academic life. Projects like the forthcoming Oxford Handbook to Victorian Popular Fictions represent collaborative achievements impossible within purely extractive models, and it is distance from such models that will more certainly enable its completion.
Such work requires sustained commitment to intellectual community over institutional advancement, to substantive inquiry over tactical positioning. It demands exactly the kind of attention management I have learned through institutional experience: the capacity to distinguish between genuine scholarly long-term priorities and temporary urgencies, between meaningful collaboration and performed collegiality.
The academy’s future depends on whether it can move beyond hasty, extractive models toward regenerative practices that nourish rather than deplete its participants. This transformation requires not just policy changes but fundamental shifts in how we understand scholarly value, institutional purpose, and intellectual community. It demands the courage to commit to genuine collaboration and intellectual generosity, qualities that institutional structures often discourage but which remain essential for meaningful educational and research practice. Above all, it needs the distance and careful attention to distinguish between a claim in a tick box and the realities of intellectual and social practice, and the affects and effects that dissonance and consonance between them can generate.
Gratitude itself functions as a form of intellectual practice. It requires sustained attention to what has been received rather than what has been withheld, to possibilities that have emerged rather than opportunities that have been foreclosed. Such attention, cultivated through the very institutional experiences that seemed to obstruct it, now becomes available for future scholarly and educational endeavours unconstrained by the particular dynamics of any single institutional context.
original cover for Crossing Cultures, a collage designed by a school pupil.
What follows is the Introduction to the Teachers’ Book of a British Cultural Studies textbook for 12th grade Romanian students in bilingual schools whose first edition came out in 1998: Crossing Cultures: British Cultural Studies for Romanian Students (Cavallioti Publishing & The British Council, Bucharest, Romania). ISBN 9739840094.
The Teachers Book as well as the Students’ Book were subsequently revised and reprinted several times, and formally adopted by the Romanian Ministry of Education as its official British Studies textbook for a decade.
I was commissioned to produce it by the British Council with the help of a wonderful team of Romanian teachers and academics from across Romania (in alphabetic order: Cornelia Bursuc, Adriana Cichirdan, Liminita Ganea, Zoe Ghita, Prof. Roxana Marinescu, Tunde Minulescu, Mirela Nasaudean), but the Introduction, together with the design and execution of the research project that underlay the textbook, were entirely mine.
A version of the Introduction was published as “Crossing cultures into the Reformă de Ĭnvăţământ Preuniversitar în România: autoritarism socio-politic into capacititaţi intelectuale superioare.” in Dascăl, Reghina, (ed.) Proceedings of the IATEFL-East 98 Conference, Constanţa, Romania, August 1998. Editura Eurobit Timişoara, pp. 257-266. ISBN 9789739441704. This is what is reproduced here. Many thanks to Reghina for allowing its reproduction.
I was supposed to produce a British Studies textbook for use in English-language ‘bilingual schools’ in which subjects were taught in Romanian + another language like English, French, German or Hungarian. But I redirected the project towards cross-cultural studies where Britain was treated as a mirror or Other that could be used by students to help think about their own socially constructed selves.
Crossing Cultures was actually the first textbook in Romania to introduce into Romanian schools the study of class, gender, race and sexuality at a time when homosexuality was still a prisonable offence and ethnic stereotyping was a state-sanctioned norm. It was – for Romanian schools – a very early exponent of critical thinking rather than rote learning.
Both of the places where it was originally published are now very hard to find (they aren’t digitised and the last reprint of Crossing Cultures was 2005). This is why I am posting this here, for reading it again after over 25 years – it was written before I’d even finished my PhD – I still stand by both its rigour and its pretty uncompromising ethical stance (fortunately the Ministry was open to both its stance and its rigour).
The topical references may be very dated, but the commitment to crossing cultures, whatever those cultures may be, remain fast.
Introduction Part 1: Crossing Cultures into the Reforma de Învăţământ Preuniversitar în România
The title of Part 1 of this Introduction may seem a little strange: Crossing Cultures into the Reforma de Învăţământ Preuniversitar în România. The title of a book on British Cultural Studies is transformed into a verb of motion, complete with object, by the simple addition of a preposition and a phrase. What does this mean? How does one “cross cultures into pre-university education reform in Romania”? Who is doing the crossing? How is the crossing to be done? What relation has the book to the Reforma de Învăţământ Preuniversitar în România [“Reform of Pre-University Education in Romania”]?
The following part of the Introduction will seek to answer these questions. It will do so by moving in three stages. First by linking a political with an educational system, then by looking at the idea of cognitive skills, and finally by looking at the implications for evaluation.
1. Autoritarism socio-politic into capacitaţi intelectuale superioare
The title of this first sub-section is perhaps as unexpected as the general heading to Part 1. Firstly, it is almost entirely in Romanian, when one would expect the Notes to a book on British Cultural Studies for Romanian teachers to be in English. Secondly, it sets up a dichotomy from two apparently unconnected fields: a term from political theory (autoritarism socio-politic) is opposed to a term from educational cognitive psychology (capacitaţi intelectuale superioare). Thirdly, one wonders what it has to do with the subject at hand, British Cultural Studies . In using such phrases Crossing Cultures is declaring at the outset that it is trying to live up to its name, crossing the linguistic border which separates English from Romanian. Immediately, it declares that the language which makes it is not a “pure”, but macaronic, impure, hybrid, a cross. It declares its double perspective, Romanian and non, both insider and outsider.
As for the dichotomy itself, it is only the context that may have caused surprised since you will have read of it before in the Plan-cadru [ master plan] drawn up by the Comisia Naţională de Reformă a Planurilor de Învăţământ. Under the rubric Disfuncţiile actualului plan we find the very first sentence:
Din punctul de vedere al filozofie educaţiei, planul actual de învăţămănt exprimă, în esenţă, un univers de valori şi de mentalităţi caracteristice unei culturi dominate de industrialism economic şi de autoritarism socio-politic.
The Plan-cadru goes on further to define the effects of autoritarism socio-politic on the present education system in Romania. Most of what it proposes concerns structural reform – the number of hours each subject is allotted and so forth, but it also stresses the need to reform the practice of teaching itself. There needs to be a move la placarea elevilor în centrul actului educativ, for example, and part of this transition towards student-centred teaching involves progressing beyond the inculcation of facts through memorisation. Instead of simply getting students to memorise and repeat knowledge, teachers need to ask students to do things with knowledge, thus developing what the Plan-cadru calls the “higher intellectual capacities” – capacitati intelectuale superioare.
Yet Crossing Cultures does not simply bow to the authority of the Plan-cadru. That would mean that it remained within what it is trying to get out of, the univers de valori şi de mentalităţi caracteristice unei culturi dominate de industrialism economic şi de autoritarism socio-politic. For the rest of this sub-section we shall compare first what a few other “authorities” say and then compare all this with our own research, thus following standard research practice of finding out what has been written before and then evaluating it against our own evidence.
I shall turn first to a non-Romanian academic visitor to this country. In a paper delivered at Iaşi in 1996 , the chair of ESSE (Professor Bonheim of the University of Cologne), pointed out that the research referred to [by Romanian academics] was almost without exception cited as authoritative rather than questionable; there was as good as no pitting of one scholar against another; and what is written is left unquestioned. He thought such treatment of sources was a “hangover” from the days of dictatorship when “ventilating opinions against the prevailing trend” was dangerous. The problem with such processes is that they leave Romania outside the West. As Bonheim says, such attitudes “might be said to … betray[ ] some elements of marginality”.
So far I have referred to comments from the Ministry of Education and from a foreign academic, and as a final type of “authority” before commenting on what our own research found, I shall refer to the work of a well-known Romanian academic, Prof. Lazăr Vlăsceanu. His chapter on education in the volume Social Policy: Romania in the European Context focuses on what he calls a “chronic quality crisis” in Romanian education. One of the aspects of this crisis is, again, how memorisation of facts are prioritised over what he terms “skills”. He observes, that from the point of view of injecting its pupils with information, the Romanian system is highly effective:
An illustration of this reality is the fact that an average Romanian pupil or student is highly competitive with his or her peers from any developed educational system, very often surpassing them. However, this same positive assertion cannot be made with regard to their abilities to be creative and to solve problems, particularly innovative ones. The Romanian pupil or student can reproduce a great deal but is less able to innovate. Educational policy and practice have required him or her to do nothing more than reproduce knowledge. In the short term, such a student may achieve very good results, but in the long term, he or she will lag behind because his or her skills or abilities for lifelong and innovative education, for acquiring specific learning modalities, will remain undeveloped (pp.302-3).
What all these “authorities” do is set up a dichotomy or binarism between what the ministry calls the “lower” and “higher intellectual capacities” with all the weight of respective values that “lower” and “higher” carry in the west. All connect the “lower” with dictatorial government and the latter, at the very least by strong implication, with democracy. All urge a cultural transition (which is after all the Latin word for “crossing”) from the first to the second, arguing that it is imperative for the Romanian education system to concentrate on the “higher intellectual capacities”. Otherwise Romania will become marginalised through the inability of its inhabitants to adapt to constant change, when such change is the essence of democratic capitalism.
What has this to do with Crossing Cultures, supposedly a book concerned with Britain and things British? The second part of this sub-section will seek to answer this in two ways. Initially, it will give an account of our research into both the teaching and learning of BCS in Romanian bilingual classes of English, then explain the dramatic effect of this research on the material that was piloted and what the book is now.
At the outset, we must say that our micro-research on both the teaching and learning of British Cultural Studies seems to confirm the diagnosis of the education system that we outlined above. In April and May 1998 we conducted a piloting of British Cultural Studies materials amongst 16 teachers of BCS and their students from all over Romania. We asked both teachers and students to fill in three different questionnaires each over this period, making a total of six different questionnaires, three for students and three for teachers. We got a very good response of 14 teachers and an average of about 50% of the estimated number of students in the teachers’ classes (380 replies for the first questionnaire down to 160 for the final one). We asked a large variety of questions, including what they associated with Britain, what their sources of information about Britain were, what they valued in those they considered their most important sources, what their priorities were in learning, and so on.
We found that school textbooks were the overwhelming formers of the image of Britain for these students, followed, at a distance, by British films on Romanian TV, Euronews, MTV and cinema. Of the 29% who said they listened to the World Service, more than 1 in 3 felt it to be key to their understanding of modern Britain. Their use of the media notwithstanding, students’ image-repertoire of Britain was resolutely conservative, “heritage” / historical (in fact, most students who thought they had studied BCS before 12th grade equated it with history). This implied strongly either that the media had little influence, or that the students were decoding cinema and TV along very different lines from how a British person would. Their knowledge was also that of a tourist, almost exclusively of London. Scotland and Scottish stereotypes comprised just 1% of total mentions, and Stonehenge achieved just over that. Northern Ireland was referred to by less than 0.5%, while Wales was mentioned (in passing) once in all of the 380 questionnaires that asked about this.
Stereotypes of the most banal kind overwhelmed any kind of critical awareness, forestalling any form of cultural crossing. Britain was associated with the monarchy and especially with Princess Diana who is thought of in connection with the UK as much as pop music (a recognisable trace of MTV!). But just as often the conventions of British weather recurred: fog and rain or a generalised “bad weather”. None of these were mentioned as often as Shakespeare, while other literary figures achieved just over half Shakespeare’s fame en masse. Most individual authors were referred to just once. The only twentieth-century authors mentioned were James Joyce and Dylan Thomas (one mention each).
Again despite MTV, the Queen and Diana, the gender-image of Britain was predominantly masculine: the historical, literary and musical figures connected with Britain were almost exclusively male (and dead and white).
It rapidly became clear that the vast majority of students, although all from the élite cadre, had an almost entirely non-scientific knowledge of Britain. Exactly as described in general terms above, we found in practice that students depended upon auctoritates (authoritative models) rather than on learning how to judge for themselves. This was particularly clear in students’ statements of what they thought constituted the value of sources. They were particularly concerned with the criterion of “completeness” (textbooks which they said were most important as sources were often cited as “complete”). Logically, this was connected to their model of how textbooks, the media and literature worked. This model offered connections between the sign and referent either in a simple transparent way – the sign was regarded as a window through which one saw an unproblematic and unproblematised reality – or it was idealist – that is, that the media and textbooks were revelatory of a supposed essence of “Britishness”. Only those students who had been to Britain gave any evidence at all of pragmatic learner autonomy: they alone stressed the importance of “seeing with [their] own eyes”.
What was even more surprising was the students’ cognitive dependence upon the Limba engleza textbooks for 11th and 12th grades: the opening of Bleak House for fog; Big Ben; Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament on the cover; Francis Bacon; Keats; Byron; Shakespeare, of course; cathedrals… Students mentioned all these not once but many times. It is therefore no surprise that no British women writers were mentioned by the students (apart from a solitary mention of Jane Austen), since none appear in Limba engleza. There is no reference to women at all: the chronicle of events in Limba engleza (p.169) does not even mention the female franchise in 1918, the single biggest change in voting in British history . Likewise, there is no reference to the ethnic diversity which make up Britain’s most important urban areas.
At the same time we found virtually total confusion about anything to do with the capacitaţi intelectuale superioare. We checked and cross-checked students’ understanding of these in a variety of ways and found almost universal incoherence. It became clear, for example, that students did not understand what it means to decide whether evidence is relevant to the argument, or whether it is true or false (let alone to decide whether it is somewhere in between). Most said they wanted to learn how to do that, but they did not know what it meant. We found too that teachers stressed quite heavily the necessity for students to evaluate data, but at the same time they did not feel they had had much training in doing it themselves. But amongst teachers too there reigned some confusion over what capacitaţi intelectuale superioare comprised and how they could be taught.
It should not have been surprising then if teachers and students did not know what BCS actually was.
We already knew from previous reports that “Britain” had usually been taught to Romanian 12th graders in a mode which is often called “British Life and Institutions” (BLI). Sometimes this mode has been called British Cultural Studies and it is this, we feel, which has led to a great deal of the confusion. BLI is concerned with informing students of what institutions there are in Britain, and frequently with how they developed over the centuries (“institution” may be the monarchy, parliament, universities, the processes of law, family life, and many other things). It was not surprising therefore that students thought “British Cultural Studies” meant history of a certain sort. But more important than that, BLI assumes that its object of study is fixed and knowable: it’s enough to know for BLI the number of MPs in Parliament at any given time, for instance. If any “meaning” is attributed to that number at all, it will be formulated in terms of something vague and magical such as “the growth of democracy”. In other words, if institutions are given “meanings”, they are often freighted with an implicit fetishisation or abstract glorification: “Oxford and Cambridge are the best or most important universities”, or, to quote Limba engleza, “St Paul’s is a masterpiece in the foremost rank of the world’s buildings” (p.21).
While some people may well agree with or voice these opinions, they are after all opinions, not scripture. We are not saying that they are wrong, but that many people will disagree or be indifferent to such statements. BLI does not usually take differing views into account, preferring to assume a “purity of the object”. Accordingly, students can learn “simple truths” by heart – or simply copy them into their atestat papers.
Since we already knew this, our piloted materials tried to get away from BLI’s factory-like reproduction of the Gradgrindean fact . Instead they set up structures which enabled students to discuss issues we thought might interest them, all the while studiously avoiding giving much data input in order to keep Gradgrind out of the classroom. What we found, however, was that these materials did not encourage serious enquiry but rather a form of unstructured “chat” which was little more than EFL fluency practice. These materials did not seem to develop the higher intellectual capacities but rather promote facile anecdotes, not fertilise rational debate but give more life to the déjà connu.
Students and teachers were generous but at the same guarded in their welcome of these materials. They said they enjoyed using them, but…
This “but”, almost always politely hinted at rather than explicit, together with the inferred results of the piloting we mentioned above, caused an entire rethink of the project. We recognised we had taken a path that led only backwards. As a result, anyone involved in the piloting will recognise hardly a single activity that has remained the same. While certainly not BLI, the piloting materials encouraged too great an intellectual freedom. If we are justly harsh and honest with ourselves, we were encouraging a freedom without responsibility, or, in more colourful terms, we were promoting the freedom to be a couch-potato watching well-known cartoon images of Britain flutter unanalysed through semi-consciousness. Our approach did not, as we found, promote British Cultural Studies as a serious educational discipline. Our materials would not enable Romanian students to cross from the margins to the centre, but confine them on the outside with bonds of fatuity.
The methodology and discipline of British Cultural Studies which we hope is that of Crossing Cultures, fits into what the Comisia Naţională proposes, but at the same time is closely matched to the chalk-face reality we discovered pragmatically through our own research. Crossing Cultures thus combines the general imperatives of the ministry with an awareness of the concrete specifics of the subject as it is taught in Romanian bilingual classes today. The rest of this sub-section is devoted to describing some specific ways our research has affected the book.
Knowing that 86% teachers and 48% students have access to British magazines, several optional activities and one obligatory one make use of them .
Since 43% of teachers and 19% of students claim to have access to the internet, and of these 18% and 21% respectively already make use of it to find out about Britain, we sometimes suggest obtaining information from it (though never for obligatory activities). We provide a list of useful internet addresses at the end of the students’ book.
Given the students’ ignorance of British women writers, we include a class on gendering the Canon that takes as an example Christina Rossetti. Such practice of course also takes into account the Plan-cadru’s insistence on the principiu egalitaţii şanselor in giving women students the knowledge that people like them have made a contribution in a field outside the domestic sphere.
Since Diana and the monarchy are popular subjects we give students the opportunity to study them – but from unexpected angles.
Since students know a lot about London tourist sights, we offer no class on London, and approach England tangentially, beginning with the component of the UK that was mentioned least, Wales. Later there will be a class that takes Scotland as a case study for the analysis of national stereotypes and the notion of “founding myths” which have recently created a stir in Romania with the publication of Lucian Boia’s books. Northern Ireland, which was hardly mentioned at all in our survey, gets two classes and offers the opportunity to explore the importance of names and the concept of the “Other”. As for tourism, we do not confirm what students already know by offering a visit to the Tower of London, but we challenge their preconceptions by offering them the chance to study a rather well-known British tourist coming to Cluj and to Bistriţa.
We seek to counter the simplistic assumption that students must obtain a totalising encyclopaedic knowledge of a subject by breaking classes up into groups that study different and often contradictory aspects of the same thing.
Both students and teachers said they were keen on developing ethical skills, and we have given ample opportunity to do this in a profound way, taking ethics to mean not a series of behavioural imperatives and prohibitions, but as a process of relating to and constructing the world. Thus we devote a third of the core-course explicitly to the notion of what it means justly to represent the world.
Unlike the piloted materials, which were designed to allow teachers to create their own syllabus from material undifferentiated in level of difficulty, Crossing Cultures has become structurally developmental, starting from first principles and each class building on what has gone before, until at the end of the year students are in a position to combine and apply concepts in a freer way. Crossing Cultures thus places the emphasis on developing cognitive skills in what the Plan-cadru calls a coherent way.
It also fulfils the Plan-cadru by making inter- and trans-disciplinarity a feature: besides having classes on literature, it has classes on science as well, and even in one case on science and literature. It has been careful find out what students will have studied in earlier grades and to make reference to textbooks students may well possess at home and have used. Furthermore we refer to what they study in 12th grade philosophy and science and call on students to make active use of what they have learnt in those classes.
Crossing Cultures places students at the centre of the learning process by getting them actively to “discover” and debate knowledge, arrive at their own definitions, evaluate the validity of different points of view.
Like the earlier piloted materials, Crossing Cultures is primarily concerned with teaching the higher cognitive skills –the capacitaţi intelectuale superioare and not teaching facts to be replicated. But unlike the piloted materials, it starts at the base of the cognitive pyramid by offering a large amount of up-to-date “knowledge” for students to learn to manipulate. Note that when we write “a large amount of up-to-date knowledge” we do not mean that students need memorise huge amounts of material. On the contrary, knowledge can be given to the students so that they know it only for a short amount of time, or can see it in front of them to refer to. This is the purpose of the often long readings that we offer: they act as temporary banks of knowledge that students can draw on for the purposes of the class only.
Crossing Cultures is opposed to autoritarism socio-politic and the marginalisation that that has caused. Refusing to derive its existence merely from the negative virtue of opposition, however, and thereby fall into the pit of unstructured “chat”, it offers a third way: a positive and disciplined training intended to enable Romanian students confidently to move themselves not only to the centre, but to wherever they wish to go.
As we said at the beginning, Crossing Cultures is a verbal phrase, not just a static title. As such, Crossing Cultures translates the Reforma into the classroom.
The Wicked Boy was very successful, garnering great reviews (here’s the Guardian‘s, for example) and winning the 2017 Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for Best Fact Crime. My students used to really like it when we taught it, especially as the murder occurred not too far away from Greenwich, across the river in Plaistow.
The book deals with an 1895 matricide by a 13-year-old boy, Robert Coombes, in the working-class East End of London, along with its context and its aftermath: the squalid city, the discovery and investigation of the crime, its coverage in the press, the possible effects of the boy’s sensational reading, his trial and imprisonment, his eventual release, service in World War I, emigration to Australia and his rescue and nurturing of a boy who was being abused.
I have to say though that my take on the book was very different from the reviewers’ – much more theoretical for a start, and much more concerned with thinking about the emotional effects it had on us readers in the classroom. We read it in the light of crime fiction rather than “true crime,” for while we noted its very clear differences from fiction, we also noted a similarly powerful pull to read it, along with its development of characters and its forensic portrayal of context as a set of clues.
For a start, what does it mean that “Kate Summerscale” is the narrator of The Wicked Boy? Can we be sure that the “I” of the narrator (which emerges strongly only in the last part) is a simple reference to the author? Are we sure the narrator is not a constructed character? The fact that the narrator shares a name with the author might be confusing, but hardly unique, especially in postmodern detective fiction (at one point Paul Auster’s deranged detective-protagonist meets Paul Auster in The New York Trilogy). The “I” of the narrator seems very carefully constructed throughout, even when – especially when – it does not appear directly but simply as a collector of evidence or as a (sometimes vacillating) point of view. To me, it is as much a character as “Robert Coombes.”
I’m sure you’ll have noticed too if you’ve read The Wicked Boy that not only does the protagonist Robert Coombes change over the course of this “true crime” volume (it shares that kind of character development with the Bildungsroman) but the narrator does as well. Her investigations in the archives gradually lead her to discover unexpected secrets – that maybe Robert Coombs was more than just a “wicked boy” defined by the law and then “archived” – arrested, shut away in a lunatic asylum, forgotten. We gradually understand that “Kate Summerscale,” the character/ narrator, wants to get close to the subject of her investigations. She wants to understand him. By p. 197, she can surmise that “To survive the horror of the murder, Robert needed to forget. To recover from it, he would need to remember.” At the end, she even touches the hand of a man Robert helped survive abuse:
As I stood up to leave, Harry smiled and reached over to clasp my hand. He seemed glad to have told me what Robert had done for him. When I started work on this book, all that I had known about Robert Coombes was that he had stabbed his mother to death in the summer of 1895. It was astonishing to hold the hand of a man whom he had saved from harm. I still couldn’t be sure whether Harry knew about the murder. I hoped that he did, and had loved Robert anyway.
Wicked Boy, (pp. 196-7)
How can we understand this astonishing transformation from the coolness of the investigator we hear first, a narrator who seems to be on the side of forensic investigation and the upholding of due legal process, to the woman story-teller (yes, at the end the narrator is strongly gendered) who proposes a higher justice than the law can offer, a justice that gives us all a right to be loved, to be redeemed?
This doesn’t seem in the end to be a cool investigation of just the true “facts” of a crime: the narrator’s rooting in the archives seems to have changed her as well as her view of her central subject.
“Kate Summerscale” as forensic narrator concerned with weighing up the evidence uses a panoply of primary resources: newspapers and periodicals, books (often in rare or special collections – see for example note to p. 11 (p. 311) Archer Philip Crouch, Silvertown and Neighbourhood: A Retrospect (1900); a note to p. 253 [on p. 343] lists 3 rare book sources), manuscripts and paper documents in particular locations (E.g. “BRO (= Berkshire Record Office) D/H14/A2/1/1” – note to p. 222 [p. 337]; the diary of Charles Francis Laseron in Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales); secondary sources – the included bibliography is extensive and impressive (e.g. a note to p. 11, justifying descriptions of trams refers us to Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: a Human Awful Wonder of God (2007)). The narrator later – when it becomes “I” – even records personal interactions – phonecalls, emails, casual encounters, interviews (see pp. 284-5, 303-7).
Archives are fundamental to Summerscale’s enterprise. But how do they lead to that tremendously affecting moment when she touches the hand that touched the hand… ? What might we mean by an “archive,” then, and what effects might that “archive” have on our understanding of the text and on the narrator’s relationship with the subject of her research?
Derridean Archives
Reflection on the nature of archives is hardly new. Twenty years ago, Marlene Manoff was able to write that “researchers [have been] proclaiming the centrality of the archive to both the scholarly enterprise and the existence of democratic society” (“Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines, Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2004), pp. 9–25, p. 9) and even more has been written since then.
Freud’s couch and desk in the Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London
The turning point in archive studies is usually put at Derrida’s Mal d’archive [“archive sickness/ evil”],a lecture delivered at the Freud Museum in North London in 1994, and published first in French as Mal d’archive: Une impression Freudienne (Éditions Galilée, 1995) and in English the same year in the periodical Diacritics (Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” translated by Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), 9-63).
Derrida had an audience of psychoanalysts and his lecture is very much addressed to them. Yet one of the many fascinating things about Derrida’s essay is how it has been treated by historians and critics. It’s as if they had read only the first few pages in which the archive is defined in historico-political terms. They forget that the lecture is actually about the nature and origin – the archives – of psychoanalysis composed for psychoanalysts in the symbolic “home” of psychoanalysis of the refugee Freud at a particular moment. Nonetheless, let’s follow the historians and literary historians, at least initially, and consider what they have taken from the lecture.
One of the commonest points that is made concerns how Derrida explains in his opening pages that – in his usual etymological and serious-fun play on words ‑ an “archive” was originally the building where the written laws of ancient Athens were stored. Only the magistrates of ancient Athens, the archons, were empowered to place them there, to put them in order and to interpret them.
In these introductory pages, the archive is always, according to Derrida, a place of “house arrest”, involving both the law and the idea of an enclosed place from which documents cannot be removed or put into general circulation: indeed, there’s a curious and all-encompassing, circular relationship of the archive and the law – the law proclaims who can access the archive which is itself the repository and authority behind the law. The “archive” is what gives the archons their power and enables them to keep it. It does that by keeping the laws secret. Only the archons can reveal those secrets, and it’s in revealing them – bringing the laws out from the archive and interpreting them – that they most clearly exercise their power.
In typically Derridean logic, without the idea of an archive, neither secrets nor laws could exist. The archive is the guarantor of the law by virtue of keeping it secret (of course Derrida is thinking of the Freudian unconscious and the Oedipal prohibition here). But then, as soon as an archon outs a secret or a law, it is ready to be archived and forgotten again, becoming again accessible only to a few. It’s just as if an archon (or, we might think, an artwork or therapist) were to show us a scroll on which laws are written only for it to be put back on its dusty shelf again, while we get on with our daily lives as before, having been entertained and distracted by the revelation (and perhaps a legal infringement or temporary escape of the unconscious) for a moment.
Following on from Derrida’s argument, it’s entirely logical that, if we think an equal-opportunities-for-all democracy is a good idea, we who are not archons with power will rebel – we will want to wrest the archons’ power from them. Power in such a democracy, we think, should circulate. Pursuing that logic further, all of us should want to be able to reveal secrets and show how the world “really” operates according to laws hidden from other people but not from us. Knowledge is power – we’ve been taught that since the beginning of school – and we want that power.
While for most of the time we just get on with life, there remains a nagging doubt – more acute for some of us than others – that the archons may give us only one version of ourselves and our history. They may say “you are a Wicked Boy” or “you are nothing but the murderer of your former employer” (Mary Braddon’s Henry Dunbar) or “you are a sexual experimenter and accidental suicide” (P.D. James’s Mark in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman) or a “serial bigamist” (Richard’s Marsh’s Judith Lee story “Matched”) or “a dangerous woman who can blackmail a king and thereby destabilise the whole social order” (the Sherlock Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia”).
But is that all there is to the identities of such characters – or of real people? Maybe we can prove that the archons don’t possess all the secrets as completely as they think, that we can observe and come to logical conclusions better than they. Maybe the Wicked Boy is more than that label. Even if we just want to assert ourselves and show the world that we are not simply as the archons describe us, we will want to show that we are, in short, better archons than the archons, or, this being a democracy, that we are at least as good as them.
We search for a trace that allows us to imagine we are rescuing secrets that the archive has hidden from the world.
Whole infrastructures have grown up according to that logic. Institutions like schools and universities aim to teach us to find things out for ourselves – or at the very least, teach us that there are secrets out there that we need to uncover. They tell us that we can become archons if we work hard enough. Such institutions operate doubly though: they both make a few of us feel like archons with the key to knowledge in our pockets or purses, but also they teach large numbers of us that we can never hope to understand the secrets of the archive. In the latter case, institutions teach us to be “the populace” – the ruled not the rulers, the powerless not the powerful.
Such thinking is what Derrida means when he writes that any “science of the archive must include the theory of [its] institutionalization, that is to say, at once of the law which begins by inscribing itself there [in the archive] and of the right which authorizes it.” (p. 4) Institutions like schools and universities are gateways to the archive: only a few of us are granted the right to pass inside where we can decode and profess the secret laws of the universe and of texts.
As we’ve understood by this point, the goal for those of us who root around in the archive is, according to Derrida, to find the previously secret. What that secret comprises is closely and inextricably bound up with two presuppositions: first, the idea that we are discovering a unique thing that only we know and, second, a powerful feeling – the magical, mystical moment of enlightenment we experience when we discover the secret, the authentic instant where we neither know nor care if we are the researcher or the researched, the ghost or the haunted, writer or written, archive or archon. We search for evidence where “the trace no longer distinguishes itself from its substrate,” as Derrida puts it on pp. 98-9 of Archive Fever – everything dissolves thrillingly into a feeling of oneness (very Lacanian psychoanalytic that). The past and present fuse, and in that moment death is overcome. To quote Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break,” we seem to touch a “vanish’d hand” and hear “the sound of a voice that is still.”
Derrida’s way of conceiving the “archive” – at least at the beginning of his lecture – has not gone unchallenged, even though it has been very influential. Within standard historical and literary historical discourses, his proposal raises questions such as the following in Ed Fulsom’s excellent essay on “Archive” in the collection Literature Now: Key Terms and Methods for Literary History.
When we read Derrida on the archive, questions proliferate: how much of what we could think of as archives in fact exists outside of official archives and resides instead in garbage heaps or even in lost voices still travelling somewhere on sound waves? How much exists in the endless writings stored on tapes or records or disks or other outmoded technologies that are difficult if not impossible to access? How much of an archive is stored in the deep and inaccessible parts of any single human brain?
Ed Fulsom, “Archive” 23-35 in Sascha Bru, Ben De Bruyn and Michel Delville, Literature Now: Key Terms and Methods for Literary History( (Edinburgh Up, 2016), p. 23
Of course these are sensible questions within the discipline of history, including literary history, and they are central to postmodern writing that deals with the past. The garbage heap that Fulsom regards as a possible repository of secrets is not sealed from us as official archives are; the memories stored in the heads of our loved ones are, in theory at least, accessible to us. How can we claim therefore that these kinds of archive are ruled by the archons of knowledge? History, archaeology and literary history of the last seventy years has indeed raided both rubbish heaps and outmoded technologies as well as oral accounts by the living and the dead. Such sources are (again in theory) freely available to all.
There are two issues here though.
The first is that what is called “garbage” is determined by the powerful. We may not feel powerful when we throw the history of our drinking in the recycling bin, but we are much more powerful than the malnourished person who lights on our bottle in a rubbish dump in China. Texts once regarded as garbage because they didn’t conform to what was thought acceptable literature by the archons of culture may disappear altogether, recycled as note paper or toilet paper, leaving – at best – only the trace of their existence behind in catalogues (we recall how very few copies of the mass-market London Journal survive even thought it was read by 10-12 times more people than Dickens’s Household Words).
Secondly, to raid garbage heaps so that secrets are revealed requires skills – and what those skills are and who has them are determined by archons. So even if material may be freely available, to investigate it so that it yields its valid secrets requires access to the secret laws of the archons. And the loved ones whose own stories we’d like to hear may have understood that they are garbage according to the powerful and so may have deleted or altered them to accord with what they think is acceptable. How can we say in a simple way, then, that such stories are accessible?
(Perhaps indeed the archons, the archives and institutions are not just outside us. They are us. We have at least to negotiate with them to get our “I”s, our speaking selves, to speak at all)
The Forgotten Shelves of Derrida’s Archive: Psychoanalysis and Ethnic Boundaries
So far so good. That kind of institutional thinking is very useful for historians of all sorts. But what historians seems have elided and forgotten – “archived” to use Derrida’s terminology (or maybe “shelved” or, as I’ve done above and am.doing here, “bracketed”) – is that for Derrida psychoanalysis is at the heart of our concepts of the archive, and vice versa, for how we imagine an archive lies at the heart of psychoanalysis. And psychoanalysis is concerned to investigate our identities – who we are inside. It does not conventionally excavate the external power structures and processes that we are constrained and enabled by.
The “theory of psychoanalysis, then, becomes a theory of the archive and not only a theory of memory” writes Derrida at one point (p. 18), challenging a once dominant notion. And then he goes on to ponder the possibilities of an alternative history in which Freud uses a different technology which uses a different archiving mechanism – email, for example: how would psychoanalysis have been conceptualised if Freud had communicated with his friends and colleagues using email instead of pen and paper and the postal service? That too is a famous and oft-quoted point, and directs our attention to the “paratextual” and how technology affects our creation and understanding of texts (something I’ve written about quite a lot elswhere). But the point surely is that identities, in so far as they are an effect of archives, are both personal and institutional.
By far the greatest part of Derrida’s lecture – the part that historians neglect – is taken up with a thoughtful discussion of the claim by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and lnterminable (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991) that psychoanalysis is essentially Jewish. Derrida’s lecture is in reality a targetted intervention that needs to be read in its time and place, as a response to a Yarushslmi in the house of the refugee Freud, not as an ahistorical pronouncement.
Yerushalmi, writes Derrida, is the exemplary historian, exhibiting
the desire of an admirable historian who wants in sum to be the first archivist, the first to discover the archive, the archaeologist and perhaps the archon of the archive. The first archivist institutes the archive as it should be, that is to say, not only in exhibiting the document, but in establishing it. He reads it, interprets it, classes it.
Derrida, 1995, p. 38
And it is precisely this institutionalised “desire of an admirable historian,” not what has been left out of an archive on the rubbish dump of history or what technology is used to preserve it, that Derrida asks us to question. It is this “desire of an admirable historian” that is “archive fever”, the mal d’archive, the sickness/ evil in the title of his lecture. Desire is the foundation of the archive; the rational institution we see, the home of the Law and secrets, the Archive, is built on something quite other than the rational. And desire in turn is built on lack, on absence (we can’t desire something if we really believe we have it already).
In other words, we search the archive not really for rational knowledge of the secret or the law, but a feeling, an experience – a sensation that something is present when it can’t be. We root around in the dust because we want to encounter something or someone close up – in absolute closeness that fills the absence, the lack, beneath desire. We feel a void in everyday life, a distance from it – we are alienated from ourselves and from others, perhaps – and our investigations into the archive are a search for a way to bridge that gap, fill the void within ourselves, encounter the Other. This sensation generates a feeling of Truth, of access to what Lacanian psychoanalysis calls the Real. We want what Derrida calls elsewhere “presence”, the feeling that someone is right next to us, in communion with us. We know that such “presence” is just a metaphysical, impossible fantasy, but that doesn’t detract from its magnetic pull. This drive for such a sensation is what I tell my students is “the fiction of detection,” the fantasy that we have solved the mystery, revealed The Secret.
This psychoanalytic reading of the archive has little, it seems to do with the power relations around the archive that the historians are interested in. But Mal d’archive is a psychical drive – and it certainly doesn’t belong to any ethnic group. In fact it’s a universal human drive, claimed Derrida, rightin the home of the refugee Freud.
For Derrida has, it turns out, raised the question of the archive, its institutional violence and evanescent material technological basis, its sickness and fevers, to argue against Yerushalmi’s argument that psychoanalysis is the property of just one ethnic group, and not of the world. Yerushalmi, argues Derrida, is on the side of the archons and institutions who want to keep the secrets for one group. He is policing the archive for reasons he should reflect on.
Such a tactical move is perfectly in line with Derrida’s commitment to an ethics of hospitality that dislikes border controls and welcomes Others, including refugees like Freud (however problematic he saw that commitment – see Judith Still’s wonderful Derrida and Hospitality, EUP, 2012; and the two volumes of translations of Derrida’s 1995-96 seminars on Hospitality which came out in 2023 and 2024 from Chicago UP). It is also in line with his commitment to acknowledging the role of the irrational in what can seem simply rational, a commitment that itself is an inheritance from psychoanalysis.
Derrida is asking us – and Yerushalmi in particular – to use the insights of psychoanalysis to examine the foundations of our own stories – the discourses and institutions that govern what we do without our even realising it. In the house of Freud, he’s asking us to welcome truly Freudian thinking.
Archives and The Wicked Boy
So how does all this connect to The Wicked Boy? First of all, doesn’t “Kate Summerscale” (the narrator) set herself up as an archon of some incredible power? Goodness – all those archival sources! Just look at the notes! All those newspaper articles that she’s used to construct her story!
To impress us with her credentials as an archon in the orthodox institution of knowledge is surely the purpose of the notes and the bibliography. They are a sign that she must have worked for years over crumbling paper copies in dusty libraries and arcane archives. She’s got the skills and the knowledge so she’s closer to The Secret than we could ever be. She’s just like a private investigator at the top of her game, a Cordelia Grey or Margaret Wilmot or – since she narrates in the first person (so it turns out) – a Judith Lee.
Well, let’s dig a bit deeper and excavate “Kate Summerscale”’s own processes of generating secrets – let’s reflect on that character’s archival processes to reveal some secrets ourselves.
First thing, it’s clear to me (as a mini-archon in my own way) that her story is based mostly on online databases – especially the British Newspaper Archive (BNA). Rather than spend years in the paper archive, Summerscale has spent days in the digital archive, using keyword searches. You can do it easily enough yourself – just type for example “Robert Coombes” in the BNA and see what comes up. Other books she cites are freely available online through Google books or archive.org.
She hasn’t admitted any of this, though: her bibliography doesn’t list the BNA or Google books, only individual newspapers. Rather, Summerscale has mystified and glamourised her role as an archon to give us the impression that we are getting real value for money – that we are buying a huge amount of her labour. Of course the author hasworked really hard – just not in the way that the creation of “Kate Summerscale” the narrator suggests. This isn’t deception on her part, just a conventional veiling of process that accords with the dominant rules of the knowledge-producing institution: academics still tend to cite the paper versions of primary sources even if we’ve found them online. It’s an unspoken institutional rule that either you know (that proves you are an archon) or not (you’re “populace”).
Second, let’s look at the metamorphosis of “Kate Summerscale” the narrator/ investigator. At first the narrator starts off like a cool police reporter: the tone is reasonable and controlled, a careful and very detailed description of events and environments. We might note the extraordinary emphasis on smell, for example. These days, in our hygienic world, we are so used to things not smelling that this emphasis, noted by several reviewers, comes as something of a shock: the stink of the ship Spain – a mix of “animal flesh, urine and excrement” (p. 12) – the powerful smells of 1890s London – “sour urinous… musty caramel… rotting cow carcasses… simmering oranges and strawberries… boiling bones and offal… bird-droppings… rubber, caustic soda, sulphuric acid, telegraph wire, dyes, creosote, disinfectant, cables, explosives, poisons and varnish…” (p. 13).
Yet all this horror is presented in calm forensic detail, with even rhythms and elegantly composed sentences. We are not surprised when the body is discovered and dispassionately described as if in a police report (see especially p. 41). “Kate Summerscale” here is very much on the side of the law and the reasoned forensic use of the archive. We readers seem to be positioned at this point as the jury deciding the wickedness or otherwise of the murderer. Did he do it? Well, yes, probably. But we are also being asked to judge whether he did it because of his environment (of which the smells, and the brutality of others, are a pungent part) or whether because he is essentially wicked inside, evil in nature, worthy to be thrown with other rotten characters on the garbage heap of history. The very asking of the question, though, opens us – and, with more certainty, the narrator – to change: which side will the narrator and we plump for?
For “Kate Summerscale” does not stay the same – her relationships to the law and to the archive are not fixed throughout. As I suggested before, her investigations in the archive gradually lead her to discover unexpected secrets – that maybe Robert Coombs was more than just a “wicked boy” defined by the law and “archived” – arrested, shut away in a lunatic asylum, invisible, secreted. We gradually understand that the narrator has been caught up in her investigations. This suggests, then, that the book is a Bildungsroman not just of the object of research, Robert Coombes, but of “Kate Summerscale” herself. And it’s archive fever that provokes this change.
The Archive is not just evil or repressive, then, for it can also be an engine of transformation: the power of the mal d’archive is not confined to the “desire of an admirable historian” to make the world conform to himself, but can open the possibility to encounter the Other, an Other.
What she’s doing becomes really clear when we find that, because “Kate Summerscale” herself is shut out of the archive relating to the asylum, she keeps padding around its perimeter, treading textual ground that might offer a glimpse of Robert – the descriptions of Broadmoor where he was incarcerated, her hunt for photographs (are they all definitely of Robert Coombes?). We get closer again when she tracks him down to Australia and locates people who knew people who knew him.
We discover that, like the detective Cordelia in P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job, she wants to get close to the object of her investigations, to understand him, to make him present to herself and to us. She wants to reach out across the void of time, hear his voice and touch his hand. She wants to raise the dead. In so doing she seeks to elide the binaries of past and present, perhaps too of fiction and fact, to touch a “vanish’d hand” and hear “the sound of a voice that is still,” to undo death even while knowing that that is impossible. It is utopian, fantastical, a resource of hope, a reason to change.
That impossible desire to get close is surely the secret of why we continue to read, why we are touched by the two conjoined stories of “Kate” and “Robert” that come together in the end. “Kate” may not be able to touch Robert’s hand, but she can touch the hand of a man who touched him, and she can hope that he feels the same way as she does about Robert. This is the metaphysics of presence in literary and historical action: we know such desire for presence is impossible, but we keep hoping nonetheless. That is a glory, and a tragedy, a source of grief and of pleasure, a hope and an acceptance of defeat.
Archives, then, may always be political, institutional, systemic, but they are also emotional and experiential. They may harbour secrets from the past and try to ensure closure and certainty, but the desire archives excite can also be a driver to the future and to change in politics, institutions, systems and the self. What the narrator of The Wicked Boy does is show the transformative effect of archive fever so that, in the end, we can welcome what before we feared.
We can, as “Kate Summerscale” models for us, visit the archive not only to become archons who erect and police boundaries, but to become, also, hospitable.
from Poem 7 of 1897 American edition of Tennyson’s In memoriam (orig. 1850), illustrated by Harry Fenn (Fords, Howard and Hulbert, New York)
In 2010 I organised a conference onAngels and Demons at Canterbury Christ Church University. This resulted in a special number of Critical Surveyon the topic in 2011. Keen to promote my colleagues’ work rather than mine in the limited space available, I never expanded and published the paper at the conference that I had only a few days to prepare for when a speaker was forced to withdraw. I had to use what was close to me as a person physically, intellectually and emotionally: that shows!
The other papers looked at the first and last words of the title. Typically for me, I examined the smallest, neglected word: the ‘and’ of the title.
Here it is, more or less as delivered, in three parts.
Angels and Demons: Luluand the Copula
Act1
Nothing like beginning at the end, especially the end of Alban Berg’s unfinished opera Lulu, and a double murder by Jack the Ripper of someone we hear described as an “angel” and of the woman in love with her, a personification of the New Woman, the Countess Geschwitz, who plans to leave the garret to go to university to study law and fight for women’s rights.
NB CONTENT WARNING for violence : from the 1979 Chereau production of the completed three-act version
The important point is that this scene, the last from the opera, pretty unequivocally suggests that men really don’t like women! Men murderers of angels really are devils, aren’t they?
From the way the countess’s decision to fight for women’s rights is thwarted by her murder, you may have decided already that Jack is a representative figure of something beyond himself, perhaps standing for the general category “misogynistic, conservative, reactionary man”. Certainly the idea that Jack represents the revenge of men on uppity women is a very common interpretation. For some critics, the work even becomes the tragedy not of Lulu, but of men who are forced to violence by such women (not a conclusion I agree with I should add).
And then the music… this isn’t just any old double murder of women by a man, of course, but a double murder in the 1930s high modernist opera by Alban Berg: Lulu, a work championed (and criticised) by no less an enemy of mass culture than Theodore Adorno.
One might well ask whether the demon is not Jack the casual murderer of would-be liberated New Women, or even women who supposedly make men behave in violent ways, but exclusive avant-garde texts like Lulu. After all, everyone knows who Jack the Ripper is – he has generated a vast amount of material dedicated to him. We might say he has a vast fan base. We even go on Jack the Ripper tours in London’s East End. Jack is popular. Berg’s Lulu, by contrast, is hardly the Glaswegian singer who won the 1969 Eurovision Song Context with “Boom Bang-a-Bang“. It’s “hard”, difficult, unpleasant; this Lulu doesn’t follow the musical rules we are familiar with.
Yet it’s clear just from the inclusion of the figure of Jack that the opera attempts to take on board the violent hierarchy of popular and exclusive. For the conjunction “and” can be used in various senses – inclusion yes, but also to signal (and perhaps interrogate) a hierarchy of difference: good and evil, man and woman, angel and demon. In questioning the hierarchy of popular and exclusive as well as the other binaries I’ve just mentioned, Lulu is like many operas of the period, such as Ernst Krenek’s Johnny spielt auf, or several of Franz Schreker’s operas (perhaps most of all Die Gezeichneten). Certainly in some places it reworks then-popular dance forms, jazz rhythms and instrumental colourings. Lulu even takes on the film industry – already dominated by Hollywood by the time the opera was being written between 1927 and 1935. A performance of Lulu as Berg wrote ithas a film at its very centre, a 3-minute action-packed short very different from Pabst’s lingeringly aesthetic film on the same subject as the opera, Pandora’s Box of 1928, starring the wonderful Louise Brooks. Despite the claims of a few breathless writers, even the Pabst film was never “popular” in any sense. When it premiered in Berlin in January 1929, it was almost entirely ignored in the excitement of the new “talkies” that were grabbing public attention in Europe and America. Brooks herself was slashed by the critics. It took until the 1950s for the film to be appreciated by the cognoscenti in the art house. Unlike the retellings of the tale and figure that Karen Littau and Shelley Berc have detailed for us, the Lulu I’m writing of here has never been popular for all its engagement with elements of the popular. Does that mean that I, as a historian of popular narrative, cannot or should not engage with it? Is it heretical of me to do so?
Like Pabst, Berg based his work on a pair of plays by the fin-de-siècle German playwright Frank Wedekind, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box which Wedekind worked on between 1892 and 1913. Many of the music critics who discuss the opera love the music. It is a highly ingenious form of dodecaphony and parades the signs of exclusive distinction that require long training to decode. But they regard the Wedekind plays as belonging on the junk heap of literature, too low for the sacred realms of opera. What was Berg doing when he chose to set this shabby little shocker that sold out to contemporary bourgeois notions of the femme fatale and comprised a collage of the vulgar misogynistic commonplaces that Otto Weininger systematised in his 1902 Sex and Character? Wedekind’s Lulu plays seem uncannily to agree with Weiniger’s fantasy that Woman has no ethics, logic or soul and therefore can only see with a blank stare, that Woman is totally materialistic and has no spiritual or intellectual side. It’s all wonderfully summed up in a notorious quotation from Weininger, “Man possesses sexual organs, her sexual organs possess Woman.” The New Woman we see murdered at the end, who plans to go to university to study law so that she can fight for women’s rights was, so her beloved Lulu tells her, half a man. Lulu herself can be regarded only too easily as the quintessence of Weinigerian Woman, as a one-sentence narration of her life will demonstrate. Having started as a child prostitute and thief, Lulu goes through three husbands, murders the last of them, escapes from prison through the machinations of her lesbian friend, runs off to Paris with the son of her third husband, and ends in a London garret as a prostitute.
Wedekind wrote his original version as Die Büchse des Pandora, ein Monstretragödie (“Pandora’s Box, a Monster Tragedy”) between 1892 and 1894 as a single 5-acter, monstrous both in length and subject matter. If you thought the ending in the opera was shocking, in the original Jack the Ripper explicitly knifes out Lulu’s genitals and fantasises about how much the London Medical Club will pay for them. Partly because of this ending, Wedekind’s publisher thought the Monstretragödie would provoke prosecution for obscenity. He therefore persuaded Wedekind to publish just the first three acts of his play which dealt with Lulu’s marriage to each of her three husbands. Subsequent versions of the play which Wedekind wrote (including splitting the original 5 acts into 2 plays) attempted to negotiate a path between the censors and desire for popularity through sensation. Berg condensed his opera from the published two-play version – we know from a surviving seating plan that he went to a private performance of the second play in 1905 and that this performance and its paratexts influenced him. By recombining the two plays, therefore, Berg was returning them to their original structural integrity.
To me just as shocking as the murders is the number of music critics who choose to ignore what they regard as an unworthy text to concentrate instead on analysing the fabulous intricacy of the music – Adorno amongst them. What is at stake in this violent excision of words? This what the other parts of this blog will seek to answer.
The previous post closed with a perhaps outrageous claim to have noticed something that specialised music critics have not. But the point is not difficult to argue. Let’s look again at the extract from the score I printed in the previous post.
Lulu centre again – but note the direction to the performers to put mutes on their instruments, and the fade of the vibraphone from pp (very quiet) to ppp (extremely quiet)
Notice the directions nehmen Dpf in the middle of the page – put the mutes on. For the music is played backwards with all possible instruments muted. This signals a difference from the first half, an addition subtle on the page but decidedly audible in performance. To an audience listening as opposed to a reader reading, that is, with the remediation of the text through the technologies of musical instruments from the printed visual to the aural, the palindrome does not signal a suspension of the arrow of time. Rather, it emphasises time’s passage by highlighting difference in similarity.
This is certainly the case with the narrative palindrome that Berg creates. By the last scene, when the husbands start returning and taking their revenge, we in the audience have been so well trained by the patterns in the opera that we know the narrative law. And we are given a choice. Do we simply accept the law as an inevitable given, as part of the human condition, or do we rebel against its violent inflexibility? Do we want this structure to be enacted?
I want the ending to be different. I want Lulu to escape Jack and for the self-sacrificing Countess to study law and fight for women’s rights. I do not want men to take revenge, as by this time I, though a man, have come to see Lulu as a human being. I want transcendence from my own gendered, socialised subject position, I want the cycle of suffering to be broken. My engagement with the performance and its technologies (as opposed to just with the technologies of print) has caused me to distance myself from a community of people who automatically assume the rightness of the lex talionis.
Alternatively, if I do want it – and parts of me do, confiteor – I am encouraged to ask myself about the moral stature of my sadistic misogynistic desire, my conservative desire to remain within a community of vengeance.
Lulu in the final scene puts my progeessive and conservative desires in dialogue with one another.
By listening to and watching, by experiencing a performance on stage, I, already split, have also become linked to Lulu. If the title of the opera follows the tradition of naming a work after the solitary protagonist like Tosca and Fidelio – it’s not Tristan und Isolde, or A Village Romeo and Juliet ‑ I nonetheless supply both the conjunction the missing adjunct: Lulu and me. Who of these is the angel, who the demon? Am I Jack or Lulu or both? The and here is not, as I’ve already explained in a previous post, a simple conjunction: it is an implied copula fot it suggests identity through linkage. Lulu and me suggests that I am Jack or Lulu or both?
In this last part, I turn to one of the many recurrent passages that is never subject to palindromic treatment, the coda to the sonata form associated with Dr Schön, Lulu’s third husband. This is the music of Lulu’s desire to be loved by Dr Schön, the man she wanted to be married to at the start. She wants him to recognise her as a valid human being. She wants him to recognise that she is. It’s all she’s ever wanted, as she says in one of the terrible quarrels they have. The first time the musical passage appears, she recalls her childhood as a street urchin and thief in spoken words that ensure the audience understands them:
“ ‘My husband’… If I belong to anyone in this world, I belong to you. Without you, I don’t know where I’d be. You took me by the hand, you gave me food and clothes, even though I was trying to steal your watch. Do you think I can forget that?”
Alban Berg, Lulu, vocal score, Universal Edition, 1936: 81 (“Coda der Sonata”)
Memory binds Lulu to Dr Schön: she can’t forget. And indeed, it is the power of memory that binds me to Lulu as I watch that last scene when Schön returns as Jack. I remember her story when this music returns, and that is why I partly become her.
What does Lulu give me in that memory? She does not give food and clothes. Instead she gives me the story of her life, an Other to my own. And then, to complicate the act of generosity that art always involves, the actress who plays Lulu gives me her labour and her skill. If successful, this is a gift beyond price, signalled by the ecstatic applause at the end of a performance which pays the artist beyond her fee, an act of recognition all of us who have performed need and know in our flesh more than in our pockets.
Now, though no previous critic has pointed this out, I think it clear that Lulu’s gratitude music owes a debt to the very first motif in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The first four notes have the same intervals but are played backwards and upside down, the whole filtered through the emotional and orchestral lens of late Mahler (itself deriving from Wagner).
How the opening bars of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde become the theme of the heroine’s Gratitude/ Love in Berg’s Lulu
Lulu’s music of gratitude and love is by no means the music of absolute modernity and abstraction from history. Its reworking of Wagner declares itself to be very firmly within tradition, within a historical community of texts: Berg and Wagner, not Berg in splendid isolation. The reworking is a memory and acknowledgement of history, of community, of society — and therefore necessarily of ideology. The music of gratitude can even be said to acknowledge its debt by mirroring back its donor: Wagner is acknowledged as the source. This is exophoric reference, an intertextual repetition. It is not the abstract kind of repetition without ideology that Adorno and his followers have praised. It is an and of textual community.
My point is that repetition, even the retrograde of the palindrome, does not necessarily mean timelessness, the absolute of utter novelty that is the orthodox claim of high modernity, or a refusal of ethical intervention into society that is pure deixis. On the contrary: repetition of the intertextual kind (and there are many such in Berg) and even palindromic repetition, necessarily imply memory, a coupling of the past to the present that enables future action.
I remember and I am reminded of Lulu’s gratitude to Schön and her desire to be recognised by him every time this music recurs. Its last appearance is in her conversation with Jack, the reincarnated Schön, when it is conjoined effortlessly with the music of Lulu’s beauty that we first hear when she is presented by an animal tamer in the Prologue. Jack and Lulu discuss money: he, rather than she now, takes more and more in incremental demands, an inversion of her financial dependence on Schön – except that he takes everything. (“Gib mir das ganze”– “Give me everything” – InGottes Namen” – “In God’s name” replies she, as if acknowledging the operation of Biblical lex talionis)
When Jack stabs Lulu we have been reminded he is killing a human being who only wants to be loved as she is. When he kills the Countess we have been reminded, and afterwards in her Wagnerian Liebestod will be reminded again, that he is killing a human being who only wants to live for others. Our Weinigerian misogyny at this moment will be pressured by our affective involvement, by our feeling for and with Lulu and the Countess.
That sounds very sentimental. Indeed it is, in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense. This is a political tradition of sentiment that in the nineteenth century was practiced especially by women for the sake of women and other oppressed people – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is perhaps the most famous and impactful example of its deployment. Ouida operated within it, as did the American mass-market abolitionist and proto-feminist novelist E.D.E.N. Southworth. Better known today is the political sentimentality of Dickens.
This is not the sentimental tradition of, say, Violetta or Mimi – those archetypal operatic women who are thrown away when used up, who die of consumption literally and metaphorically and whose voluptuous deaths we uncritically enjoy so much, as we are reminded by Catherine Clement in her famous 1979 book on Opera and the Undoing of Women. That is the version of commercial sentimentality that Adorno hated. Instead, we are talking of a use of emotion to stir the audience to political action. Such action may stem from a humanistic ideology that not so long ago it was the fashion to excoriate and altogether repudiate. But at least action is possible (indeed necessary) in that ideology.
We also have to ask if Adorno’s belief in the possibility of escape from ideology and the personal is actually only a blindness to the very material conditions which permit that belief. After all, Universal Edition, Lulu’s publishers, were and remain a very canny publishing house as moiled in capitalism as any Hollywood studio. Adorno’s argument depended on a printed text produced by Universal to show how Berg was unideological and passive, resistant to action. My main issue with him here is not blindness to the capitalist materiality of what enabled his anti-capitalist praise of inaction and formal perfection, nor his praise for the hard, the difficult, the challenging, the unpopular, but his rejection of the sentimental through praise of the abstracted and neglect of performance.
Sentimentally, I refuse to be either abstracted or mono-media.
To move us to action a link must be made with us. And this is the conjunction-copula that binds the work of art to us. Lulu’s escape from ideological constraint, pace Adorno, lies not in its abstraction of structure and a purity of absolute decontextualised modernity. That idea relies on the media technology of printed scores, itself a product of industrial modernity of which Adorno was the salesman of a specific sector. Instead, opera, when it is successful, like theatre in general, offers us the conjunction-copula – the verbal force of and – of Carmen and Don Jose, Lulu and Dr Schön, murdered and murderer, actor andaudience, popular and elite, text and performance, even the Angels and Demons with which we began.
I stand with Cixous in her remarks on opera and theatre. A performance of Lulu offers the time of pity in its examination of the uncertain differences coupled and defined by a conjunction, the messy relation of memory, of today and yesterday, of the popular and exclusive, of men and women, of Angels and Demons, of Conservative Communities andNew Possibilities, Others and Us.
And is not a simple parataxis devoid of force; it is a part of speech that, when examined, can and should result in calls to action. It is in this sense that and can be a copula (pace Adorno here).
What that action will be depends on the force of both strictly verbal copula andconjunction that our stories, our art, our ethical commitment can generate.
Christine Schafer as Lulu in prison, from the centre of the central film in the 1997 Glyndeborne production,
I ended the previous post with a reference to Adorno’s appreciation of Lulu. I’ll return to Adorno later. Before I do, I want to remark on a particular structural element the critics find more fascinating than any other: Berg’s obsession with palindromes in Lulu – music that runs forwards and then backwards.
Perhaps the example most commented on is the film interlude right at the centre of the opera. Where I’ve inserted the blue line in the figure is indeed the opera’s exact centre – you don’t need to be able to read music to see how the musical lines go up and then down.
The centre point of the entire opera
Lulu’s palindromes are narrative as well as musical. Berg’s screenplay for the 3 minute film at the heart of the opera very clearly organises its narrative palindromically.
He stuck very closely to Wedekind’s original text, though he had to cut it down by 4/5ths. The cuts are significant: they make the whole work structurally tauter, emphasising the text’s repetitions and balances which appeared in the original but by no means as starkly. Most important of all are Berg’s alteratiibs to them final scene: Berg turns it into a recapitulation of the first half of the opera, that is, the whole of Wedekind’s first play. By now Lulu is reduced to plying her trade as a prostitute in London, accompanied by her 3rd husband’s son and the seedy old Schigolch, a hanger on who may or may not be her father. In the Wedekind, she has 4 clients, the last of which is Jack. In the Berg she has only 3 – the virgin university lecturer is cut – and each of these 3 is a reincarnation of one of Lulu’s husbands. Each client has the same music as the relevant husband and is, so Berg directs, to be sung by the same singer.
Now this emphasis on musical recapitulation and double roles means that everything after the mid point of the opera takes on what George Perle in his magisterial study of the opera calls a déjà vu quality. Indeed, and the musical symmetries and taut structure to me seem to bind the characters into a machine-like helplessness.
In terms of narrative justice – and justice is staged at the heart of the opera with Lulu’s filmed trial – the plot is governed by the retributive and symmetrical lex talionis of Deuteronomy — an eye for an eye. A cold, simple and inflexible justice. Lulu kills and is killed, an active is balanced by a passive verb.
That’s how the story ends.
The narrative, judicial conjunction here becomes a copula marking a predicate, a cause and effect of equivalent force: and marks the balance of a palindrome.
End of story?
Although Adorno never mentions the lex talionis, acceptance that this is the way of the world is what some of his praises of Berg suggest. Berg refuses the happy end of commercial texts – that happy end which may not always be happy for the characters but which suggests catharsis for the audience, or the possibility of hope for a better future – or even, as Adorno devastatingly suggests in his analysis of Hollywood film in some aphorisms from the 1920s in Quasi Una Fantasia (pp. 49-50), the minimal happiness which lies in the audience’s knowledge that happiness is not for them (“the old mother who sheds tears at someone else’s wedding, blissfully conscious of the happiness she has missed”). Berg, for Adorno, looks on the human condition objectively and notsentimentally (i.e. commercially); Berg does not impose his subjective response to the narratives he presents in either of his two operas. It is this, along with the music’s extreme complexity and ingenious logic that renders Berg able to escape the constraints of his society’s ideology. Adorno’s is a huge and important claim – for how far is it possible for any of us to escape ideology? What of the gender and sexuality conventions that Berg, following Wedekind, exploits for his theatre piece – the tragic half-man lesbian or the sex-obsessed Woman? Is this not ideology?
Adorno has, however, to admit that Berg sided with the lost, and that in this Lulu is similar to Berg’s earlier opera Wozzeck. But Wozzeck, said Adorno, quoting Berg himself, could easily put its first bar after its last and the whole tragedy could happen all over again. The narrative is an endless cycle of suffering with no possibility of escape. No answers are given, just deixis – a pointing out of the human condition into which no intervention is possible, and through which there can be no transcendence or real catharsis. Alban Berg was passive, stresses Adorno, not assertive, and it is his siding with non-action that allows him to escape ideology. This is good, for action is, according to Adorno, always geared towards making a population act in a certain way, and therefore must of necessity be ideological.
The palindrome in such an understanding contrasts with ideology by suggesting a self-contained universe beyond the arrow of time we experience in the phenomenal world – the critic John Covach has suggested that for Berg the palindrome represented a timeless heaven deriving ultimately from a Swedenborgian description in one of Balzac’s lesser-known novels. This is perfectly consonant with the mystical leanings of the musical circle Berg moved in ‑ and of course it matches Adorno’s promotion of Berg as offering a non-active refuge from the evil of a world that could produce the ideology of Nazism.
There are two things that interest me in these claims. Yes, I love tracing the music’s formal complexity – it has all the charm of a musical puzzle and a practical rhetorical lesson for my own compositions (how did Berg derive that chord or instrumental line from his musical materials?). In either case, its analysis is a very abstract activity indeed, like maths. But it’s of course very dependent upon my access to a very particular mediated version of the music – the printed score.
To print I can return again and again – abstracted from society, abstracted from death and the onward rush of time. This is a characteristic of the medium of print, as envisaged in the very first image of a printing press known to us. Death takes away the men, but the books and printing press remain.
The earliest known illustration of a printing press, from the Dance of Death, Lyons, 1499
Adorno’s vision of abstraction from ideology depends, it seems to me, on a particular organisation of the media industry, which enables the stable reproduction of very complex printed musical instructions – to write them out by hand would require literally years and, as all students of media history know, would generate an unstable text. Abstraction from ideology in reality depends on the ideologically bound material practice – the labour – of the profitable publishing of an iterated, stable text.
There is another issue too: my relationship to music that this printed medium enables has also allowed me to confirm how the large scale palindromes aren’t by any means exact. How dare I say this when so many critics have not remarked on it?
This historical definition of the twentieth century as related to book publishing over the last two posts have covered 6 elements: technology, ownership, regulation and distribution and conglomeration and the paperback format (the first post was an introduction). Before ending this consideration of the book in the twentieth century, I want to cover two more areas: first, the importance of war to publishing, and secondly, and inevitably, therelationship of book publishing to other media, a crucial characteristic of twentieth-century publishing.
We may not like to think this, but war is a time when information storage, retrieval and transmission of all sorts benefit from a lot of additional energy. We can see this in the effects of the Crimean and Peninsular wars in the nineteenth century on demand for newspapers, the effect of WWI on increasing demand for published images of the war and on staff shortages at printing works – which obviously caused its own problems – or what I’m going to write about here, the effect of WWII on the book as we know it.
In many ways, the second world war is just as important as any of the other factors outlined in previous posts.
First, WWII promoted the idea of a national literature which turn had a huge effect on the industry and on education. In America, for instance, it had an enormous impact on the consolidation of the canon of Great American Books. In 1941 was published one of the foundational books that came to define what was to be included in the American canon – and of course excluded from it. This was F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, a volume that set the syllabus for schools and universities for decades to come.
If this was what we may call a top-down effect, there was also some influence of what people were actually reading on what academics decided should be canonised: Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby had sunk without trace, an utter flop on its appearance in 1925. Chosen for free distribution amongst the American forces during WWII partly because the copyright was very cheap, The Great Gatsby began to be read by large numbers of people for the first time. Following the war, academics who had read it when serving in the forces started to publish on The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald in general.
More comforting – to me at least – than the idea of war encouraging an idea of a national literature, is the opposite: the idea of a world literature. It was a year after the war that Erich Auerbach’s magisterial Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur was published in Switzerland by Franke Verlag. Its research project was intended to show the cultural histories many of us share – a rebuttal of the divisions that the war between nations was using to justify itself. In its 1955 English translation the Auerbach became one of the founding texts of comparative literature, rightly praised (in my view) by Edward Said.
During the war there was enormous demand for reading matter: people not only wanted information on specific subjects such as the military – no fewer than 229 new titles were published on military matters in 1943 alone, as opposed to only 62 in 1937 – but military personnel had long empty periods of waiting between scenes of action while civilians had long evenings to kill with not much to do because of blackouts and rationing.
The publishing industry in Britain found that due to the rationing of paper it was unable to meet demand. Fortunately for publishers, it had a ready-made lobbying body in the Publishers Association which succeeded in preventing the imposition of Purchase Tax on books and in negotiating on a national scale the Book Production War Economy Agreement. This latter determined both the quality of paper and the size of type in order to produce savings.
Paper rationing – which came to an end only in 1949 – was instrumental in establishing the dominance of the paperback (which Penguin had already begun), for the production methods used for paperbacks used less paper than their equivalent in hardback. Furthermore, the pared down visual style imposed by wartime printing restrictions was highly influential on later developments in design.
These very brief paragraphs can only open the subject up for discussion rather than explore it in detail, but it is nonetheless important to acknowledge the very obvious fact that historical events, of which war is a very powerful example, impact enormously on the configuration of the book publishing industry. It’s a great area in which students can research individual items for projects.
One that strikes me is the surprising “Services Edition” (No. 481) of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own that heads this post. As the back cover of the slim volume has it, these editions were “for circulation to the FIGHTING FORCES OF THE ALLIED NATIONS. THIS BOOK MUST NOT BE RESOLD.” By the time of its publication in 1945, Woolf had already committed suicide, though this is masked by a remark that she had “died” in 1941. The note on the author in the inner page defines her in national and canonical terms: “at the time of her death she had won a foremost place in English fiction, but she also ranks high among literary critics and essayists.” Readers need to read Woolf, suggests the note, because she is English and high quality according to sanctioned criteria, not because she has sold a lot (the original 1929 Hogarth Press edition had sold out very quickly as it happens). As with The Great Gatsby, in such framings we see an attempt to formulate the continuation of an illustrious national history, a promotion of “England” as a cultured, civilised and literary nation opposed to the barbarism of the enemy we see so prominent in British and Allied propaganda. This is, for all its endorsement of Woolfian feminism, the result of a carefully controlled (even while apparently librral) propaganda enterprise far removed from Auerbach’s call for unity.
The final element in my analysis of the “twentieth century” in publishing terms is relations between media. Books should never be separated out from other media: even the Gutenberg Bible was meant to recall manuscript rather than declaring itself to be entirely new. For most of the twentieth century we need to consider the relation of books to film, radio and TV – what I’m calling here “electric media” (as opposed to electronic) . I’ve no intention of going into the interaction of books with these media in any detail here, but there are a couple points to make that students find interesting.
Electric media have all interacted in complicated ways with literature: not only is there the obvious phenomenon of the spin-off, the film of the book, the talking book (on radio, tape or CD), the radio play of the book and so on, but also these other, electric, media have all affected literature itself. The influence of film is well documented, especially in the early twentieth century, from Kafka, Thomas Mann, Joyce to Fitzgerald (at the end of the century and at the obvious level of cultural reference, one recalls the importance of Rogers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music (1965) in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997)). Students have considered this in their projects and – even more commonly – how books (qua novels) have been adapted for the (cinematic) screen. This is all very familiar to us.
More importantly from my perspective, however, is the dating of the electric media’s influence on considerations of what “literature” is. While film had been widely consumed since the early years of the twentieth century, radio from the 1920s, from the 1950s it was TV that proved to be the competing – or perhaps complementary? – medium to the book. It’s important to remember how poor people were in the UK before WWII and before TV. Over the 1920s and 30s leisure accounted for less than 5% of national expenditure. Such poverty unsurprisingly hampered media expansion. It was the post-war boom that saw the greatest changes in media consumption – I’ve already mentioned the importance of the 1950s for the transformation of book production methods and in many ways nineteenth-century media production ended 50 or even 60 years after 1900, as the old production methods were replaced wholescale by the new only after WWII.
Consumed sitting in the home, TV became a rival not to radio (as is sometimes claimed) but to the book. The similar physical postures involved in the consumption of TV and the book put them into competition, while the radio could be listened to while involved in other leisure activities or while working. I still remember the BBC radio programme “Music While You Work” which had started during the WWII – in 1940. It ran until 1967. Asa Briggs’s 1970 The History of Broadcasting in the UK(Vol. III: 576–577 perceptively writes about how popular music was broadcast to aid productivity – this wasn’t a secret even to me as a child: it was just “normal.” But to watch TV you had to sit down and dedicate time to the small grainy screen in order to decode what the pictures meant. Today’s giant screens enable us to do the ironing while watching TV (or our phones enable us to watch while commuting). That wasn’t the case in the 1950s.
Now at exactly this time – the late 1950s and early 1960s – we see the birth of modern media studies, a birth largely and paradoxically in book form: not only Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy of 1962 and his Understanding Media of 2 years later, but work on the history of popular reading by Margaret Dalziel, Richard Altick, Louis James, Mary Noel and others. Richard Hoggart was considering The Uses of Literacy in 1957 just two years after ITV started in London and the BBC killed off Grace Archer in an attempt to prevent the curious tuning in to the upstart channel. Of course, there had been studies of mass or popular reading before – one thinks of Q.D. Leavis’s cantankerous and inaccurate (but very influential) Fiction and the Reading Public of 1932 ‑ but what was new at this time was the extent of interest in and concern over the new media and a corresponding re-evaluation of the old. No longer did “English” and “American Literature” remain with their sights on a few canonical classics, but the field began to widen to include texts not previously considered “literature.” Not only was contemporary popular culture analysed (Barthes’s journalism collected as Mythologies in 1957 remains a key example), but popular fiction and even journalism began to be studied historically. Important for me, this is the period when the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals was born, and when the interdisciplinary Victorian Studies was first published.
Television was not of course the only or even an obviously direct or major propellor of these paradigm shifts in the study of literature – the post-war expansion of higher education and the “reward” of higher education to working-class men who had been promoted to military officers are more direct causes, but the incursion of popular entertainment into the home, once the province of the book, certainly contributed to the gradual (and by no means inevitable or certain) democratisation and broader social study of literature and the transformation of Literature to literature I referred to in the first of this bog series.
What, we may well ask, will the electronic twenty-first century do to the book and to the concept of literature itself? Already there have been many studies and many predictions: which (if any) will become dominant?
When I wrote the first version of these past 4 blogs as a public lecture in 2000, I thought that perhaps we were entering a similar phase to the 1950s and 60s of new technology and new awareness: the world wide web was only 7 years old and everyone was excited about the possibilities for new configurations of meaning. A lot of writing appeared about that. 23 years on and the www has graduated and is thrilled less with new configurations of meaning than new possibilities for consumption. The paper book seems an antiquated medium from which targetted ads are excluded; many of us use electronic versions which offer different affordances. Yet the paper book continues to enjoy status amongst a certain social sector. Will that be sufficient reason for its survival?
In the previous post I covered the first 4 of 8 elements of media history that I’ve found useful for teaching. Here are two more.
If many very small publishers have survived into the twenty-first century (certainly helped by the internet and new digital printing technologies), nevertheless a distinguishing factor of the twentieth century, especially the latter part, concerns the concentration of ownership of the media. I’m thinking here of the sublime growth of international conglomerates and transnational book production in line with just about every other manufacturing industry.
Ever since Paul Hamlyn in the 1950s escaped the restrictions of paper-rationing still in force in Britain by having his books manufactured entirely in Eastern Europe, book production became increasingly international. Even in the long gone 1999, it was quite normal for an author to key in her work in London on a word processor, send it to a publisher whose office might have been in New York who sent it to be typeset in Hong Kong, printed and bound in Singapore, for distribution to an Anglophone but world-wide market. What once were comparatively small publishing houses of perhaps 50 or so staff which carried the name of their founding father whose descendants headed the business are now huge transnational and transpersonal conglomerates.
It was the 1980s, the era of “deregulated” mergers and acquisitions, that saw the virtual elimination of the “gentleman publishers” and the restructuring of the whole publishing industry. The restructuring was due not only to deregulation, however, but also and not least by how the contemporary decreased funding of education led to a correspondingly decreased (and less seasonally reliable) demand for textbooks and library books within the UK. The demand was not only smaller but less predictable. Then again, the appreciation of sterling against the currencies of countries to which Britain had been exporting in large numbers since the 1950s made exports expensive and difficult.
Macmillan’s is a good example of a firm that illustrates how the industry was restructured in the second half of the twentieth century.
The brothers Alexander and Daniel Macmillan, originally from the Scottish island of Arran, had founded the company in 1843. They aimed mainly for a target audience with a large degree of cultural capital, publishing Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes, Lewis Carroll, Tennyson, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells and so on. In the twentieth century Macmillan’s published Ouida (to whom they were very generous in her declining years), Yeats, Sean O’Casey, John Maynard Keynes, and many other well-known names. The talent-spotting talent of the Macmillan family, their canny awareness of the coincidence of cultural and financial capitals, were not confined to fiction and poetry: they also published periodicals and reference texts – Grove’s Dictionary of Music was theirs, for instance. The firm increased in size and influence throughout the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, reaching its apogee in Conservative politician, Harold Macmillan. After having served as Prime Minister between 1957 and 1963, he withdrew from politics and took on (as Macmillan’s website tells me), “a leadership role at the publisher. He instituted an ambitious program that led to international expansion. The Education Division grew significantly and standard reference works and scientific magazines were also added to the list.” (see Macmillan’s interesting inhouse timeline and also Elizabeth James’s Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition 1843-1970, 2002)
Although the family still has a substantial interest, Macmillan’s is now owned by the enormous German media company Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrink – which owns the German national Die Ziet, which its website tells me is “Germany’s largest opinion forming newspaper”. It also owns Germany’s equivalent of the London Evening Standard the Berlin Der Tagesspiegel, 5 different German fiction imprints, a Swiss fiction imprint and 2 New York based houses Henry Holt and no less than Farrar Straus and Giroux, 8 local newspapers in Germany, 2 companies that make documentaries for TV, shares in a large number of radio stations, and various subsidiaries that publish on the internet and on CD. Macmillan’s itself has numerous subsidiaries in 70 countries, the result of Harold Macmillan’s global expansion plans. Since 2000 it has run an academic imprint called Palgrave, the result of the merger of the US St Martin’s Press and the UK Macmillan’s. An even larger conglomerate is Pearson’s. It owns Penguin, Longman and Simon and Schuster; it produced the late twentieth-century hugely successful TV series Baywatch, The Bill and Zena Warrior Princess; it owns the Financial Times, The Economist; it ran Thames TV, has a large stake in Channel 5 and is the world’s largest education publisher. It has for some decades now invested heavily in electronic media, especially the on-line provision of share prices.
There are many issues involved in the creation of these huge conglomerates with their stress on marketability and share prices. One revolves around the value of such industrialisation of knowledge. There was a vigorous resistance already in the nineteenth century: William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites spring readily to mind. In the 1890s many small scale presses had been set up, but their energy and usually socialist and artisanal ideals had all collapsed by the early 1960s. Does this collapse indicate the dominance of books tailored by market researchers, the heartless triumph of the machine – and offer opportunities for paranoia about who controls the knowledge available to us?
While made-by-committee books based on detailed market research certainly are published, it’s a universal axiom in publishing textbooks and commentaries that the indefinable flair of individual editors and their relationship to individual authors is still key to publishing. As one late twentieth-century textbook on publishing explained, “Good personal contacts are paramount” (Giles Clark, Inside Book Publishing, Routledge 1994: 67 – the site associated with the book is very good). And then one thinks of the disaster that brought Dorling Kindersley to its knees with its manufactured Star Wars book: phantom menace the item indeed was. The company managed to sell only 3 million of the 13 million Star Wars books it had printed. This was the main contributing factor to the heavy losses it posted in May 2000 of £25 million. DK was bought out by Pearson’s who joined it to the Penguin Group.
Then, if we are fearful that such transnational conglomerates might control us like Big Brother, we have to reflect on the issue of how centrally controlled they actually are. I remember being told by an editor for Palgrave that although the von Holtzbrink family owns large numbers of shares in the conglomerate that bears their name, they’re only interested in seeing the balance sheets every 5 years or so. They dont interfere. Individual editors operate independently and are, rather, assessed at the local level on the overall profit distribution of the books they have commissioned. Power is diffuse and capable of many different variations, promoting many different tastes and value systems.
While there are certainly issues of control over what becomes available to us to read – the Assange case is proof of that (and see eg the debate over Canongate’s publication of his unauthorised biography in 2011) – few readers feel constrained by what is available except by price. Indeed, given the explosion of small independent publushers in the twenty-first century enabled largely by new technology, many voices can be heard. This brings me to my next point.
From the point of view of most British users of books, issues of ownership are less important than theformatrevolution of 1935. Indeed, for most book readers today the twentieth century really began that year. 1935 was the year that Allen Lane started the Penguin paperback. Taking advantage of the monotype printing I’ve mentioned in a previous post, a technology that had been commercially developed in the 1920s, Penguin changed the face of publishing for ever.
The idea of the paperback was by no means new – books stitched in paper covers date from the late seventeenth century; in nineteenth century France, most books were published in the form to allow for binding according to the consumer’s choice. What was new was the industrial scale on which paperbacks were produced and marketed.
Penguin was born from necessity. Allen Lane was the owner of The Bodley Head Press, which he inherited from his uncle John Lane who had gained a reputation in the 1890s for the avant garde and “advanced” – Lane had published The Yellow Book, the showcase of aestheticism for instance. By the mid 1930s, however, The Bodley Head was in trouble financially: Penguin was a desperate attempt to save it. Allen Lane got the idea of the look for the series from Germany, where a paperback series called The Albatross had been started up by an Englishman named John Holroyd-Reece to rival the old-established firm of Tauchnitz who had been publishing paperback reprints for almost a century. Penguins were, however, by no means straight imitations of Albatross.
While early Penguins, like Albatross, were paperback reprints with visually distinctive covers of works originally published by other forms – as Phil Baines’s beautiful Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 shows us – Lane planned to sell Penguins very cheap: at 6d. Most revolutionary of all, he distributed them through outlets other than standard bookshops: the cheap department store Woolworth’s played a large role in the success of the Penguin imprint. Penguin’s real revolution lay not in its material identity as a cheap distinctive paperback but in establishing the book both literally and metaphorically in places in the market it had never before settled in. It paved the way for the supermarket books we know today.
For the next 20 years Penguin dominated the paperback market in the UK and helped normalise the format to such an extent that for most of us now the paperback IS the book.
What once was a technology meant for disposable reading, ephemeral in its structure, transitory in its nature, available for personalisation, came in the twentieth century to represent the quintessence of the book, the repository of (what we like to think of as) non-ephemeral knowledge.
We have now looked very briefly at 6 elements in media history, taking examples twentieth-century book history: here format and conglomeration, previously technology, ownership, regulation and distribution. What have we not discussed yet?
First print technology,that which enables literature to transit from author to reader.
In the 1950s printing machines whose designs dated from the 1850s were still in general use. Yet paradoxically, printing technologies that in some ways are most characteristic of the twentieth century were first developed in the late nineteenth.
The two great revolutions in printing of the years between 1900 and 1950 were linotype and monotype. The Linotype machine was 1st installed on the New York Tribune in 1886; Monotype was invented 3 years later in 1889 but only commercially established in 1897.
Perhaps you can see from the illustration how monotype employs a paper tape with holes in it as an intermediate storage and transmission technology between the keyboarding and typesetting. The idea derived from looms for weaving cloth interesting enough – the same technology that Charles Babbage used in his mechanical prototype of a computer. These technologies, esp. monotype, tripled the speed at which books could be produced and formed the basis for the revolution that was to happen in the 1930s with Penguin (on which see more later). But even more advanced technologies were invented in the late nineteenth century which were to be used commercially for books only from the 1950s. The 1890s saw patents for devices that set type photographically, but nothing came of them for almost 60 years with the introduction of the Intertype Fotosetter in the USA in 1945. This photographic technology in turn enabled the ever-faster production of books after WWII .
A second way twentieth-century publishing can be said to start in the late nineteenth is not purely technological but concerns conventions of literary property – who owns the text transmitted? I’m referring to the formulation of international copyright, most notably with the Berne Convention of 1885, through which a uniform international system of copyright was initiated. During the course of the twentieth century the convention underwent several modifications, including what is called the Rome revision of 1928 whereby the term of copyright for most types of works became the life of the author plus 50 years. This had in fact already been adopted in 1911 in Britain. In EU countries this has subsequently been modified to 70 years after the death of the author.
Copyright is incredibly important to the publishing industry: it is indeed its cornerstone on which its economics are based, but again with new technologies of the last 60 or so years – starting with photocopying which started to become common in the 1960s – it is undergoing a period of enormous stress. Perhaps in future times the twentieth century will be characterised as the period of efficient copyright – certainly more efficient than for any time before it, and perhaps after it too.
A third conventional continuity from the nineteenth century concerns censorship, particularly the persistence of the Obscene Publication Act. This dates from 1857 with a famous – or infamous – modification in 1868 that defined obscenity as that which exhibited a tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences”. (Justice Cockburn in Regina v. Hicklin, a bookseller in Wolverhampton — see Victorian Print Media pp. 101-104 for extracts from this and other obscenity trials). Obviously, this had enormous impact on what could and could not be published in Britain. Lawrence’s open discussion of sex in The Rainbow in 1915 notoriously led to the seizure of 1,011 copies during a police raid on the London offices of the novel’s publisher Methuen. It was banned by Bow Street magistrates after the police solicitor told them that the obscenity in the book “was wrapped up in language which I suppose will be regarded in some quarters as artistic and intellectual effort”.
Then there’s Joyce’s Ulysses, published in Paris, which was seized by customs officers when it dared cross the channel into Britain (though curiously Bodley Head didn’t get prosecuted for publishing it in Britain in 1936). Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness had caused its publisher Jonathan Cape to be brought to court in 1928.
In 1959, there was a further and vital modification to the law of obscenity: now the work in question had to be taken “as a whole” and the interests of “science, literature, art of learning” could be adduced to defend a work from the charge of obscenity – “expert opinion” could be called. The following year the case of Regina v. Penguin Books over the publication of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a test case of this new law. Penguin won. Since then the question of obscenity has been continually debated, with concern in Britain at least has been far less over literature, however, than with film and video and, more recently again, the internet (see e.g. a recent article in The Guardian).
If then in three major respects twentieth-century publishing seems a continuation of nineteenth, in another it can be said to start perfectly on time on 1 January 1900 with the Net Book Agreement (NBA), signed by members of the then recently formed Publisher’s Association. The NBA concerns distribution. Again its roots go back to the nineteenth century — but it can also be regarded as a decided rupture with it.
The NBA was designed to prevent booksellers selling at suicidal discount yet price wars had erupted when in 1894 the lending libraries Mudie’s and W.H. Smith’s rebelled against taking three-volume novels. Publishers were forced to publish novels in one volume and more cheaply. This in turn meant that cheap books flooded the market and booksellers sought to undercut one another. Unsurprisingly, this spelled disaster for many booksellers (as well as publishers). Many booksellers went bankrupt. This in turn meant fewer outlets for the retail of books and the consequent risk of a decline in the market because of distribution problems – for if booksellers closed because they had been trying too hard to undercut their competitors how were publishers to get their wares to the consumer? Hence the need that some publishers felt to save booksellers from bankruptcy. The NBA was one solution. Through the NBA, the publisher allowed a trade discount to the bookseller only on condition that the book was sold to the public at not less than its “net published price” as fixed by the publisher. In Britain, a first attempt to introduce the net price principle by booksellers in the 1850s had been condemned to failure by supporters of Free Trade; but in the 1880s it had been successfully adopted in Germany. Encouraged by this toward the end of the century some British publishers, led by Alexander Macmillan, began to replace the variable discounts they gave to booksellers by fixed prices. To press for the new system, the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland had been formed in 1895, and the Publishers Association was created in 1896. These two organizations then worked out the Net Book Agreement.
If the twentieth-century British book trade can be said to be the century of efficient copyright, it is just as much the century of the NBA – indeed it only collapsed in September 1995 through pressure from a complex of sources including rulings by the European courts about what constituted cartels and pressure from the Office of Fair Trading.
The industry itself had also changed though. The import of cheaper books from the US via Europe because of the strength of the pound, and not least the enormous growth of bookseller retail chains like Blackwell’s, Dillons, and Waterstones which by 1996 had grown to take over 30% of the U.K. market. These chains – in ever-reduced numbers amongst themselves – became the pacesetters in the new deregulated market that emerged in the 1980s. They were able to launch full-scale retail marketing of the sort that had previously only been seen in UK supermarkets, such as price promotions on certain brands (or imprints, in the case of books), loyalty cards and hence database marketing based on analysis of what specific kinds of customers were buying where and when. Regulation (“deregulation”) encouraged the consolidation of the chains: complaints to the office of Fair Trading by more than 600 small publishers that Waterstone’s was abusing its (dominant) position in the market by seeking greater discounts from publishers were dismissed. More recently again, of course, Amazon has increased its market share of literary distribution to previously undreamed of heights. Are monopoly, oligopoly and cartels the inevitable end of a deregulated market as we saw in the Hollywood film industry of the 1930s before the Paramount decrees, where the studios controlled distribution, exhibition and production?
This month’s initial series of blogs will concern how we can think of changes in book publishing in the UK over the course of the twentieth century, inspired partly by how I was recently working on a piece on the history of publishing over the course of the nineteenth century, though I wrote the first version a couple of decades ago for teaching purposes. For this is really a set of pedagogical blogs designed to offer students a framework for how to think through long term changes in the media industries. The eight categories I’ll propose I’ve used successfully as a checklist for students to write their own histories of specific media. I’ve treated publishing as a model case study so that students in groups can produce something on their own chosen medium by following the same set of headings.It’s worked pretty well: students like the prescriptive structure and group work.One heading that isn’t here is the changing nature of how publishing (or any other media industry) is financed. I tried to include it once but my undergraduates didn’t get it: they weren’t interested and, after all, it’s just too complicated for an overview such as this. I left financing models out of subsequent frameworks and, perhaps wrongly, it will be omitted from this set of blogs too.First of all, though, I wanted to explain the importance of paying careful attention to the title of the question, which is why I start with a few basic definitions from which the rest of the “essay” should depend.
This series of blogs will be almost entirely concerned to think through the terms of the title “Literature in Transit: Histories of the Book in the Twentieth Century“.
For what can we mean by “Literature” in a century that saw Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and Barbara Cartland? Why should it be “in transit?” Why are we concerned to look again at the idea of the “book” in this electronic age when “books” are dying out? Perhaps most bizarre of all, I also want to query what we mean by “Twentieth Century“.
Yet defining the terms of my title will enable me to sketch a history of book publishing mainly in Britain in the twentieth century, up to and including the internet revolution. It will also enable me to reflect on what we need to study in any large-scale historical analysis of a communications medium.
First of all then, we need to consider what a bookmight be.
I’m taking it to be a specific kind of information storage and transmission technology, and in that sense comparable to music recording or film. Of course it’s very different from them as well: it’s a material thing that has a specific and material history. Yet we mustn’t forget that it is fundamentally an earthly avatar with a traceable biography – a life indeed – of a much more intangible and abstract concept. If today we don’t often think of the book as a storage and transmission technology – while we do think of computers in that way – it’s because the book has become naturalised, simply part of our everyday lives, so old it doesn’t need to be thought about except in rare instances like Craig Raine’s famous 1979 poem “A Martian sends a Postcard Home”:
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wingsand some are treasured for their markings —
they cause the eyes to meltor the body to shriek without pain.
I have never seen one fly, butsometimes they perch on the hand.
Now the very questions we ask do not exist outside of time: history encourages certain questions to be asked and discourages others. So it is with the question of what a “book” is. In the 1990s, the new technologies of information storage and transmission woke us up to the fact that the book is just one manifestation of a more abstract concept. Today these technologies enable a text such as this where the history of the the book avatar is discussed. It’s only when lay people outside the book production industry are compelled to compare the book with other avatars of the same concept that we begin to reflect on the specific technologies of the book, its form, its history and its effects.
Literature I take to be the subset of information that comprises combinations of letters of the alphabet. This is what the original term letteratura meant in Latin – a writing formed of letters of the alphabet. The term applied to Greek or Latin as opposed to the Egyptian hieroglyphic mode of information storage or, as the philosopher Cicero suggests (following Plato), human memory. Literature may be encoded in books that appear on the market all at once or in other avatars of information storage and transmission such as periodicals, newspapers and pamphlets, and indeed now on the internet and in our computers. In defining literature by taking shelter in the etymological, I want to avoid for the moment the difference between high- and low-status information, Literature with a capital L and with a lowercase l. Again I think that it’s the new developments in information technologies that have brought that distinction between high and low to the fore and lend it still a particular urgency, especially for those of us involved in education. It’s been an on-going debate for a long time, but it is certainly not resolved, even in 2023: the question of cultural (and thereby social) status has just become masked under the dominant rhetoric of the free market (I’m thinking of the Jim McGuigan’s 2009Cool Capitalismhere).
Transitderives, of course, from the Latin verb “transire”, to go across, to pass from one state to another. In using it in my title I’m also thinking of the crossing that comprises the notion of the medium through which an author communicates with a reader. But of course “in transit” also suggests that the technology that enables literature is changing, passing from one state to another.
At least since Marshall MacLuhan in the early 1960s we’ve thought about how the medium might be related to the message, how not only the medium itself alters but how this has an effect both on how the message is conceptualised by the author and by the reader – the message changes as the medium does. I won’t be writing about this much, but I will give a simple example – the novel as we commonly think of it depends for its existence upon technologies in paper production, cutting and binding as well as printing, not to mention technologies of distribution that allow publishers to get their wares to the consumer. They also depend upon a set of conventions about what certain kinds of information physically comprise. For most of the nineteenth century novels published in book form were very often in hardback volumes.
Novels for us have become one volume – and not only that but paperbacks. I’ll be describing that particular technological transition from hardback to paperback in a later post. I just want to signal it here as probably the most important development in the twentieth-century material book as far as the reader is concerned.
A second association of “transit” that I want to foreground is the increasing perception of the motility of the written word. Once the dominant notion was “In scripta manent” – things remain through being written down. One thinks of the Ten Commandments carved in stone, immobile, resistant to the gnawing of time and the creativity of memory. The orthodoxy in the early twenty-first century is, however, that the printed word is always and everywhere in a transitional state. Texts are no longer considered self-contained units of meaning; rather we think of that each word as in a constant state of moving towards other words and states. Stasis, like fullness and completeness of meaning, are only illusions; intertextuality and instability are the order of the day.
It may seem rather absurd to query what an apparently simple term like the “Twentieth Century” means. The terms refers to a simple period of 100 years from 1900-1999. Yet my question derives from a consideration of periodisation in history, a question that anyone familiar with the defintion of, say, “Romanticism” and “Victorian” will know well. What does an arbitrarily defined chronological period mean in relation to events that actually occur? In this case, is the history of the book really to be bound by a hundred cycles of a planet around a star? George Eliot began Daniel Deronda with comments on the “make-believe of a beginning”; so here I began to query the notion that the twentieth century, in book publishing terms at least, lasted the 100 years between 1900 and 1999. As I will be suggesting, it can be argued that the twentieth century in publishing terms began in the late nineteenth, in the 1880s or even the 1850s. Alternatively, we might say that it began as late as the 1950s. It may have ended in 1992 – in which case it might be very short indeed, less than 40 years.
Now there is an enormous number of ways the twentieth century can be related to the other terms in my title. I’ll be looking at just eight of the most important over the next set of blogs.
Prof Andrew King 