Stimulating narratives: Literature in a bureaucratic age

Stimulating Narratives: Literature in a Bureaucratic Age argues that complex systems of social conventions function within literary texts in the same manner as rules of language and literary form do. I define a story or narrative as the presentation of a broken rule, arguing that the effectiveness of narrative resides in its presentation of lawbreaking. I suggest that the increase in bureaucratic organization in nineteenth-century Britain and America was advantageous for literary production both because bureaucratization produced new forms and conventions to be used in and by texts and because particular administrative tasks—specifically, counting individuals, systematizing communication, recording new ideas, and standardizing times and dates—had distinctive appeal for the fictional realm. These projects offered a picture of the population, instituted an exchange network with new forms and new languages, and established a shared sense of time, place, and progress. In short, they created new social situations and new ways to bring people together.; In my introductory chapter I present a theory of narrative as a matter of broken rules, explicating what I mean by bureaucracy and bureaucratic functioning, and elaborating on the paradoxically social nature of rule breaking and narrative. I suggest that the stimulating effect of breaking laws in literature is akin to what Sigmund Freud calls pleasure and Jacques Lacan calls jouissance . Each of the four remaining chapters examines a text in which a new bureaucratic process plays a crucial role and demonstrates how this bureaucratic convention grounds, generates, and galvanizes each narrative. These works are: William Wordsworth's “We Are Seven” (1798) in the context of the first British Census (1801); Henry “Box” Brown's Narrative of Henry “Box” Brown (1849, 1851) in the context of the post-1840 British and American Post Office policies; Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1857) in the context of British Civil Service and Patent Office reforms (1852–4); and Brain Stoker's Dracula (1897) in the context of the nearly worldwide institution of Standard Time and the Universal Day (1883). Each chapter demonstrates that these new social forms and their breakage are integral to the organization of each work.