Conclusion

What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”

I meant this book to be straightforwardly historical. How could I hope to establish the aesthetics of semi-detachment without also providing a time-lapse account of the rise of certain ideas: partial absorption, translucency, and the discrepancy that James sketches between “the dramatic “ and the “representational”? I had visions of neatly distinguishing between John Galt’s strange authorial aside in 1831 (“But still she has been a mystery to me. For what use was knowledge and instruction given to her? I ponder when I think of it, but have no answer to the question”1) and Charles Dickens’s wry 1837 meditations (in “Our Next-Door Neighbour”) on the metonymic relationship between London door knockers and the people who dwell behind them. I’d carve so cleanly that decades (or even half-decades) would fall apart from one another as neatly as the sections of a Terry’s Chocolate Orange (“tap it, then unwrap it”). I felt sure only laziness or obtuseness could prevent my charting a neat trajectory from John Stuart Mill’s opaque anxieties about poetry’s place between feeling and thought to Willa Cather’s idea of the novel as an empty room filled with resonant overtones emanating from the reader herself.

Yet somehow I couldn’t stop thinking about Caravaggio’s The Musicians (Plate 1), about the way its central figure gazed outward—vividly present yet manifestly unseeing. Somehow, that blind gaze incarnated for me what Ford Madox Ford described as “those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass.”² I was a voyeur peeping at a musician blindly going about his tuning—and I was also the painting’s intended audience, seeing just what the painter had willed me to see. Like that double-imaged pane of glass that Ford imagines, the canvas I stood before at once opened up a window into that musician’s world and also mirrored back to me my own thoughts and feelings—that musician wasn’t the only one gazing slack-jawed into space.

The Musicians reminded me to reckon with semi-detachment as a state that I myself experienced. I have worked hard to show how moments of distant or veiled recognition are registered, accounted for, or represented within artworks, or in artists’ accounts of their work. Yet my own experience is also manifestly a key part of the aesthetic phenomenon I am describing. Recognizing that basis in particular thoughts and feelings, including my own, also meant recognizing the importance of slippage, of the play between authorial intent and audience uptake. That slippage, too, the impossibility of any original intent entirely defining what an artwork is or does, seemed intrinsic to my argument.

In my earlier books (one about the nineteenth-century crowd and another about Victorian conceptions of portable property), the longer I spent with my materials, the more I felt I learned about original intent and import. This time, though, what stayed with me most of all was the sense of discrepancy, of slippage. In those previous projects, I aimed to wipe all the slippery surfaces dry and present the reader with sturdy, finished objects: dry weight. Here, the more I wiped the surfaces, the slicker they got. That slickness suggested that the problem with supplying a history of ideas (their apex and their extinction) is not that such history explains nothing, but that the very fact of our grasping the ideas of the past suggests that we are closer to them than we think. To know and recognize an idea may not be to own it as one’s own, but it certainly demonstrates the idea’s continued life: after all, here one sits, having that idea all over again.3

In his introduction to Ivanhoe, Scott remarks that any piece of historical fiction that used only words that had fallen out of common usage would both alienate readers and miss a fundamental fact about the continuity between past lives and our own.⁴ Like Ford’s doubled glass, the artwork exists neither within one world nor another; it is a lens, propped up to give us an image that reaches backward to another time while still remaining firmly anchored in the viewer’s own. That is no justification for abandoning historicism in favor of a hunt for timeless truths. Rather, it is a reason to think harder about the ways in which our own experience of recognition of a past thought conjures up commonality, as well. The present is only the way that it is because of the past’s peculiar bequests, its double-edged legacies. The ways we study now depend on the affordances of intellectual tools inherited from the very past we labor to study.

A late George Eliot poem, “The Legend of Jubal” (1870) offers one intriguing way of thinking about how exactly such cultural persistence works. In it, Eliot recounts the story of Jubal the lyre player, who returns to his people after an immensely long absence—and is promptly beaten to death by two flutists. The fatal instruments are not exact replicas of his own lyre, but in Eliot’s telling, they are nonetheless unmistakably its descendants.5 Genealogy matters: present modes of assaying the past—in Eliot’s analogy, our flutes, with which we strike out at the lyre of the past—are descendants (or perhaps collateral kin) of the objects we study. Such affiliations offer no guarantee that any leap into the conjectured past will land us there.⁶ Still, a vital first step involves acknowledging the way in which not-totally-bygone intellectual tools still shape present-day practice. Those painted, unseeing eyes into which we stare so deeply may not be looking back at us. But they are still with us, if we think they are.

READING LIKE THE DEAD

In short, Eliot’s image of lyres-turned-into-flutes gave me hope. Semi-detachment might offer a new way of hearing ancient lyres—if not hearing what they sounded like then, at least a sense of what they sound like now, across the years.⁷ It was in that frame of mind that I undertook Semi-Detached’s strangest piece of research: an experiment in reading like a teenager from the 1890s. For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to read like the dead. Not just to read dead authors—something a little bit creepier. People have gone out of their way to educate me on the fallacies involved: I know that recapturing the actual experiences of long-ago readers is no more plausible than visiting Mars or traveling in time.

Still, when I learned about What Middletown Read, a database that tracks the borrowing records of the Muncie, Indiana Public Library between 1891 and 1902, I had some of the same feelings physicists probably have when new subatomic particles show up in their cloud chambers.⁸ Could you see how many times a particular book had been taken out? Could you find out when? And by whom? Yes, yes, and yes. We know, for example, that on Wednesday February 3, 1892, a factory worker’s son, Louis Bloom, ascended to the second floor of the Muncie City Building, turned left at the top of the stairs, entered the city library, signed the ledger kept by librarian Kate Wilson, and checked out The Wonders of Electricity. He came back the next day to return it and take out Frank Before Vicksburg; Friday it was Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick; Saturday The North Pole: And Charlie Wilson’s Adventures in Search of It. Sunday, the library was closed; Monday, February 8, 1892, (his 13th birthday) he took out James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. If library records are usually the night sky of cultural history, a dim backdrop to action elsewhere, Louis’s borrowing history is like a supernova.

This sudden access of information, tightly clustered but shining all the brighter for it, tempted me into a thought experiment. Could I make myself into a proxy reader, simply by recreating a single borrower’s history—make Louis’s experience somehow my own? I could not resist the fantasy of popping back into the past for a brief bibliographic séance—a kind of hermeneutics without suspicion. I gave myself a month to read as far as I could in the 291 books Louis Bloom had checked out over a decade. I would happily gather what external facts I could about Louis, but fundamentally his booklist would be my passport back in time.

The experiment’s limitations soon became apparent. As an effort to travel back in time, my Bloom month ended in failure: though it also put me in contact with Louis’s own charming grandchildren and—when I reported the results in Slate—with many small-town librarians. Though I dutifully read in natural light when I could and was delighted when a power failure in our neighborhood meant I had to read Elsie Dinsmore for hours by a camping lantern, there never came a moment that felt like time travelling. As I painstakingly checked to make sure that I’d gotten the same edition Louis would have been reading, I was aware of how distant my pedantic antiquarianism was from what his own teenage first encounters must have been. I was partially there with Louis in the Muncie library—but I was also a long way away. I was always gaining on Louis, but somehow I was never fast enough to fall into stride with him, to turn sideways and find myself looking him straight in the eye.

My Bloom month experiment taught me what Walter Benjamin’s dialectical historicism ought already to have made clear. The past’s lyres stayed silent. There is no wading the same river twice; no account of the past that does not account for the distance across which we regard it, and the instruments we rely upon for that regard. I had gathered and crunched some data and heard some stories, but the problem with aiming for antiquarianism is that you can never be quite antiquarian enough. Despite weeks of pleasant correspondence with his grandchildren, despite time spent with photographs and archival records and letters, by my experiment’s end Louis Bloom remained only a shadow, a dimly visible pair of shoulders, a motionless back of the head (with protruding ears) between me and Horatio Alger’s Ben the Luggage Boy, or Henry Mayhew’s The Story of the Peasant-Boy Philosopher.

Yet that problem was also the payoff. As an experiment in semi-detachment, some of my experiment’s failures ultimately struck me as successes in disguise. The gap between our own era and the past can be bridged, imperfectly, by artworks themselves to the extent that their aesthetic operations activate modern imaginations: if the notion of elbows that are frozen at once by being on the bridge at Dorlcote Mill and the arms of my armchair back home remains a redolent one, then Eliot’s still in the house.

To see my phase-shifted connection with Louis only as a failed antiquarian reconstruction of the subjective life of the mid-nineteenth century would be to disregard the very questions of regression and distance that Semi-Detached studies. In the books Louis checked out, he found, as readers everywhere always do, something other than a perfect mirror of his own life. Not even the most battle-hardened cultural historian will proclaim that what Middletown read equals what Middletown was. Like me, Louis found a way out of his actuality; caught a glimpse of his own future in the world of mechanics and of physics, far from Muncie. Thanks to those books, he too had a telescope. Like mine, it was small and imperfect, with no guarantees about the accuracy of what he glimpsed through it. To understand what Louis Bloom felt opening up a book in Muncie, I had to grasp not only the space between me and the past I thought I had found but also the gaps and glitches in his own life, the way that what Louis sought also eluded him or receded from him as he pursued it.

Ina Ferris has described the “apparitional poetics” by which Scott aims to make the past loom forward into the present in his historical narratives.9 By Ferris’s account, Scott earned the title “magician of the North” because of his ability to conjure up an apparent overflow of past into present. Not the past as it was, but as it is now, creeping up on us in our present actuality. Scott’s fiction presents itself as apparitional, collapsing the boundary between dream and reality so as to create a sense of doubled present reality.¹⁰

Semi-Detached offers a kind of “apparitional criticism.” A criticism that attends to the imperfections attendant on any kind of historical retrospection, that registers the inevitability of one’s understanding being shaped as much by the distance that is traveled as by what is glimpsed on arrival—a criticism that puts us in Louis Bloom’s shoes, but only in the moment that he is trying to step out of those shoes himself, heading somewhere else. Understanding oneself as partially present, partially distant, when facing the semi-remote, semi-obtrusive artwork thus becomes not just the story of a certain kind of semi-detachment in days gone by but also a story about how we ourselves hope to bring that past close enough to catch a wavering glimpse. What divides us from the past also connects us: semi-detachment all the way down.