Abstract
This chapter leaps forward in time to Marcel Proust’s contentious claim, in response to John Ruskin, that books cannot stand in as a form of friendship. Passages from Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies lectures and Proust’s On Reading (published as a preface to Ruskin’s work) prompt final reflections on the distinctive ways that eighteenth-century authors equate textual communication with friendship ideals. I outline how the study of this “Enlightenment” trope might contribute to conversations about twenty-first-century mediations of friendship in fan cultures and simulated relationships.
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Notes
- 1.
John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, ed. Deborah Epstein Nord (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 30–31.
- 2.
Marcel Proust, On Reading, trans. Jean Autret and William Burford (New York: Macmillan Company, 1971), 31.
- 3.
Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 32.
- 4.
For a rare attempt to put the terms of contemporary fan culture in dialogue with eighteenth-century reading practices, see Judge, “Kidnapped and Counterfeit Characters,” 22–68. While fandom seems an obvious evolution of early modern and modern reading and audience practices, the anachronistic application of the term fan can lead to the neglect or marginalization of the period’s own loaded terms (such as friendship) that eighteenth-century readers used themselves. Moreover, fandom critics often point to the historical correlation between a phase of modernity and the emergence of the fan identity. See for instance Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (New York and London: New York University Press, 2007). In the Introduction to that volume, the editors describe a “deep-seared symbiosis between the cultural practice and perspective of being a fan and industrial modernity at large” (9). They write: “perhaps the most important contribution of contemporary research into fan audiences thus lies in furthering our understanding of how we form emotional bonds with ourselves and others in a modern mediated world” (10). Yet, in the volume’s Afterword, Henry Jenkins also notes that critics should “deal with fandom as a set of historically specific practices and cultural logics that have shifted profoundly over the past decade, let alone in the course of the past several centuries” (364). Ultimately, I prefer broader categories such as reception studies or media studies, which offer a rubric for placing the concepts of friendship and fandom within a genealogy of audience practices, thereby allowing us to recognize the striking parallels that Judge discusses, while still avoiding the temptation to make fandom a trans-historical category. Many terms tied to Internet reading and writing practices in the discourse of fan studies have discernible antecedents in eighteenth-century reading practices. See, for instance, the glossary terms “textual poaching” and “narrative activism” in Mark Duffet, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
- 5.
Translating the print conflation of solitude and intimate communion to the digital age, the bookstore Barnes and Noble introduced its digital reading device, the Nook, with the humanizing accessory, a durable book jacket inscribed with this maxim attributed to Sir Christopher Wren.
- 6.
Booth, The Company We Keep, 196. Similarly, Derrida remarks that “friendship should always be poetic. Before being philosophical, friendship concerns the gift of the poem” (Politics of Friendship, 166). While Derrida scrutinizes what we would mean by friendship and gift, these terms are very close to Wayne Booth’s description of the novel Tom Jones as a ‘gift from a friend.’ Other readers, including Adam Zachary Newton and James Phelan, have questioned this ethical vocabulary. See Newton’s Narrative Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) and Phelan’s Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Newton’s critique arises out of his preference for the paradigm of Levinasian otherness. But I would suggest that the cultural significance of friendship in the eighteenth century, as a discourse that forges a dialogue of the secular and sacred, the self and the other, provides historical texture for the exploration of alternative ethical paradigms, including the one offered by Levinas. Phelan, by contrast, finds any predetermined framework too limiting and prefers to let the individual text set the terms of its reflexivity. I find this sensible and not opposed to the way I have tried to ground my readings in the terms set by individual novelists. Tracing the origins and legacy of this historical phenomenon through literary history would offer a more qualified and inductive way of reconciling Phelan’s and Booth’s approaches to ethical criticism.
- 7.
Deidre Shauna Lynch, Loving Literature: A Cultural History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 22. While I take up the rhetoric of eighteenth-century fiction as part of this larger history that Lynch defines, I see friendship as the predominant though not all-encompassing affective framework that authors draw upon consistently. In Loving Literature, Lynch explores a broader range of affective terms that help to “personalize” literature. Despite the title of Part 1 (“Choosing an author as you choose a friend”), only in passing does Lynch note the Aristotelian view of friendship, and this stands as the book’s only engagement with a specific philosophical or cultural friendship ideal.
- 8.
For one concerned and one optimistic view of the way digital simulations and mediations will affect human relationships in the twenty-first century, see Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). Turkle strives to take a nuanced view of technology, cautioning against its threat to human relationships while not embracing an extremely technophobic position. Yet, the human concepts she wishes to preserve, such as “solitude, deliberateness, and living fully in the moment” are not themselves adequately subjected to critical or historical inquiry (296). Schmidt and Cohen try to qualify their optimism about the expansion of “connectivity,” but their epistemology falls into a positivistic view of human connectivity as a necessarily liberating exchange of information. As they write, “Attempts to contain the spread of connectivity or curtail people’s access will always fail over a long enough period of time—information, like water, will always find a way through” (254). At the same time, they credit humanity with conventional virtues that exceed this paradigm: “We will use human intelligence for judgment, intuition, nuance and uniquely human interactions” (255, my italics). In both cases, exactly what constitutes “uniquely human” interactions remains an underdeveloped yet foundational idea, driving both pessimism and optimism about future mediations of human or post-human ties.
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Mangano, B. (2017). Epilogue. In: Fictions of Friendship in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48695-6_8
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