Slantwise Moves. Douglas A. Guerra

and a mechanical aesthetic of invention is made explicit in my third chapter, “The Power to Promote: Configuration Culture in the Age of Barnum,” which situates the success of P. T. Barnum within a framework of advancements in U.S. patent law that reinforced a growing configurative focus in society at large. By keeping the cost of patenting significantly lower than in Europe and by creating managed public archives of existing inventions like the USPTO, the Patent Act of 1836 contributed to a wider culture of exhibition in the United States and encouraged middle-class inventors to make their names by reconfiguring preexisting materials. Aligning this development with the emergence and persistence of a seven-piece configuration puzzle popularly known as “The Chinese Puzzle” or tangram, I explore Barnum’s use of physical, oral, and documentary paratextual arrangement—supporting materials he dubs “outside show”—as a variety of inventive associational puzzle play. The obsessive configurational intimacies of “The Chinese Puzzle,” which prompted international outcry over “puzzle madness” in the early nineteenth century, offer a way to read Barnum that is sensitive to the thresholds of agency limned by the association of bodies and things. Seeing this through, I pause on the troubling case of Joice Heth, the elderly African American woman who arguably made Barnum’s career as a promoter. If outside cues were a crucial element of invention and playful communication, Heth’s exhibition—first as George Washington’s improbably ancient nurse, then as an impossibly sophisticated automaton—demonstrates the sinister range in which these practices could be used to naturalize dehumanizing attitudes toward nonwhite, nonnormative bodies. At the same time, I explore evidence of audience mediations that may have gone beyond the intended studium of Barnum’s carefully designed stage pictures to produce a puzzling performative punctum, transformatively challenging viewers to play a different game. Haunting the “tact” of Barnum’s career, Heth’s airy and tonal control of atmosphere seeps into his success at the American Museum, where he places focus on murky contexts of enactment and on the reciprocal and embedded interface of spectator and exhibit, rather than simply on the subject-object relationship between viewer and artifact.

      Expanding on the thematics of scope and focal control introduced via “outside show” in Barnum’s career, Chapter 4, “Social Cues and Outside Pockets: Billiards, Blithedale, and Targeted Potential,” investigates an unlikely pairing: the high literary genre of Romance and the low hustle of the billiards hall. An Irish immigrant with a knack for the pool cue and an ambitious take on the value of his beloved game, Michael Phelan made his name patenting modifications to billiards tables and codifying American slants on both strategy and rules in his immensely popular Billiards without a Master (1850). Throughout this otherwise functional and geometrically inclined manual, Phelan fixates on the ways in which proper targeting—particularly in the iterative and improvisational mode of “nursing” the table—can be used to “cue” behavioral change outside of the game through shifts in “disposition,” imagination, and mood. Though developed around the table, a set of visual habits and their reversals bleed into associated spaces: the city, the tavern, and the home. I use Phelan’s explorations of the interface between eyes, cues, and social bodies to take a different approach to the work of “Romance” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Brook Farm reverie, The Blithedale Romance (1852). In a narrative framed by scenes of nursing, Miles Coverdale’s ostentatious visual targeting and iterative rearrangements of view enact a logic of scopic manipulation that is central to Hawthorne’s genre intervention. Stories within stories, fixations on point of view, and figures of “reticules” (small netted purses, but also gun targets) permeate a novel that is fronted by a character with a deep attachment to his evenings “at the billiard-hall.” By investigating the shared territory of utopic operation in both Hawthorne and Phelan, I consider “Romance” not merely as a genre defined by tropes of atmospheric marvelousness, but also as a way of thinking about relationality and reframing as ways of affecting social change in directedly indirect ways, a kind of motivated vicariousness native to both billiard playing and reading.

      In my closing chapter, “The Net Work of Not Work,” such “reframing” itself becomes the major topic of focus, as I double back to Milton Bradley to analyze his post–Civil War fascination with thinking across thresholds and training habits of scalar or scopic thinking. In a bizarre follow-up to the kinetic judgments of The Checkered Game of Life, Bradley’s Game of Bamboozle, Or the Enchanted Isle (1872) produces a Gordian knot of visually arresting entanglements that force its players into a series of waiting games and paratactic associations. Advertised as having “no instructional value whatsoever,” Bamboozle demonstrates Bradley looking in two directions at once: at a future of games sold by virtue of their graphic effusiveness and a past of games as places of “simple” bodily proximity and storytelling. In the first case, the full-color depth of Bamboozle’s board speaks to developments in lithographic technology that were allowing competitors like the artistically savvy McLoughlin Brothers to encroach on Bradley’s business by producing beautiful but operationally unoriginal board games. With a board that represented the most colorful effort in chromolithography by Bradley to date and rules as difficult to pin down as the sperm whales and sea creatures gracing the edges of the playfield, his long-selling amusement was a tangle of race-style games folded in on themselves that may have been intended as a procedural satire of the industry. At the same time, I unpack its deep indebtedness to the alternative sensibilities of undirected gameplay, social narrative, and transmedial reframing that characterized the massively popular card games and novels created by Anne Abbot some thirty years earlier. Pushing back against the aspirational culture that he had emphasized in The Checkered Game of Life, Bradley’s later output highlights the value of proximity and indirected association, making waiting itself a mode of social agency and group formation.

      Over the course of these chapters, the problems of creating, performing, and reinventing public character mirror a certain strain of critical discourse within American Studies. How does one attain genuine social agency—the power to change one’s world—despite the normative mechanisms of control that structure that world and make it available for such an agency? As Walter Benn Michaels put it three decades ago, critical transcendence cannot be taken at face value, “not so much because you can’t really transcend your culture but because, if you could, you wouldn’t have any terms of evaluation left.”⁵⁸ The issue of scholarly agency here is synecdochic for the wider issue of agency as a whole; six years after Michaels, Sacvan Bercovitch frames the problem as a decision “to make use of the categories of culture or to be used by them.”⁵⁹ In Slantwise Moves, I read nineteenth-century U.S. writers, readers, game players, and designers in the midst of an evolutionary engagement over the issue of repurposing and embedded use. Rather than being the passive deployment of supposedly neutral instruments, such “use” was instead a variety of insistent experimentation within an interleaved topography of body and medium. Whether it be Whitman’s redefinition of character as choice making on and across the page (use as the rehearsal of personal judgment), Melville’s iterative staging of social confidence games (use as manipulation), Barnum and tangram players’ exploitation of the thresholds between text and paratext (use as limited reinvention), Phelan and Hawthorne’s representations of dispositional change through targeting practices (use as site of perspectival potential), or Anne Abbot and the later Milton Bradley’s emphasis on social entanglement and waiting (use as generative waste), the perpetual use of at-hand cultural materials became a central mode of self-making in an era when traditional ways of adjudicating character were being left by the wayside.

      This was not a self made but a gerund-y and insistent making; it was a historical moment when, as Scott A. Sandage writes, “A rising ‘business man’ embodied true selfhood and citizenship: the man in motion, the driving-wheel, never idle, never content.” The requirement of constant change was accompanied by the persistent risk of failure—of inventing a business, a technology, or a self that failed to live up to its promise, by failing to resonate with the social body as a whole.⁶⁰ The rise and importance of the games addressed in Slantwise Moves speaks to a desire to plot such failures on a continuum, to enable inventive change despite the (often profound) human risk associated with each move this change necessitated. The works discussed here prefigure a need that advances into our own time, when critics call for reconceiving “associations as sites