from current, fashionable ones, because they have not actually surpassed them. Instead, they cultivate a reiterative brand of self-consciousness for their work that points with remarkable candor to the actual conditions and materials of their writing.
This flat style of reflexivity has specific qualities and effects. Most importantly, self-conscious writers at this time are more likely to direct readers to the physical and economic life of pages and print than to the constructions of genre or rhetoric. While mid-century writers tend to treat with a jaded sense of familiarity the novel or the newspaper article as conventions to which they conform, they flaunt with great energy the way these texts are produced and circulated as paper, print, and commodity. In doing so, they call attention not just to the rhetorical nature of language or discourse or genre, but to the material and social reality that supports these conventions: to pages, ink, fonts, imprints, editions, sales figures, booksellers, readers, reviewers, libraries, and to authors’ working conditions, contracts, wages, physical exertion, and exploitation.
Thomas Keymer identifies the most innovative feature shared by novelists in the 1750s as
their tendency to push a literary self-consciousness inherited from Fielding into a more directly practical self-consciousness about the mechanisms and institutions of print-culture; specifically, about the relationship between authorial production and its materialization as a printed object, and about the over-determination of both by the forces of literary commodification, consumer fashion, and regulatory reviewing.9
What Keymer calls these writers’ “practical self-consciousness” can also be termed their consciousness of mediation. Mediation describes, first of all, the material aspects of writing that “form” and “discourse” leave out of literary analysis. While discussions of a text’s self-consciousness have traditionally referred to the way Pope, for instance, deploys the beauty and symmetry of his own couplets in making a case for social order, talking about these couplets’ consciousness of mediation would involve taking account of Pope’s signposting at the level of discourse his poem’s neat physicality as print and paper. When Hume and Beattie direct readers to think about the pages in their hands, or Mackenzie presents his poems as property that may get carried, lost, and reclaimed on a deserted beach, these authors are displaying consciousness of their work’s mediation. Although many texts invoke ink on paper as the primary scene of composition, most references to mediation in the eighteenth century point, as “Powers of the Pen” and Columella illustrate, to the technology of print and the reception of its product. They invite readers to think about the long journey that brings a published text to hand, imagining impressions made by the printer on the page; the way pages are bound, or unbound; and the way books and papers are advertised, consumed, and, in possible futures, surfeited and recycled.
This field of reference makes mediation distinct from materiality, which shows up as soon as a poem references its own constitution in glass or ink or stone, because it extends to the complicated and multifaceted present and future of the text as object. As Lisa Gitelman defines them, media are “socially realized structures of communication.”10 A text that refers to its own mediation therefore represents a process that exceeds the moments in which a text is written and published. Accordingly, a text’s profession to know of its mediation exceeds in scope and outlook the perspective of its author. When played out well, this impossibility can cause the page to quicken with the impression of sentience. Authors, for instance, normally have no sense of how, or even whether, their manuscripts will appear in print, or whether they will be reviewed or bound. They certainly don’t know for certain whether a reader will stop to drink coffee at the eighteenth page of a novel or skip certain passages in search of others, or whether reviewers will hate their work. If I write now asking you to mark this, the sixth page of your book, I must do so before I know myself the page on which these words will appear. For the direction to make sense, it must be inserted once pages are set and paginated in a process over which I have no direct command. Eighteenth-century authors frequently experiment in this way with the fusion of authorial and material control over a text. In doing so, I will argue, they offer a representation of writing as something aware of itself in the present.
The books in this study also tend to explicate the social and economic aspects of their production, circulation, and reception. This, too, is an instance of their referencing mediation. Richard Griffith’s The Triumvirate (1764) includes half a page of dashes, “a hiatus,” the narrator explains, to be “supplied in the second, or third edition, for there is a peculiar nicety in this article, which requires some time to be able to accommodate for public view.”11 A few chapters into the first volume of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne offers, with a similar view to the future of his text, a dedication to a Lord, declaring that “the above dedication was made for no one Prince, Prelate, Pope, or Potentate … nor has it been hawk’d about, or offered publickly or privately, directly or indirectly, to any one person or personage, great or small; but is honestly a true Virgin-Dedication untried on, upon any soul living.” In the next passages, Tristram declares that his dedication is up for sale to anyone it suits, ranks its merit in terms of “composition,” “coloring,” and “design,” and commands any interested customer to pay to Mr. Dodsley, Sterne’s actual bookseller, the price of the dedication. Once the money is received, Tristram promises, “in the next edition care shall be taken that this chapter be expunged and your Lordship’s titles, distinctions, arms and good actions, be placed at the front of the preceding chapter.”12 Like invocations of the here-and-now of the page, descriptions of the economic process of publication and circulation shore up the effect of a book being conscious of the material form it takes in the present and will take in multiple editions in the future.
In exposing their material and economic basis, books make themselves visible as what Latour might describe as “quasi-objects,” things “much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective than the “hard” parts of nature.”13 Yet books that reference this social aspect of their objective being do so from a newly “hardened” perspective because they stake a claim to register experiences that no author or publisher could have anticipated for them. In many cases, this involves eighteenth-century authors using nonhuman perspectives from which to describe writing as a human technology, a field of economic concern, and a social practice. The Adventures of a Quire of Paper (1779), published as a series of newspaper columns, capaciously documents from the perspective of printed pages the production of cloth and paper, as well as the temper of hack writers willing to compose almost anything that will fill this paper for profit, and the way ephemeral publications are read. The question raised by my title, of what books know, is answered generally by the claim that texts written to the future in this way appear to know their own mediation. By definition, they expose their social and economic life and their material basis. Yet, because the representation of such processes involves electrifying loops of self-reference, the knowledge of mediation also becomes a strangely anti-human cause, entertaining because of the way in which it seems to make paper cleverer than people.
Thinking About Mediation
There are several ways to explain historically why people began to think about mediation (as opposed, for instance, to communication or materiality) in the eighteenth century. One factor is that it was at this time that books emerged as objects of entertainment, distinct from the didactic and religious messages they carried.14 In this form they began to travel through post offices, circulating libraries, and bookshops, and to show a propensity to get lost or rearranged, as well as to overcome distances. Deidre Shauna Lynch, recording what can be described as the way writers dwelt on mediation, describes “how enthusiastic eighteenth-century novelists were about the portability enabling written words to be conveyanced from book to book and about the materiality rendering those words collectibles that novelist-collectors might arrange as they pleased.”15 By the mid-eighteenth century, the commercial properties of literature were also evident to readers, writers, and professionals in general. Booksellers become conspicuously rich, bringing print sharply into focus as a technology producing objects of economic value and opportunity.16 Under these conditions, readers were more likely to see print as able to intervene in and contribute to the message it was carrying. John Guillory’s work on the concept of mediation describes eighteenth-century readers and writers thinking in these terms. Earlier,