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Biography's Myth of Presence: Thomas Edison as Invention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

David E. Nye
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Extract

American Studies has traditionally been suspicious of biography. Early works of the myth-and-symbol school, such as John William Ward's Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age, recognized the existence of a radical disjunction between public images and private realities, and focused almost exclusively on the images. Recent scholarship suggests that the myth-and-symbol school did not go far enough, and that its recent critics have erred in their attacks. Using biography as a focus, this essay will argue that in cultural studies there is no private reality and that documents are necessarily misused when regarded as clues to the existence of other lives. Rather, all documents are so separated from their reference points, or signifieds, that they are best studied as fields of relations and displacements.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 7 , October 1982 , pp. 177 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

NOTES

1. Ward, John William, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956)Google Scholar. For criticism of the myth-and-symbol school, see Kuklick, Bruce's “Myth and Symbol in American Studies,” The American Quarterly, 24, No. 4 (10 1972), 435–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For analysis of how Ward's work and that of R. W. B. Lewis, Henry Nash Smith, and Roy Harvey Pearce may be read as precursors of a structuralist approach to American Studies, see Tate, Cecil, The Search for a Method in American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973).Google Scholar

2. On the captivity narrative, see Slotkin, Richard's Regeneration Through Violence (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973)Google Scholar. For the jeremiad, see Bercovitch, Sacvan, American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar; on the pastoral novel, see Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964)Google Scholar; on Disneyland, see Marin, Louis, Utopiques: Jeux d'espaces (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973), chap. 12Google Scholar; on the cinema, see Gubern, Roman, Mensajes Iconicos en la Cultura de Masas (Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 1974)Google Scholar, chap. 2, and also Lotman, Jurij, Semiotics of Cinema (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1976).Google Scholar

3. White, Hayden, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” in Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 82Google Scholar. Levin, David's early History as Romantic Art (New York: AMS Press, 1959) was a precursor.Google Scholar

4. White, , “Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” p. 84Google Scholar. White's Metahistory was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1973. Similar approaches to biography are developed in many unpublished papers, among them Shloss, Carol's “John Berryman on Stephen Crane: The Nature of Speculation in Biography”Google Scholar (Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn.), Gray, Rockwell's “Locating Belief in Life Stories”Google Scholar (University of Texas at Dallas), and Miers, Paul, “The Graphic Self: Icons and Symbols for Belief (Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.).Google Scholar

5. See Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 280–95Google Scholar. See also his essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” which calls into question the conception of a fixed center or Subject, focusing on the work of Lévi-Strauss, Claude, in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 278–93Google Scholar. In light of Derrida's arguments, it should be noted that Greimasian semantic squares do not function as fixed centers determining the final meaning of Edison documents.

6. For easy access, both newspapers are quoted at length in Jehl, Francis's Reminiscences ofMenlo Park (Dearborn, Mich.: Edison Institute, 1937), I, 137, 160, 169.Google Scholar

7. Swan, Joseph is given more credit than Edison for the invention of the light in the standard A History of Technology, edited by Singer, Charles et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), V, 213–18.Google Scholar

8. New York Herald, 12 29, 1879, p. 2Google Scholar, “Edison in his workshop,” Harper's Weekly, XXIII (08 2, 1879), 607Google Scholar. See a similar story in Scribner's Monthly, 06 1879, p. 297.Google Scholar

9. Note that these four terms meet all the requirements that Greimas lays down for the semes of a semiotic square: contrary relations (scientist-tinkerer; wizard-alchemist); contradictory relations (scientist-alchemist; tinkerer-wizard); and implied relations (scientist-wizard; tinkerer-alchemist). The argument of this paper does not require nor does space permit full development of Greimas's theory here. See his “The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints,” Yale French Studies, 41 (1968), 69–78Google Scholar. His major works are not translated into English: Du Sens: Essais Semiotiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970)Google Scholar and Semantique structural (Paris: Larousse, 1966)Google Scholar. One good introduction to his work in English is Calloud, Jean's Structural Analysis of Narrative (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976).Google Scholar

10. McClure, J. B., Edison and His Inventions (Chicago, 1879), p. 13Google Scholar and passim.

11. Boston Advertiser, 12 23, 1879Google Scholar; New York World, 01 5, 1880Google Scholar; and The Saturday Review of Literature, 01 10, 1880.Google Scholar

12. Even as late as 1884, Edison could be depicted as a failure—see Fiske, Stephen, Off-Hand Portraits of Prominent New Yorkers (New York, 1884), p. 113Google Scholar. Edison as entrepreneur became a stock figure by 1881—see The New York Times Index for sample entries.

13. The use of the religious terminology (virtue, predestination, and so on) here is meant to suggest the secularization of Protestant values in the dominant white culture. While this insight is not new, the Greimasian approach gives it disciplined expression and further permits a metatext to be erected that subsumes each field of relations in a larger pattern. For example, the two semantic squares described here themselves are in binary opposition.

14. The differences between architectural sites are replicated in Edison's dress and deportment, which may be read as glosses on these dichotomies. In the laboratory he appeared, in the words of an assistant, like an “old rag-picker,” while at public functions and at home he dressed as befit his wealth. Similar splits have been described in speech patterns, lower class for the shop, more refined for the drawing room. Rather than read this behavior psychologically, however, why not follow it into the architectural site?

15. On the science fiction novel, see, in the Edison Laboratory Archives, “Edison Notes for George Parsons Lathrop.” In the same archives are “Thomas Edison on Life Units,” which appears in a second form in The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), pp. 203–44Google Scholar. Also in the archives are several thousand laboratory notebooks. Three of these are of particular importance in examining the unusual physics Edison developed: N-92-04-02; N-06-11-18; N-22-00-00.i.

16. More detailed discussion of the ideas presented here will appear in my forthcoming The Invented Self: A Semiotics of Thomas Edison.