LITMIR.BIZ

Figure 2. Conversation Cards. New Bedford: Benjamin Lindsey, ca. 1811. Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society.

      Drawing together design, performance, and explicitly algorithmic elements, games like conversation cards are scriptive things par excellence, challenging the analyst to produce an account that interweaves media, behavior, and meaning. They oblige us to imagine “loose[ness]” in even the most “tight” game. While the rules, materials, and history of a game dictate the breaking point of our inferential looseness, stretching the fabric, so to speak, is the only way to make room for the bodies we aim to remember. Games redirect and expand our view of the potential work of books and other allied media in part because a responsible approach to these artifacts makes it impossible to imagine reading at an intellectual distance from its material and social sites of enactment: the game of conversation cards is not the same without the tiny cards (requiring some degree of interpersonal touch to pass them on) and without the faces and voices of its players. We can’t fully know what they were or what they sounded like, but we know that they were there and how they were most likely arranged. Each of these elements gives us a slant on the game, an incomplete but provocative take on the kind of social world that was coming into being through the playing. For both players and critics, these games exist in their slantwise moves—in the indirect opportunities they create for habitual orientation and reorientation through the oblique playful use and reconfiguration of the objects, relationships, and content at hand.

      The figure of the “slantwise” is important here because it puts the work of critical orientation at issue. If I stressed earlier that every new game is the invention of a new genre, the thrust of this claim was in the way that a new game begins with a procedural orientation—an outline of how to go about using it, of how to arrange yourself, your friends, and various associated objects in order to produce a specifically contoured performance space. As a result of the liminal privilege afforded to gameplay, these performance spaces can, at times, radically readjust a group’s perspective on itself.²⁷ Prior to the opening of a game of conversation cards, certain skills may have been overemphasized in a given group dynamic: someone with a good memory for current events may dominate conversations; old friendships may effectively place the actors in a hierarchy of leads and supporting players. But the procedures of the game, in their singular reduction of “conversation” to ready-made phrases printed on cards and enforcement of turns, place the emphasis instead on charming gestures, evocative tones, and weird juxtapositions. This is not to say that gameplay escapes the ideological magnetisms of its moment—these gestures, tones, and feelings of weirdness could just as easily reinforce the most awful elements of a culture. Questions remain regarding whose action is emphasized and who gets to be in the room.

      Yet there was surprising latitude in the way that room was imagined by the makers of these games: in 1858, William Dick and Lawrence Fitzgerald pitch their best-selling anthology of home amusements as being “for family circles, for schools, for pic-nic parties, for social clubs, and, in short, for all occasions where diversion is appropriate”;²⁸ six years later, Dick, writing under the pseudonym “Trumps” in American Hoyle, gleefully reports that “regardless of sex, age, or social position, [billiards] is participated in by all classes of society.”²⁹ In the same year, Milton Bradley advertises his innovative multigame travel pack under the conspicuously combined name of “Games for the Soldiers or Family Circle” and insists that it is “just the thing to send to the boys in CAMP or HOSPITAL for a CHRISTMAS PRESENT, or to keep at home for the winter evenings”;³⁰ just after the war, he contends that Caroline Smith’s 1866 Popular Pastimes for Field and Fireside; or, Amusements for Young and Old, is “not a Boy’s book or a Girl’s book, but a home book for boys and girls of all ages.”³¹ Despite the slow yoking of gameplay to childhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the games addressed in Slantwise Moves—board games, card games, fill-in-the-blanks books, configuration puzzles, and targeting games—were promiscuously marketed and often played across generation, gender, and class.³² As a result, these games prompt us to ask different questions about the spaces where new forms of association and intimacy were being built; they prompt us to notice slantwise moments of productive irony where we might otherwise see only a loud, ponderous normativity machine.

      As contrapuntal analytics, attention to historical games can supplement the critical orientation Michel Foucault famously afforded homosexuality in “Friendship as a Way of Life,” as the “occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because of the ‘slantwise’ position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the social fabric [that] allow these virtualities to come to light.”³³ Of course, “slantwise” is not Foucault’s word, but the French en biais evokes the practice of cutting woven textiles “on the bias,” or at a forty-five-degree angle, in order to allow maximal stretch in the fabric (Foucault’s “lignes diagonals qu’il peut tracer dans le tissu”).³⁴ Because gameplay of the kind addressed in this book can never rest easy on the suggestion of a final picture or outcome—because the iterative archive of possibilities that define a game make any single analysis move like a marble on an uneven table—it must persistently hold many discrete though divergent possibilities in suspension, doubling back to stretch the comfortable fabric of texts whose interpretative range may appear to be settled.³⁵ Folding social action of the kind we can infer from games into our readings makes them thicker; orienting the diagonal relationships of books and games within a shared “fabric” of nineteenth-century media production allows for a better accommodation of this thickness, of the bodies that have been corseted out of the picture.³⁶

      A striking example of the loss that can accompany an overtight perspective on the relationships of text, genre, and medium in the mid-nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson has been a site of important reimaginings in recent criticism. Martha Nell Smith, Marta Werner, and Virginia Jackson have all, in different but related ways, challenged the early editorial and critical work on Dickinson that forced her creative output into shapes that ruled out its nearly game-like medial and genre experimentation. In light of their interventions, Dickinson’s writing now appears to anticipate the very problems that accompanied her emergence as a figure of literary interest:

      Tell all the truth

      but tell it slant—

      Success in Circuit

      lies

      Too bright/bold for our

      infirm Delight

      The Truth’s superb

      surprise.³⁷

      In a reading compatible with my invocation of “operational figures” above, the “Success” to be attained in the task of learning historical truths lies in understanding the “Circuit” or regular routes that direct their flow—hence algorithmic readings that narrate a sphere of potentials in an effort to trace the underlying biases or schemas that give shape to action. At the same time, Dickinson’s “Circuit lies” are iterative attempts to get at the truth with an imperfect instrument. The “lies” of customary metaphor and idiomatic rhetoric—the sorts of things one must tap into in order to be understood—require one to hang a lantern on the “slant” one is taking in the effort. Dickinson suggests that these efforts be multiplied, layered over and again upon each other, since no single slant can capture the “superb surprise” of an inexhaustible wonder in the world. This intuition of inexhaustibility

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