If things could talk

In 1755 John Kidgell circulated a privately published book entitled The Card, in which, paradoxically, cards seem to serve a rather peripheral role. The title suggests that a card will figure prominently in the story, or, in keeping with a genre in which objects tell stories, serve as narrative device, but the promise is never realized. The book’s title thus echoes the throwaway quality of A Tale of a Tub. Additionally, like Swift’s work, and more especially that of Richardson, The Card also incorporates some of the typographic experimentation that characterizes Sterne’s subsequent exercises in meta-textual presentation. Kidgell, however, was much less interested in promoting the material text than in mocking the pretensions of those who made a book’s physical presence tantamount to meaning. In particular, as critics dating back to George Watson have noted, The Card burlesques Richardson’s works both for their style and their presentation (iii, 996). Mocking the contradictions between realism and artifice in Richardson’s “monuments to print,” The Card self-consciously parades the arbitrary connections between a book’s style and content. More importantly, like Richardson’s letters, the card to which the title refers exemplifies the physical circulation of words among people who cannot speak or who resist speaking in person. While Kidgell’s work is not actually an object narrative, his story occupies a middle ground between the works of Swift, Richardson, and Sterne and the talking things that are the main subject of this chapter. In the same way that Swift satirically draws attention to physical marks on the page or Richardson dramatizes the social migration of texts by reminding his readers of the particular materiality of individual letters, the object narratives accentuate the matter of narration. They communicate, in other words, the human urge to speak through things.