Slantwise Moves. Douglas A. Guerra

claims about the significance of gaming rhetoric in creating models of “economic rationality” in the early age of stock market speculation;⁵³ while Michael Oriard’s expansive study, Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture, traces the use of the word “game” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that the language of gaming metaphors in U.S. literature “reveals human thought processes and cultural values … [and] creates the perceived reality.”⁵⁴ Moving beyond these suggestive rhetorical ambivalences, I focus instead on the function and cross-pollination of specific structures within the available game commodities of the time, enlisting canonical literary luminaries to show that their central position (with regard to acclaim and pedagogy) might be better employed through the different modes of critical attention that are invited by coincident period games. For example, a reading of William Simonds’s Peter Coddle’s Trip to New York (the Gould & Lincoln precursor to Mad Libs mentioned previously) adds nuance to Herman Melville’s notoriously fragmentary dialogue in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). Like Melville’s characters, Peter Coddle falls victim to a savvy operator, drawn in by his desire for objects written on a set of cards that are selected by players as the game progresses: “a stick of candy,” “a mint of gold,” or perhaps even “a stack of fat lobsters.” Nested within a larger youth novel entitled Jessie; or, Trying to Be Somebody (1858), Simonds’s textual game makes an operative argument about the increasingly instrumental perspective on becoming “somebody” demonstrated in nineteenth-century reform literature; Coddle’s identity is literally structured as a set of social input events bounded by a regulated but undefined grammar. Understanding this facilitates a reassessment of the similarly fragmentary speech of undefined passengers aboard the steamboat Fidèle in Melville’s The Confidence-Man, who construct their own identities as if they were a kind of fill-in-the-blanks game, valuing a comfortably mechanical consistency over impromptu character making. A surrogate for the lost agency of these passengers, the Confidence-Man himself begins to seem more hero than villain in Melville’s narrative because he represents an aesthetic of limited invention and tactical play that is materialized and humorously reinforced in Simonds’s game.

Figure 3. Game back. The Checkered Game of Life. Springfield: Milton Bradley & Co., ca. 1865. Courtesy of Missouri History Museum, St. Louis.

      My precedents in this approach are interdisciplinary scholars working with digital games—some coming from a framework of textual studies and book history, such as Matthew Kirschenbaum, Johanna Drucker, and Steven E. Jones, and some from within new media studies, such as Ian Bogost, Jesper Juul, and Espen Aarseth. The insights of this recent work have not been fully applied to game forms that predate the twentieth century, although there is much to be gained from such an encounter. Engaging with what Kirschenbaum highlights as formal and forensic materialities, nineteenth-century games like bagatelle, croquet, and even The Checkered Game of Life developed strategic habits of mind in players that were explicitly coincident with bodily habits of seeing, moving, and touching.⁵⁵ Hence, the USPTO’s inclusion of dumbbells and exercising devices amid playing cards, dice, and puzzles. Here the materiality of gameplay mattered in a way that is only recently being reclaimed by critics of both games and books. And because these forms existed within a shared media ecology, they both reflected and refracted the same cultural imaginary in different though comparatively interesting ways: if games carried the expectation of physical or dispositional exercise, then we are inclined to ask how books may have facilitated or enacted formally continuous modes of engagement. As New Media theorist Lisa Gitelman observes of media technologies in the late nineteenth century, “different media and varied forms, genres, and styles of representation act as brokers among accultured practices of seeing, hearing, speaking, and writing.”⁵⁶ To understand literary history within the scope of the procedural and ludic practices materially modeled by games is to better comprehend the practices being “broker[ed]” by authors working in this historical moment.

      Beginning by thinking through the manner in which object displacements of “interior” character rearticulated the grounds of social legibility in the mid-nineteenth century, my first chapter, “Both In and Out of the Game: Reform Games and Avatar Selves,” tracks the interface of decision and thing in Milton Bradley’s The Checkered Game of Life (1860) and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855). A fusion of somatic and cognitive training created to aid in the “exercise of judgment,” Bradley’s career-making board game combined the tactile socialization of previous board games with a mechanic of timing and decision that was substantially novel for its time. This shift in emphasis rendered the player’s marker what we would today call an “avatar,” an interactive social representation of users defined by their actions in a shared virtual and often strategically liminal world. By disrupting the genre expectations of lyric that typically frame discussion of Whitman’s poetry, I allow Bradley’s game to inflect a renewed reading of “Song of Myself”—a poem both formally and thematically concerned with judgment, decision, and touch. In this mode, Whitman’s voracious “I” becomes an avatar-like position within a medially sensitive algorithmic piece of writing, with flurries of inclusive “or”s foregrounding a self that chooses among complex, but limited, collections of subject positions that are inscribed upon and indebted to the tactile dislocations of the book’s various “leaves.”

      Chapter 2, “A Fresh and Liberal Construction: State Machines, Transformation Games, and Algorithms of the Interior,” continues to examine the constitutive relationship between agency, objecthood, and association. Popular but largely outside of critical view, William Simonds’s sixth youth-oriented novel, Jessie; or, Trying to Be Somebody, takes a puzzling turn midway through the tale when one of its protagonists introduces a “Game of Transformations” called Peter Coddle’s Trip to New York. A forerunner of twentieth-century word substitution games, Simonds’s story makes Coddle the victim of a New York operator who seduces the rural mark with promises of fabulous luxuries that are filled in by the game players via preprinted cards. As a result, Coddle’s active identity is a function both of formal consistencies (the text surrounding the interactive gaps) and of contingent textual variables input by readers—without material social interaction, Coddle remains structured but undefined. Published a year earlier, Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade portrays the passengers of the steamboat Fidèle as similarly undefined, giving them notoriously fragmentary dialogue that has often confounded critics: “Believe me, I—yes, yes—I may say—that—that—,” “Upon my word, I—I,” and “I conjecture him to be what, among the ancient Egyptians, was called a —.”⁵⁷ Through these stylistic gaps, Melville imagines public identity, within the demands of reformist institutionalism, as an instrumentalization of one’s social self, a singular reading and affirmation of identity in a proscriptively static interpretative mode. In this mode, which Melville lambasts through his much commented on metanarrative asides, bodily feelings of anxiety linked to chaotic and competitive interiorities were regulated by performing the self as a consistent decision algorithm, a state machine like Simonds’s fill-in-the-blank story. Melville’s marks cede their capacity for agency to the Confidence-Man, who reaffirms their desired identity—defining their structured incompleteness for a price they are all too willing to pay. In his triumph, the Confidence-Man represents the importance of “playerliness,” a term I ascribe to the ability to read broadly across layers of medial address (operational, affective, and more traditionally textual). The playerliness of the novel’s fourth-wall-breaking narrator, as well as its “Mississippi operator,” stages a critical supplement to the enactments of state and consistency that dominated U.S. reform discourse and documentation in the mid-nineteenth century. As institutionalism sought to flatten time in a manner that would ensure a consistent future, both The Confidence-Man and Peter Coddle reconfigure focus onto the differential and associative moments when character could be invented anew. Yet though Simonds was somewhat freer to invite the interplay of tone, scene, and textual object as a consequence of generic fluidity in games, the failure of Melville’s novel may reflect a reading public less willing to accept the alternative notions of literary protocol