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Slantwise Moves
MATERIAL TEXTS
Series Editors
| Roger Chartier | Leah Price |
| Joseph Farrell | Peter Stallybrass |
| Anthony Grafton | Michael F. Suarez, S.J. |
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
SLANTWISE MOVES
Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America
Douglas A. Guerra
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
PRESS PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Guerra, Douglas, author.
Title: Slantwise moves : games, literature, and social invention in nineteenth-century America / Douglas A. Guerra.
Other titles: Material texts.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: Material texts | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018007655 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5061-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Games—Social aspects—United States—History—19th century. | Books and reading—Social aspects—United States—History—19th century. | Popular culture—United States—History—19th century. | United States—Social life and customs—19th century.
Classification: LCC GV1201.38 .G84 2018 | DDC 306.4/870973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007655
For Courtney in token of my admiration for her genius
CONTENTS
Introduction. On the Uses and Abuses of Games
Chapter 1. Both In and Out of the Game: Reform Games and Avatar Selves
Chapter 3. The Power to Promote: Configuration Culture in the Age of Barnum
Chapter 4. Social Cues and Outside Pockets: Billiards, Blithedale, and Targeted Potential
Chapter 5. The Net Work of Not Work
INTRODUCTION
On the Uses and Abuses of Games
Ragged at the edges from a century and a half of wear, a black and gold game board waits quietly in the archives of the Missouri History Museum. Wispy lines carve the surface, tracing links between tarnished brass images of “happiness” and “idleness,” “truth” and “crime,” “bravery” and “suicide.” These slanted strokes, etched remnants of aggressive play, suggest a history that goes beyond the imagistic content of an 1865 luxury edition of Milton Bradley’s runaway hit, The Checkered Game of Life—“handsomely gotten up,” as the ad copy of the day would have it, in “muslin and gilt.”1 Like the scarred drag of squid tentacles across the “dead, blind wall” of a sperm whale’s head, they invite visualizations of a now bodiless conflict. There is no definite sense of endings or meanings, of who won and precisely when. Instead, there is only a scratched and worn suggestion of many doings that create a weird impression of time, a phantom feeling of intimacy at a distance. Attempting to bracket these feelings, we might set out to learn something by looking at the board itself (Figure 1). We might note, perhaps, the nineteenth-century obsession with reforming “intemperance” imaged in a square illustrating the same. Or we might attend to the evidence of innovation in planar printing technique that is literally reflected in the flat golden impression of its lithographed surface. Yet the scratches continue to itch, reminding us of the play and movement that must accompany a faithful picture of the game’s cultural work. To “read” this artifact requires more than a scan of its surfaces: one must wind oneself to the rhythms of a different moment, moving things, arranging bodies, and sliding over the worn paths of now absent hands. Reading takes the form of testing for potentials, and the nature of this testing slides freely between material and conceptual domains of knowledge.
Figure 1. Game board. The Checkered Game of Life. Springfield: Milton Bradley & Co., ca. 1865. Courtesy of Missouri History Museum, St. Louis.
Games are profoundly experimental media. The dimensions of this experimentation, and what can be learned from it, are at the center of the present book. The interpretation of games requires an approach that probes for meaning at persistently unsettled boundary lines between content and form, production ethos and reception aesthetics, subjects and objects. We can begin to frame their complexity by thinking of them as microtheories of association, codifications of and speculative exercises in how we might find pleasure with others (dare I say “fun?”). Games fix our attention on a specific subset of things, people, and actions, allowing us to understand how we operate when given a reduced but nevertheless urgent(ish) cluster of demands. They are iterative, habitual, and performative—we watch how others play, how we play, and what we think to do in specifically conditioned situations of stress, challenge, or humorous improvisation. In games we see a world in miniature, and like all miniatures they cue us to questions of fidelity, prompting us to ask what is emphasized and what is left out.2
With a media form like the book, these questions are most often critically framed by the concept of “representation,” but games impose strange