I re-read Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities this week for a methodological argument I’m making about the particular way that simultaneity and juxtaposition work together in newspapers. He considers both terms separately but doesn’t really take a deep dive into how they function—and I mean that term almost mathematically.
There’s an ideational function, a thought-generating physics at play, when you take the simultaneity of multiple “stories” appearing at once on the page and the particular juxtaposition of stories on any given day, on any given page. These properties are like the x-axis and y-axis in a (sometimes uncalculated) calculus of collective intellection among newspaper editors and readers.
Okay, I have reached the limits of my ability to make even a bad mathematical comparison. All this to say that it matters not just that various items appear side by side on the same page, but which various items so appear. This is what I’m arguing in the methodological section of the chunk of prose (chapter? article? d.o.a. draft?) I’m working on now.
While I’m thinking about Benedict Anderson’s meditations on “the demands of print-capitalism,” I want to flag his discussion of both the novel and the newspaper for what seems to me to be a bit of an anachronism.
Anderson begins with a discussion of the “empty, homogenous time” created by a novel with multiple plot lines and an omniscient narrator, and he moves from there to say that the newspaper is a hyper-realized form of the novel, in that it is a daily presentation of multiple “plot lines” and characters of interest.
What he’s talking about is the Victorian novel developed to its greatest and fullest potential— Middlemarch, or Vanity Fair. He’s talking about the height of the novel at the height of 19th century nationalism, and he implies (if only by order of discussion) that the newspaper “borrows” from or partakes of the imaginary that the novel helped establish.
But just the reverse is true, isn’t it? The first publications we would recognize as newspapers—multi-page folded numbers listing a date of publication and containing multiple items or stories on facing pages or even on the same page—date from the early-to-mid 17th century. The columnar organization of pages was apparently pioneered by the Dutch and then adopted by the English.
Pinning down the date of the first English novel is a little bit harder. Maybe it’s Robinson Crusoe, maybe it’s Pamela. But if either of those are our candidate, then it’s certainly the case that the first novel in English did not exhibit what Anderson identifies as the sense of “homogenous, empty time,” with multiple plot lines unfolding at once. And we have a while yet to go—as I said, really the 19th century—before we get to a third person omniscient narrator.
Now, let’s be clear: the time between “somewhere in the mid-to-late 17th century” for newspapers to make their mark on the English imagination and “somewhere in the late 17th to early 18th century” for novels to make their mark on the English imagination is not that long a timespan. It’s a blip. The best one might say—and I’m guessing Bakhtin said this, though I will have to go spelunking through some boxes to find my copy—is that the novel and the newspaper are born together and grow together, each shaping the other and together shaping the modern imaginary. It is the modern imaginary, in turn, that makes possible the notion of nations.
Rather than think about simultaneity and juxtaposition as a function that plays out within the newspaper or within the novel, it might be worthwhile for me to think some more about the simultaneity and juxtaposition of these two print genres, the novel and the newspaper. Still, I think the newspaper, not the novel, would be primus inter pares.
But I’m open to other arguments.
One Thought on this Post
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It does matter which items appear side by side on the same page; one of the reasons it matters is that those items, depending on the context and what they say, can work against, rather than encourage, the sentiments of mass solidarity and cohesion associated with nationalism (at least in its “mature” forms). As Anthony W. Marx observes, “the diversity of language [and/or of dialect, I’d add] within those emergent [European] states meant that spreading verbal communication or literacy could have had the opposite effect, reinforcing local or ethnic differences.” (Faith in Nation, Oxford U.P., 2003, pb ed., pp. 15-16)
He also notes:
“On a more general level, Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ ignores the central role of states in demarcating which particular community emerged and coincided with political institutions. As such, his approach does not fully distinguish nationalism from any other large-scale sentiment of cohesion.” And see the rest of this paragraph: ibid., p. 16.
A. Marx in this passage (most of which I haven’t quoted here) can be criticized for running together the terms nation (in the sense of nation-state) and nationalism, which aren’t coterminous or synonymous. But that doesn’t really undermine his criticism of Anderson.