Quotation, Simile, Photograph: Margaret Fuller on The French in Algiers

Abstract

In this essay I focus on an obscure New-York Daily Tribune column written by Margaret Fuller and published roughly two weeks before her well-known review of Frederick Douglass. Fuller’s review of Lucy Duff Gordon’s translation shows not only her range in topic (in this case, a consideration of French colonial practice) but also how she writes through the moment when Walter Benjamin’s famous “aura” was losing ground against modern modes of production. The extended quotations juxtaposed in Fuller’s review have about them a visual or dramatic quality, as if Fuller reaches forward toward the inclusion of photographs in newspaper reports. Yet the odd resemblance she establishes between the passages reaches backward toward the narrative disruptions of the epic simile. A great deal is at stake in these associations, both for our understanding of Fuller and for our thinking about the critical tools of Walter Benjamin, whose reading habits blend nicely with Fuller’s. Both took an interest in the utopian theories of Charles Fourier, both found efficacy in the task of the translator, and each geared their social critique to the seismic shifts shaping the cultural productions of their day. Fuller’s citations from The French in Algiers target those attributes for which Benjamin will later fault the newspaper itself: the reduction of life’s collective texture and experience to mere “information” for shallow consumption. Yet given Fuller’s unique attentiveness to events in Europe and at home, she does so across a broader cultural horizon, making it possible for the emancipatory dreams of Abd-el-Kader and Frederick Douglass to flash up momentarily in each other’s company on the front pages of the New-York Daily Tribune.