The Literature of Blindspot

The novel as a literary form was invented in the eighteenth century, and it was inextricably bound up with the art of writing history. Early novels, like Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (a fake journal kept by a castaway) borrowed from the conventions of historical writing, even passing themselves off as historical documents—especially journals and letterbooks, the forms we use in Blindspot. Many eighteenth-century English and American novels, like Henry Fielding’s 1749 History of Tom Jones, unabashedly called themselves “histories” and boasted, on their title pages, that they were “Founded in Fact”; Defoe insisted that he was merely the editor of Crusoe’s journal: “The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it.”

Blindspot both plays with these conventions and takes its narrative sensibility from them. Our novel is two novels—or two sets of fake documents—in one: Jameson’s picaresque and Fanny’s letterbook. A Painter’s Eye: The Life, Art and Adventures of Stewart Jameson, is much influenced Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, published beginning in 1759. Jameson’s rambling digressions (known, in the eighteenth century, as “Shandyisms”), his winks at his reader, and his weakness for bawdy humor: these come from Shandy, as well as from Fielding’s comic novels, especially Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. Fanny Easton’s letterbook has more in common with sentimental novels, often written in the form of letters, like Samuel Richardson’s 1748 epistolary novel, Clarissa, and the American Susannah Rowson’s 1791 Charlotte Temple. Fanny has also clearly read Daniel Defoe’s novel of a prostitute, Moll Flanders (1722) and the erotic novel Fanny Hill; Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, written by John Cleland—from debtor’s prison—in 1748. By the end of our story, she has become intrigued with Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, published in 1752, and a kind of gender-bending crossover, in which a woman writes a narrative of her life, adventures, and opinions. Blindspot, in short, is both a fake eighteenth century novel (and, didactically, a history) and a modern send-up of a long-dead genre.

Riddles and Doggerel
Eighteenth-century novels are riddled with proverbs, puns, and all sorts of word play. We put that same stuff in Blindspot. Some of it we borrowed, some of it we made up. “The Collier’s Daughter,” is taken from The Musical Miscellany, printed in London in 1729 (though, as Jameson admits, we have altered it a little). Several of the riddles (Spectacle, Sun, Eye, Looking Glass, Husband, The Painter’s Son), we took or adapted from two eighteenth-century riddle books: The Child’s New Play-Thing, printed in Boston in 1750; and The Big Puzzling Cap, printed in Worcester in 1786. Jameson’s love of proverbs is influenced by Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, which Franklin printed in Philadelphia from 1732 to 1758, although Jameson’s proverbs are not Poor Richard’s.

Books, Real and Fake
The distinction between highbrow and lowbrow was different in the eighteenth century. Books and newspapers mattered to everyone, to one degree or another. The Enlightenment was, in may ways, a celebration of the printed word, and Blindspot is, too. It’s chock-a-block with books; we hoped readers might be inspired to go dig them out of the library, and take them home. Where we identify books and authors, we are have generally referred to actual texts, including: Henry Fielding, The Female Husband, 1746; Cicero’s oration on friendship from 44 B.C.; John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678-1684; Samual Sewall, The Selling of Joseph, 1702; Elihu Coleman, Testimony Against the Antichristian Practice of Making Slaves of Men, 1733; John Woolman, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, 1744; David Hume’s 1748 Essay Concerning Human Understanding and his 1739-40 Treatise on Human Nature; and Adam Smith’s 1759 Theory of the Moral Sentiments. (Smith’s Wealth of Nations was not published until 1776, though we nod to it anyway.) Where we quote from actual texts, we have done so accurately, with some small exceptions—usually elisions for legibility.

Some books mentioned in Blindspot, however, are entirely our invention, including Colin Jameson’s Religious and Moral Considerations upon Philosophical Reflections on the Keeping of Negroes and Thomas Newcombe’s History of New England (though these are inspired by the writings of John Newton and Thomas Hutchinson). Our political pamphlet, Samuel Bradstreet’s Rights of the British Colonies Demonstrated, is based on an actual book, written by Speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly, James Otis Jr., and published in Boston in 1764 as Rights of the British Colonies Asserted. Otis’s treatise, however, was not expurgated, as our novel suggests. The passages he wrote damning slavery appeared in print in 1764 and not, as in Blindspot, in a book we made up, Bradstreet’s Modest Inquiry into the Iniquity of Slavery.

Assorted Allusions
Filling Blindspot with literary allusions is one way we tried to anchor ourselves in the eighteenth century’s swirling ocean of words, and to hold close to the period’s idiom, and its spirit. Our characters make frequent references to their favorite books, as when Jameson, a Chaucer lover, asks, “Is the parson to offer no tale at all?” or when Fanny wonders whether she must play Moll Flanders to Lizzie’s Pamela. Edes’s “Modest Proposal” is in imitation of Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satire. We mined eighteenth-century prose for words like by-blow, bloody-back, claw-back, fecklaw, grub-grime, lathey-made, scumble, slip-slop, and suckbribe. We also quoted, liberally from British and American literature, to help establish an eighteenth-century idiom. A small sample includes:

William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1652.
“A vast and furious ocean”

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, 1847.
“Reader, I married him”

John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 1748.
“overborn by desires”
“seat of pleasure”
“ungovernable longings and ardent desires”
“manly beauty”
“the tyranny of passion”
“the idol of my senses, the delight of my eyes”
“the barbarity of my fate”
“sweet fury”
“greater occasion to exclaim”
“full sensible of the virtues of his firm texture of limbs, his square shoulders, broad chest, in short, a system of manliness”
“a sudden sally of lust”
“the fiery touch of her fingers”
“an oversiz’d machine”
“the first lesson of pleasure”
“a gust of pleasure”
“so experienced, so learned in the ways of woman, numbers of whom had past through his hands”
“he still kept his post”
“the trance of pleasure”
“stirred beyond bearing”
“such an uproar as nothing could still”
“the swell and commotion there”
“confined by his breeches, that my fingers could discover no end to”

William Dodd, Reflections on Death, 1763.
“Nothing teacheth like death”

Hector St. John Crevecoeur, Letters of an American Farmer, 1782.
“this American, this new man”

Samuel Danforth, Errand into the Wilderness, 1652.
“errand into the wilderness”

Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 1742.
“It hath been thought a vast Commendation of a Painter to say his Figures seem to breath, but surely, it is a much greater and nobler Applause, to say that they appear to think.”

Henry Fielding, Shamela, 1741.
“You are a damned, impudent, stinking, cursed, confounded Jade, and I have a great Mind to kick your Arse”
“treasured up a fund of learning”
“kissing is but the prologue to the play”
“attained the accomplishment of his bliss”

John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667.
“Wandering steps and slow”

William Shakespeare
Hamlet
“Good night, sweet Prince”
“Give me that man that is not passion’s slave,
and I will wear him in my heart’s core.”
“Alas, poor Yorick”

Lear
“thankless, a daughter sharper than a serpent’s tooth.”
“A fox when one has caught her,
And such a daughter,
Should sure to the slaughter.”
Hear, Nature, hear! dear goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful …

MacBeth
“We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison’d chalice
To our own lips.”
“What hands are here, what hands are here.”

The Merchant of Venice
… There is but one hope in it that can do you any good; and that is but a kind of bastard hope.

Romeo and Juliet
“If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.”
“They stumble that run fast.”

The Tempest
“O brave new world.”
“the baseless fabric of a vision”
“into thin air”
“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange”

Sonnet 27
“Lo! thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee and for myself no quiet find.”

Sonnet 137
“Thou blind fool, Love, what does thou to mine eyes
That they behold and see not what they see?”

Sonnet 24
“Mine eye hath played the painter, and hath steeled
Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein tis held.”

Sonnet 46
“Mine eye my heart thy picture’s sight would bar,
My heart mine eye the freedom of that right.

John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” 1630.
“wee shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if wee shall deal falsely with our god, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world.”