Introduction: the production of Victorian culture and Victorian cultural studies.

Hall, Donald E.

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"

"Andrea del Sarto"

"Introduction"-writing can be a strange and strained endeavor. At their most mechanical and useless, introductions simply announce the topic of the collection or issue, give a bit of historical or theoretical context, and then devote a few lines or a paragraph to summing up each of the essays that follow it. I have written that type of introduction before, primarily because I thought that was expected, indeed required, of an editor. Of course, as a reader I have always thought otherwise, and whenever I see that an introduction is following that formula, I usually skim or skip it: I am a busy guy and do not have the time to linger in anticipation of the delights in which I am going to be lingering anyway.

Yet there is a different kind of introduction that one finds occasionally and that is well worth the time spent reading and writing. This is the introduction that "does something." It is a rare breed, and I can think of only a few that have had an enduring impact on me, among them Michael Warner's opening remarks to Fear of a Queer Planet and Henry Louis Gates' introductory words to Race, Writing, and Difference. I am certainly not going to predict that the present introduction will achieve the degree of originality, incisiveness, and timeliness that Warner and Gates achieved, but it will not fail for lack of effort. In fact, this introduction focuses on the need for such efforts, and why we, as editors, writers, readers, and teachers, must resist vigorously and forthrightly the banality of mechanical (re)production.

As all well-read Victorianists know, this is a topic highly suitable for a journal devoted to studies in nineteenth-century prose. We still have much to learn from writers who are often regarded from the safe distance of a century or more, who are packaged in anthologies and processed through our critical reading and writing machines. Many examples come to mind (I often quote Carlyle to tardy contributors and sluggish colleagues), but my particular concern in the following pages is the applicability to the production of literary and cultural critique today of some of the most incisive Victorian commentary on production: that of John Ruskin.

In his chapter on the "Nature of Gothic" from The Stones of Venice, Ruskin decries certain qualities of the "modern English mind" that I would suggest too often characterize the modern American critical mind as well. Contrasting the Greek love of perfection with the medieval love of invention, he defies the common wisdom of 1853 (and, indeed, that of our own day) by pointing out the relative "servility" of the Greek school of architectural design when judged against the more inventive mindset of the "Christian ... system of ornament"; he notes, "to every spirit which Christianity summons to her service, her exhortation is: Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession silenced for fear of shame" (367). In Christianity's love of individualism and personal striving (often betrayed, of course, by its own institutions and in its varying interpretations) Ruskin isolates both a principle to celebrate and a challenge to update, refine, and reissue. With further updating and some recasting, it is one that I am reissuing here. In particular, I wish to linger over the implications for educators, editors, readers, and writers today of the following Ruskinian exhortation:

 Always look for invention first, and after that, for such execution
 as will help the invention, and as the inventor is capable of
 without painful effort, and no more. Above all, demand no
 refinement of execution where there is no thought, for that is
 slaves' work, unredeemed. Rather choose rough work than smooth
 work, so only that the practical purpose be answered, and never
 imagine there is reason to be proud of anything that may be
 accomplished by patience and sand-paper. (373)

Of course in taking these words and applying them to the production of literary and cultural criticism, rather than medieval architecture or Victorian jewelry, I am clearly opening myself up to a charge of roughness (as well as anachronism and disciplinary nonspecificity). So be it; making the analogy smooth and perfect is something that, frankly, I cannot do. But you should know that my effort here will not be shortened by fear of failure, and (to complete my confession) I am out of both patience and sand-paper anyway.

Somewhat roughly put, my point is simply that American literary and cultural critics (and editors and educators) love glass beads. We love producing glass beads, we love looking at and fingering glass beads made by others, and we too often react with disgust and alarm when we come upon a bead that has a slight flaw or less-than-uniform finish. If you know your Ruskin, you know whereof I speak:

 Glass beads are utterly unnecessary, and there is no design or
 thought employed in their manufacture. They are formed by first
 drawing out the glass into rods; these rods are chopped up into
 fragments of the size of beads by the human hand, and the fragments
 are then rounded in the furnace. The men who chop up the rods sit
 at their work all day, their hands vibrating with a perpetual and
 exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their
 vibration like hail. Neither they, nor the men who draw out the
 rods or fuse the fragments, have the smallest occasion for the use
 of any single human faculty. (372)

Our academic equivalent of the glass bead is the banal critical articulation, which as Meaghan Morris has explored in an incisive essay on the subject, operates as a finely finished "commodity" in the micro-economy of our profession (149). Like Ruskin's glass beads, banal criticism is thoroughly mechanical, with a smooth and shiny veneer achieved through the polishing away of any traces of the idiosyncratic and individualistic. Now admittedly, the production of even the most banal criticism allows for the use of "human faculties" in a way that actual bead production does not; however (to smooth out my argument somewhat), the "mechanical" finally supplants the "human" in the process and product of banal criticism. Ruskin challenged his contemporaries--and challenges us--to adopt a different set of priorities: "Grammar and refinement are good things, both, only be sure of the better thing first." And that better thing is "invention" (373).

We in literary and cultural studies have been taught and continue to teach our students to think otherwise: "Invention is fine, but perfect finish is primary." And for proof I suggest that you scan the pages of edited collections, of monographs, and of journals, where you will find the end result: well-expressed but banal critical works, perfectly finished arguments that pose little challenge to our understandings of ourselves, the world around us, or even the text at hand. These are glass beads cut from a rod that stretches through every English and humanities department across the country. We all know the production process: take a text, rehearse previous criticism, apply an approved methodology, and generate a reading that adds incrementally to the wisdom stored on library shelves. An inculcation and replication of this process is, for all practical purposes, the substance of most graduate education in English today. And while the banalities that Morris finally points to are somewhat different from those which presently characterize Victorian studies (her specific target is Australian studies in popular culture), the losses through standardization are the same: the energetically self-critical, the polemical, the multi-perspectival, the brashly inventive. Queer theory, when it was still a theory, promised to overturn that servile mentality of production; queer criticism is, for the most part, simply interested in producing more glass beads.

Meaghan Morris and John Ruskin: an odd pairing, is it not? The linkage is especially disconcerting because in the same era--the medieval--where Ruskin finds striking innovation, Morris finds exemplary instances of the "banal":

 In medieval times, it ["banal"] could mean two things beside
 "commonplace." It could mean, to issue an edict or a summons
 (usually to war). That was the enunciative privilege of the feudal
 lord. Or it could mean to proclaim under orders: to line the
 streets, and cheer, in the manner required.... To obediently
 perform a rhythmic applause is the "banal" enunciative duty of the
 common people. (165)

But as divergent as Ruskin's and Morris' perspectives on the medieval era appear to be, they actually converge in prodding us to enunciate precisely how we define our role as literary and cultural critics today: is it closer to that of the medieval artisan or that of a member of a medieval crowd? While in many ways we are quite different from both, the difference between making invention or conformity our top priority is clear and crucial. And for those of us choosing "conformity" (either expressly or tacitly) Morris asks yet another question, Whose production edicts are we following anyway? Who orders us to enunciate in such banal fashion? With no feudal ruler in sight, are we, perhaps, demanding banality of ourselves, playing both medieval lord and crowd in a disturbing (though certainly common) dynamic of self-restriction and homogenization?

In their different ways and separated in time by well over a century, both Morris and Ruskin urge us to reclaim invention and individualism as our top priorities, to resist banal truths and the values of the crowd. To this end, Ruskin challenges the most basic assumptions of his contemporaries:

 Our modern glass is exquisitely clear in its substance, true in its
 form, accurate in its cutting. We are proud of this. We ought to be
 ashamed of it. The old Venice glass was muddy, inaccurate in all
 its forms, and clumsily cut, if at all. And the old Venetian was
 justly proud of it. For there is this difference between the
 English and Venetian workman, that the former thinks only of
 accurately matching his patterns, and getting his curves perfectly
 true and his edges perfectly sharp, and becomes a mere machine for
 rounding curves and sharpening edges, while the old Venetian cared
 not a whit whether his edges were sharp or not, but he invented a
 new design for every glass he made, and never moulded a handle or a
 lip without a new fancy to it. And therefore, though some Venetian
 glass is ugly and clumsy enough, when made by clumsy and
 uninventive workmen, other Venetian glass is so lovely in its forms
 that no price is too great for it; and we never see the same form
 in it twice. Now you cannot have the finish and the varied form
 too. If the workman is thinking about his edges, he cannot be
 thinking of his design; if of his design, he cannot think of his
 edges. Choose whether you will pay for the lovely form or the
 perfect finish, and choose at the same moment whether you will make
 the worker a man or a grindstone. (373-374)

I hope you read that paragraph with the mental substitution of "criticism" for "glass," and "critic" for "workman" in every sentence. And while you may leave "modern" unchanged in your reading (simply replacing "English" with "American") you must, of course, substitute something for "old Venice" and "Venetian." But rather than providing a perfectly appropriate substitution, I suggest that you choose one reflecting your own tastes. Who comes to mind when you think of past producers of gutsy, individualistic, and inventive criticism of culture and its many forms? Perhaps Ruskin and Pater? The New Critics? Kate Millett and Elaine Showalter? Barthes and Foucault?

Where, today, are our young Ruskins, our Milletts, our Foucaults? Are we training any, or are we, perhaps, doing the opposite, training the "inventive" out of our students and young academics? Are we welcoming them into a crowd or teaching them how to resist the seduction of the crowd? The answer is apparent all around us. I am certainly not going to name here those whom I consider "bead"-producers in the field of Victorian studies; not only would that be uncollegial it would be beside the point, for the real issue here is that of a broad value system. Even our best and brightest young scholars are, in my opinion, constrained by the current norms of American academic production. I challenge you to name a single book published by a young scholar in the field of Victorian studies in the past decade that actively interrogates or even stretches slightly the production formula mentioned above. And, of course, one cannot place blame on those writers as individuals, for beads are what graduate instructors, editors, readers, and reviewers expect and value from our domestic producers, even as many of us also purchase and pore over far less standardized cultural critique from abroad--by Irigaray, Foucault, and Derrida--inventive work often produced when those writers were of the same age as our own young critics and theorists.

In effect we have multiple and conflicting standards at work. Of course, some will argue that applied literary criticism must follow very different rules from those governing the work of theoreticians such as Derrida and Foucault. I happen to disagree, but even if I were to grant the point, I would still ask, where then are our brash new theoreticians and speculators in the field of Victorian cultural studies? We are not producing any, and neither is any other "discipline." We collect, appreciate, and use "Venetian glass" (in this case French theory and criticism) while we fully support the domestic production of glass beads in our own departments, journals, and classrooms. Oh yes, our hypocrisy can run deep; after all, we do not read or even remember the Victorian writers of banal cultural criticism, we read the iconoclasts and polemicists. Andrea del Sarto's wistful words quoted at the top of this introduction should not serve only as sterile matter for multiple-choice examinations. Do we train, hire, publish, and reward innovators--or sycophants? Are we (who edit, teach, and mentor young academics) producing a new generation of Victorianists who will, in their turn, produce an endless supply of glass beads or an exciting variety of works in Venetian glass?

While "innovation" and "finish" are hardly incompatible in literary and cultural criticism (my analogy is admittedly rough in this respect), an excessive emphasis on the latter at the expense of the former has numerous consequences, both internally and externally, and for both new and seasoned academics, that bear honest consideration. A disciplinary regime demanding a "perfect finish," fully internalized and incorporated into one's professional selfhood, grinds one down as relentlessly as assembly-line work, killing joy, and rendering silent and sullen too many members of our field and the larger profession. Part of my musings here on the "production of Victorian cultural studies" should mention the production of the present issue, which grew out of a conference at my home institution on interdisciplinary approaches to Victorian culture, but which was then opened up to submissions on the topic at hand from scholars who did not participate in the conference. As has been the case with other projects that I have overseen, the most reliable and interesting work has come from a few graduate students and others who (for a variety of personal and professional reasons) have not been afraid of taking chances. They are among the very few who are struggling to withstand, even stand up to, the graduate school machine. The least reliable "producers," on the other hand, are actually academics in their thirties and forties with a book or two under their belt, who have become terrified of producing a less-than-perfect glass bead. Several well-known, well-employed, and certainly well-intentioned scholars committed to the project but then failed to submit their essays because they did not feel that the "perfect finish" was there, even though their ideas were exciting and, though roughly expressed, compelling interventions into ongoing conversations. Isolated incidents? Unfortunately, no. In the course of completing another project, I am conducting a series of interviews and arranging dialogues on a host of professional controversies. One young, newly tenured scholar whom I had hoped would participate in a dialogue (which I planned to tape and transcribe) finally refused, saying that while he knew that he could always sound "polished" in his writing, he was afraid that his words and ideas would appear less than perfect in a transcribed conversation. Such an exaggerated emphasis on a "perfect finish" is far from productive; in fact, it is the opposite: paralyzing. Too many of us are so afraid of sounding "rough" rather than "smooth" that we will simply sit in silence; indeed, some fall silent forever, never producing a second book or articulating an oppositional stance. I say we have it backwards. Silence and perfect banality are shameful; imperfect but ambitious expression is something to be proud of. Much of our modern criticism is exquisitely clear in its substance, true in its form, accurate in its cutting. We are proud of this. We ought to be ashamed of it. If we could see "roughness" as a sign of growth, innovation, and human attachment to otherwise inanimate material, and therefore value it highly, we academics would be far less tortured individuals.

But if the internal consequences of servility are painful, the external ones are dire. Glass beads are pretty and pleasing for a moment, but are wholly irrelevant in the long run. Muddy and rough Venetian glass may be disconcerting on first appearance to those who demand perfection, but it endures as important and impressive. Consider some of the writers who in past years changed dramatically our understanding of the Victorian era: Sandra Gilbert, Raymond Williams, Elaine Showalter, J. Hillis Miller. They were not (and in some cases still are not) afraid of making gutsy and sometimes "rough" interpretive leaps, even though such leaps generated (and continue to generate) controversy. But none fell silent for fear of producing a less-than-perfect glass bead. Perhaps our gutsiest Victorianist today, James Kincaid, still speaks out passionately and sometimes roughly, but always importantly and in ways that challenge our preconceived notions: "Mother said, and I do not forget, that I should never, no matter how bad the times, let myself be dragged down to playing by the rules" (3). No glass beads there, either. But who will replace these senior colleagues? Look at our journals, our conferences, and the catalogs of our book publishers: we are drowning in a sea of glass beads.

And therefore I return again to our own roles and responsibilities as producers and reproducers of Victorian cultural studies. I want to modify here slightly Judith Butler's notion of the "performative," which as her argument and focus demands, points directly at the actions and reactions of the physical body. In terming my own concern as one with "production," I wish to emphasize the work that we do, the talks we give, the books and essays that we publish, all performed, to be sure, but that also lead to "products" that endure in tangible ways that everyday performances do not. And this, again, accounts for much of our fear of appearing less than perfect through those products, for they will be around to taunt and haunt us for the rest of our careers. But there are many different ways that we can play with the words "product" and "production." If we truly consider ourselves the creators of commodities, such as hamburgers and cola drinks, ones that must meet the imagined needs of the largest number of consumers, then inevitably we will be driven by our estimation of a lowest common denominator. Glass beads certainly will offend far fewer people than muddy Venetian glass. But if we see ourselves as working in "product development" rather than assembly-line production, and our writing as part of ongoing processes of thought, experimentation, and innovation, then we will also recognize that our "products" are never finished and final, but are instead put forth to spur further production. Glass beads will elicit rhythmic applause, while muddy Venetian glass will sometimes produce, in turn, both anger and contempt. But which of these is most "productive," at the very least of another round of response and a continuing dialogue? We should delight even in highly critical reviews of our work, for they too often demonstrate and can help propel invention (I was particularly struck by one reviewer's charge that my modestly revisionary Fixing Patriarchy is "unrelentingly peevish" [Galperin 909]--as you may have noticed, I am working to build here on that solid foundation). But what I find far from delightful is that gutsy work too often goes unpublished because it is not glass-bead-like. Silence is terrifying, especially when it is broken only by the sound of another bead hitting the floor.

In calling attention to the "production" of Victorian cultural studies, I wish thereby to reiterate our own agency in what we write, read, and value: "every young lady ... who buys glass beads is engaged in the slave-trade" just as "[e]very person who wears cut jewels merely for the sake of their value is ... a slave-driver" (372). As producers and reproducers of a discipline, we act in ways that can perpetuate or change it dramatically. Every reader's report we fill out, every book review we write, every job search we participate in, and every tenure and promotion committee we contribute to, is an opportunity to do something different, if we so desire and are brave enough to do so. We perform in a daily fashion a myriad of professional activities that make up the intangible entity that is our "discipline." This makes it at once both easy and enormously difficult to change that discipline, for every day presents an available opportunity, and every repetitive action, unreflected upon, disciplines us even further as members of a crowd.

But what, you might ask, would breaking from (or, better yet, dispersing) the crowd entail? What are the qualities of that muddy Venetian glass, or of Ruskin's own writing, as they might manifest themselves in Victorian literary and cultural criticism today? First and foremost, we must recognize that critical writing does not have to be mechanical writing: form and manner of presentation do not require bead-like uniformity (even if Ruskin, himself, becomes a little bead-like in his presentation, as my students often note). We ought to be ashamed, not proud, of the fact that most critical essays today sound and look alike. Second, gutsy interpretive moves, ones that suggest innovative links among disciplines and genres, that point to new, usefully different, understandings of Victorian and post-Victorian mindsets, and that challenge and abrade formulas and paradigms, should be valued highly. If it is inventive and compelling, if it provokes us into clarifying why we believe what we believe, then such work succeeds admirably, even if it engenders equally or finally more compelling counter-arguments. Third, the Victorians and their writings are most important and interesting for what they have to tell us about the ways we continue to live our lives today. Thus, criticism that moves from past to present (as Ruskin's did) should be valued most highly of all. As the finest Victorian writers well knew, our primary responsibility is to understand and improve the world that we live in and that is to come. Ruskin and Browning (and Eliot and Dickens) can help us do so. And finally, like those good Christians of which Ruskin speaks, we can love and embrace our own human imperfection and that of others, rather than cloak it in a rhetoric of unassailable authority and deride it when perceived in our colleagues. We exist in and perpetuate a culture of scorn and sneering condescension, both in American society as a whole and in the particularly unhealthy subset of it that we academics inhabit. We can be peevish toward the crowd without being mean-spirited toward our colleagues. What we value in our beloved Victorian and twentieth-century producers of Venetian glass we can also value in and among ourselves. Certainly this does not mean a disregard for proof, cogency, or effective expression, all of which we find even in the gutsiest and most iconoclastic writers whom we read and teach. All that is required is that we look for invention first, and after that, for such execution as will help the invention.

And this brings us, at last, to the issue at hand, that is, the special issue of the journal before you. I will offer a very few words here about its organization and contents, and then leave you to your reading of it. I asked all of my contributors as they were working through drafts of their essays to consider the manifold ways that Victorian culture, indeed cultures, were actively produced and reproduced, through words and images in a variety of media. They find in their chosen texts sites of active cultural contestation among interests, ideologies, and definitions of "self" and "other." Yet as diverse as their topics are, their essays are linked in a common critique of "process," that by which the Victorian era attempted to solidify its own sense of common culture and that by which we continue to produce the Victorian cultural "objects" of our critical scrutiny.

The issue opens with Peter Sinnema's "Mourning and Merchandising," which examines the spectacle of Lord Wellington's London funeral in 1852 and discovers there processes of cultural solidification and redirection that allow a rich historical perspective on the sensational media response to the death of Princess Diana almost a century and a half later. The London cityscape also provides a rich and complex text for the second essay in the issue, "Building the Vanished City," by Andrea Zemgulys, in which the critic traces the definitional processes by which buildings become "landmarks" for some and "eyesores" for others, and how a variety of economic and cultural interests are served through attempts to alter perception.

The third and fourth essays of the issue scrutinize similar intersections between visual texts and the print texts that work to define and monitor proper perception. Julianne Smith's "A Noble Type of Good Heroic Womanhood" traces the process by which Florence Nightingale was enshrined as cultural icon, examining painterly image, imagery-filled texts, and a variety of direct and indirect interpretive guides. Thomas Albrecht's "Aesthetic and Rhetoric in Swinburne's Aesthetic Criticism" delves into the micro-workings of the same process, that by which the visual is represented in the rhetorical, and probes just how uneasy the relationship between the two genres remains for the interpreter of culture.

The final two essays of the issue turn their full attention to print texts and the cultural ideologies encoded and interrogated there. Laura Fasick's "Authorial Angels" examines Thackeray's reinterpretation of Victorian gender norms and authorial roles as he struggled to define the manifold social and cultural responsibilities of the writer. Finally, my own essay, "Body Fluid Desire," (which went through a blind review before appearing in this issue--no muddying of that process, I assure you) complicates our continuing oversimplification of Victorian masculinity, arguing that in the pages of Victorian pornography one finds ample evidence of behaviors and beliefs that the term "phallic" does not adequately describe.

The six essays included in this special issue prod us to reflect upon our own roles as producers of a discipline and a larger cultural realm. And for such prodding and for their highly productive attitudes and efforts, I would like to offer my sincere thanks to all of my contributors, to the editor-in-chief of Nineteenth-Century Prose, Barry Tharaud, to the new voices in Victorian studies that will reinvigorate our field, particularly the membership of VISAWUS (the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States) and, finally, to the patient and persistent readers who have made it to the end of this rough introduction.

California State University, Northridge

Works Cited

Browning, Robert. "Andrea del Sarto." 1855. Victorian Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. 245-248.

Galperin, William. "Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century." SEL 37.4 (Autumn 1997): 877-964.

Kincaid, James R. Annoying the Victorians. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Morris, Meaghan. "Banality in Cultural Studies." What is Cultural Studies? A Reader. Ed. John Storey. New York: Arnold, 1996. 147-167.

Ruskin, John. From The Stones of Venice. 1853. Prose of the Victorian Period. Ed. William E. Buckler. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. 361-392.