Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction: Associationism, Empathy and Literary Authority by Peter J. Katz (review)

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

• Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction: Associationism, Empathy and Literary Authority by Peter J. Katz
• Christian Lehmann (bio)

Peter J. Katz. Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction: Associationism, Empathy and Literary Authority. Edinburgh UP, 2022. Pp. vii + 248. $110.00; £85.00. ISBN 978-1-474-47620-1 (hb).

The opening participle in Peter Katz's new book, Reading Bodies, is ambiguous. Are the character bodies doing the reading? Are we reading the characters or the characters each other? Is it our own bodies that are reading? Over the course of six chapters and five novelists, Katz continually disrupts our understanding of what it means to read and who does the reading. But Katz is not interested in the meta-literary; rather he attempts to return us to the experience – and stakes – of the reading public in the nineteenth century. He traces a schism between academic writers and readers against popular authors and their general reading public, for whom literacy rates rose to 81% for men and 73% for women by 1871 (93). For the academic writer and reader (e.g. Matthew Arnold and Max Müller), reading is about power and authority; these (almost always) men get to interpret and lay claim to someone else's experience (think about Edward Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies). In contrast are the popular novelists that populate Katz's chapters. "Reading, these novelists have suggested, can be a place to reject knowledge, and even to reject a kind of false acknowledgement that only seeks authority. When read well – with feeling, for feeling, about feeling – novels can cultivate not authority, but an ethics of care" (188). This ethics of care is the "Empathy" in Katz's subtitle. [End Page 493] He claims that these novelists grounded their appeal for empathetic reading in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science of Associationism. At its most general, Associationism claims that our sensations are absorbed first and then turned into rational understanding in ever more complicated ways along associative pathways. Katz's specific interest is in Associationism's understanding of language, which considers "language not as a force that shapes matter discursively, nor as a byproduct of material forces, but rather as part of a biological process in an embodied, social species" (5). Thus, reading the words on a page changes the way we interact in social space.

The first chapter sets the background for Katz's argument as he introduces us to the philosophical debates, the scientific and philosophical practitioners, and the cultural background to his arguments about reading and Associationism. There is a dizzying array of names, but Katz ably guides the reader through the evolving thinking through helpful subsections. Chapter 2 is a sustained close reading of Dickens-as-Boz's 1837 Sketch, "The Hospital Patient," in which Katz argues that Dickens's text teaches us as readers to empathize with the patient as a person and not an abstraction: "The Sensations one feels about a textual body equate to the sensations one could feel about a living body" (70). In Chapter 3, Katz takes on Great Expectations with the central argument that Pip sees himself as a constant (only) referent, which leads him to solipsistically misread others' bodies and his own. Katz approaches the novel in its serialized form (citing the weekly parts rather than the published novel) and observes that serialization

enables Dickens to plug into this practice of embodied memory […]. Rather than imagine serial as a sequence of reading time punctuated by periods of waiting, Associationism suggests a continuity of sensations and complex identities that contain not simply a past self reading, but the effects of that past self on the present self remembering.

(89)

In an excellent subsection, "Serialisation and Speed" (90–96), Katz explores the relationship between the sensation novel and the frequency, speed, and location of consuming those texts, while drawing on Alfred Austin's 1870 article, "Our Novels: The Fast School," to observe the connections between reading novels and experiencing empire.

In the next three chapters, Katz turns away from Dickens to three other authors. In his chapter on The Moonstone, Katz argues that Collins's 1868 novel sits at the center of a debate between mechanical...