would be to vaporize in a terrible storm of heat and plasma. And while it’s true that I’m indulging in a little scientific anachronism here, it’s not wrong to say that in four words Romeo conveys potential reflections about vitality and danger that resonate in relation to Shakespeare’s script, no matter how circuitous the path. Even if we knew nothing else of the play, our model of Juliet’s potential significance changes with these words—and with that, our sense of how to “read” her characterization (and Romeo’s). The metaphorical operation, by prompting nontraditional but specific schematic ways of knowing a tenor, fills in a territory that may have seemed nonexistent in an otherwise “full” literal depiction of characteristics. Metaphor reminds us that any concept—even one as deeply ingrained as “literature”—is always only a working model.
In “Deep Play,” Clifford Geertz sees games as occupying a similar space of operative social modeling. Expanding on a discussion of rural cockfights in 1970s Bali, he explains that “an expressive form works (when it works) by disarranging semantic contexts in such a way that properties conventionally ascribed to certain things are unconventionally ascribed to others, which are then seen actually to possess them.”14 Since nineteenth-century books and games did exist in a tightly shared context of production, transmission, and reception—something I discuss below—it makes even more than usual sense to ask the near-metaphorical question: What if a book were seen a game? What ideas about gaming might be usefully applied to notions of reading and writing? But this risks discussions of “play” that won’t take us much further than the semiotic deployments of this term that characterized the important, though often abstract, enlistments of late twentieth-century poststructuralist theory. Instead, I’m inclined to ask these questions in a way that lingers with material and historical details of distinctive gameplay media—not a loose or common-denominator sense of definition but concrete models of actual games that offer ways to test for the social potentials we might otherwise be overlooking in specific historical moments. “The heart is a city” can prompt certain thoughts about emotion, but no one would deny that “The heart is Chicago,” “The heart is New York,” and “The heart is Phoenix” are statements that carry different opportunities for thinking: about lakefronts and emotion; about compression, circulation, and cultural displacement; or about love, dust, rattlesnakes, and strip malls. Nineteenth-century games can provide information about repetitive cultural behavior that is as important to thinking about reading practice as it is to thinking about historically oriented sociological questions more broadly—and Slantwise Moves addresses this in appropriately messy and speculative, but interlocking, ways that require tracings of the unruly media scenes that books and games shared.
Conversational Slants
In this book, I argue that beyond anything else a game reveals, it also signals a social scene: a dicey collection of concepts, materials, and people in a distinctively mobile arrangement. An example can help to clarify this. Variations on a simple game called “conversation cards” existed throughout the long nineteenth century in the United States, advertised in newspapers at least as far back as 1775.15 A commonplace in many stationery and job printing establishments, conversation cards (and playing cards) conspicuously lodged themselves among other more functional paper and ink implements. A representative listing of printed goods for sale might include:
A great variety of message and visiting cards, plain, bordered, and gilt,
Large printer’s blanks, common size ditto,
Playing cards English and American,
Conversation cards for reading the hearts of ladies,
Ditto for reading the thoughts of men,
Dutch quills.16
Typically a tiny pack with the dimensions of a matchbox and wrapped in paper or leather, conversation cards could be tossed into a pocket or reticule and be used to break the ice in friendly company—to “read” each other, as noted above. It’s not uncommon to find playing cards and conversation cards printed on the backsides of unused formal cards of introduction, aligning pervasive social rituals that involved the exchange of cards.17 The gameplay itself evokes an advanced level of such practices, moving beyond family names and business recognitions into the ambiguous terrain of “hearts” and “thoughts.” Composed of question cards and answer cards, the roughly sixty-card deck would be dealt entirely to the players, which the pronouns and supporting materials presuppose will be a mixed-gender gathering. An 1866 edition from Adams & Co. outlines the basic procedures of gameplay:
The player having the [question] cards takes one from his pack, and after reading it, aloud or not, as may be agreed upon, passes it to the other player, who in the same manner returns [an answer] card…. A laugh is allowable if it be not audible. The player who laughs aloud on the passing of a card, or during the game, shall take one of his live cards and put it with the dead ones. The player who first loses his cards, loses the game, and the other player wins. The preceding Rule and Forfeit may be dispensed with if desired, and a right-down merry time be had without limitation. The former manner of playing may be called a Tight, and the latter a Loose Game.18
With these procedures in place, players are given license to work through a series of irony-laden call and response situations that, notably to my mind, only require at least one player who can read.19 On the one hand, strict attention to the content of the card—distanced from the probable scene of gameplay—reveals this as a game invested in specific forms of heterosexual courtship. Benjamin Lindsey’s 1811 pack, widely copied and likely a reprinted copy itself, asks, “Do you long to be married?” and “Do you think yourself handsome?” with answers like “Yes, sir, with all my heart” or “Indeed you make me blush” (Figure 2). On the other hand, these composed and appropriate responses must have faced persistent interruption from otherwise unspeakable flirtations and gender inversions: “Are you fond of making conquests?” “Yes, sir, only in the dark.”20 If this weren’t the case, laughing certainly couldn’t be one of the functional methods of competitive assessment. Depending on the players, laughter could be its own form of behavioral policing: we laugh at things we recognize to be “wrong”; we laugh to show we’re in on “what’s right.” But just as often we laugh at things that gesture at the ambiguity of rightness—things that transcend or neutralize a traditional polarization of wrong and right. We laugh at the thing that may be right even though no one ever says it that way (or says it at all).21 Because the operation of play is controlled by the rules, “conversation cards” do a lot of the talking for you—literally in the case of the silent variation suggested above—and there are myriad reasons why we can imagine this to be desirable. When one person asks, “Are you my friend?” and the other answers, “As circumstances will admit,” the words themselves can tell only a partial story. The rest lies in what is registered by the laughter, nonlaughter, or almost laughter that accompanies the physical exchange of a card: the losers of a “tight” game might actually be the winners of a broader communicative scene.
Tone is key. But we wouldn’t know that simply by reading the conservative gender content of the cards themselves. Ironically, this would strip the cards of their conversational quality.22 Alongside the text, we sketch a plausible social territory by narrating the potential contours of the game in its playing, in the scene of associations that unfold when we envision the game in movement—again, as a particular set of rules, things, spaces, and people. “Close reading,” the vexed but tenaciously useful core method of literary studies, demands sticking “close” to the specific language of a text in an effort to produce a “reading” or interpretation responsive to the questions of form and figure raised by a given cluster of words in a given order. Extending this responsivity to extratextual and nonnarrative figures, what we could call “close playing” is about the interplay, exchange, and potential transformations facilitated by traveling across different layers of form in a piece of media. Through this attention to the materials and mechanisms of transformation, close playing allows one to identify “operational figures” in nineteenth-century media and society—sets of actions held together in loose but structured sequences that become the basis of social legibility.23