An upswelling of work by scholars and artists calls for new archival research methods. Relying exclusively on documentary evidence preserved from the past, these different approaches point out, results in an evidentiary problem when it comes to minoritized lives. They attribute gaps in the record, intentional lack of documentation, and lives hiding in plain sight to the structures of authority that collected and preserved materials in the first place. In particular, scholars often point to the nineteenth-century institutionalization of collecting in museums, libraries, and national archives. These institutions dictated the preservation of certain kinds of records over others, resulting in information control that could look like surplus or erasure.
In the face of these obstacles to empirical proof, scholars have begun to explore speculative methods, which imagine with and beyond the limits of the archive.Footnote 1 “Acknowledging that the archival form itself often precludes recovery,” write the editors of a special issue of Social Text, “some scholars have transformed archival lack into a methodological tool” of “critical speculation.”Footnote 2 An extension of the “archival turn,” which transformed the archive from a source to an object of critique, speculative methods do more than read against the grain. Inspired by queer temporalities, Black feminist epistemologies, and decolonial approaches, they seek at once to recognize archival gaps and circumvent them by expanding the limits of what counts as proof.Footnote 3
To do this work, speculative methods position fiction as a necessary corrective to the archive's inevitable silences. Inspired by Octavia Butler's novel Kindred, for instance, Saidiya Hartman proposes “fashioning a narrative” in order to “advance[e] a series of speculative arguments.”Footnote 4 As their terms suggest, approaches like Hartman's “critical fabulation,” archivists Michelle Caswell's and Anne Gilliland's “archival imaginaries,” and literary scholar Rebecca Olson's “responsible speculation” create possible pasts while still centering the facts of documentary record.Footnote 5 Lessening our reliance on too close an “identification of historical subjects with archival objects,” as David Squires puts it, emphasizes the alterity of historical subjects and exposes the mistake of relying on official records.Footnote 6
Specifically, this essay suggests that the affordances of fictional character can help us rethink what it means to know an archival subject. As John Frow explains, “characters work as quasi-persons” while “social personhood works as a kind of fiction.”Footnote 7 This formulation is often echoed by archival scholars, as when Marisa J. Fuentes describes mining the scant archival evidence to craft the perspective of enslaved women as “seeking to understand the production of ‘personhood.’”Footnote 8 In addition, the ethics of archival knowledge—like critical discussions of fictional character—are often framed in terms of depth vs. surface. The political implications of intimate knowledge of a historical subject can be refracted through the aesthetic questions of how well readers are allowed to know a character. Archival scholars have lamented the lack of knowledge created by archival silences yet also pointed out the danger of the researcher's “impossible wish” to recuperate and recover historical figures who might be more safely buried in the past.Footnote 9 Speculative methods ask how much we can responsibly imagine, not only in terms of fact but in terms of intimacy.
Minor characters, often overlooked in literary studies, offer a way to think through this archival quandary. I turn specifically to the minor figure of the Victorian miser. Both minor historical personage and minor fictional character, the miser was a marginalized subject who appears most often in the historical record as a fictional character, such as Ebeneezer Scrooge or Silas Marner, or a sensationalized figure in collected biographies, such as Frederick Merryweather's Lives and Anecdotes of Misers (1850).Footnote 10 The miser is typically known only superficially as an object of derision, humor, or reform. As such, our knowledge of these historical figures is always partial, while the miser's hoard offers an alternative model for preserving the past. Together they offer archival researchers a model for reframing the limits of the historical record.
Those limits are located in the miser's resistance to the future-oriented methods of institutional collecting such as the archive and museum. These institutions emerged in parallel with speculative finance during the nineteenth century, while the miser is a queer figure who “collects” (aka hoards) without planning to invest or circulate his possessions. As such, the miser embodies the potential of fictional character in speculative methods while also approaching head-on the central problem of fictionality in speculative archival methods: lack of evidence to shore up this imagined personhood. If traditional archival methods depend on documentary evidence, the moment the collected item from the past pays out as a “find,” the miser queers that futurist logic because they refuse to ever cash out. For the miser, being known—being on the record—is always fraught. As Jeff Nunokawa puts it, “The miser's self-love suggests one that dares not speak its name.”Footnote 11 Yet, in his resonant minorness, the miser also offers ways of knowing historical subjects that redress some of the archive's limitations.
With this approach, I bring together two schools of archival theory typically seen as having, as Stephen Best puts it, “different stakes” in the “intimate acknowledgement” of archival contact: queer and Black studies.Footnote 12 The figure of the miser weaves together queer theory's nonreproductive and anachronistic sense of time with Black feminist uses of fictional techniques to speculate beyond the limitations of the archive. Because the miser accumulates for their own sake rather than for future discovery, their hoard is “temporally backward” compared to the future-orientations of traditional archival methods.Footnote 13 That effect is compounded by the miser's opacity, which resists readerly attempts to access a deep, transparent subjectivity.
To be sure, the white, male misers of the Victorian novel are the queer outliers, not the revolutionaries or redemptive saviors of the Victorian system of speculation that shaped both global financial systems and institutional collections. The misers of the Victorian novel can occupy their antifuturist stance because of the ways that they are both outside of and intimately connected with the violence of Victorian global capitalism.Footnote 14 From such a fraught position, this essay examines the queer collectors of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865) and George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) as these novels participate in the polarizing logic of the financial panics of the 1860s, pitting the futurist speculator against the backward hoarder, and, as such, open up questions about preservation over the passage of time.Footnote 15 They ask us to consider how knowledge abides (or doesn't) when it is opaque—buried, evasive, or unrecognizable—and how our present-tense desire for certain kinds of knowledge drives our searches. Ultimately, I argue, the miser offers us minor intimacies, a nonnormative model for knowledge of historical subjects.
The Speculative Fiction of the Archive
Typically positioned against the nineteenth-century founding of nationalized archives, museums, and libraries, speculative archival methods have seen these institutions as “lenses for retrospect,” demonstrating how they solidified national, international, and professional forms of authority through historical preservation.Footnote 16 But the nineteenth-century process of archival institutionalization was also shaped by speculative practices such as finance and novel-reading and, as such, used the past to gamble on the future.
Novels imagine the past and present to act as a form of collective memory preservation. Trained in reading novels, using paper money, and buying shares, archivists and curators speculated on their institutional futures by seeing collections as contingent pieces of proof that could be assembled to tell many different stories. In 1874 James Watson articulated this method for the India Museum and Library, arguing against “mere assemblages of specimens” in favor of a series of “collections, illustrating some special point, and composed of well-selected typical specimens, systemically arranged,” united by a “thread of purpose or meaning.”Footnote 17 More succinctly, Prince Albert had promoted the Exhibition of 1851 (which later formed the foundation of the Victoria & Albert Museum) by claiming that it would create “a living picture” of human development that would act as “a new starting-point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions.”Footnote 18 In order to prove their worth, institutional collections drew on the power of fictionality to speculate on their own value.
Fictionality arose as a result of the invention of the novel as a genre and, more broadly, the emergence of capitalism, especially credit-based economies and speculative finance that relied on fictionality's “cognitive provisionality.”Footnote 19 Defined by “flexible mental states” that “encourage disbelief, speculation, and credit,” fictionality, Catherine Gallagher demonstrates, allows for the extension of belief on a temporary basis, a willingness to go along with a story to see what might come of it.Footnote 20 The result is “a competence in investing contingent and temporary credit.”Footnote 21 That temporary credit was crucial to both nineteenth-century institutional collections and to speculative finance. Both drew on fictionality's future-orientation to promise a payout to come. Anna Kornbluh points out that nineteenth-century financial journalists called speculative investments a “futures contract,” while Susan Stewart notes that the act of collecting is an “anticipation of redemption.”Footnote 22 Collection creation, archival research, and speculative finance all operate in the future perfect, focusing on the payout, the find, the moment of discovery that justifies the actions of the past. Collections may preserve the past, but they do so with their clock set to the future.
If we wish to move beyond the archive as a fixed site of empirical evidence, it is important to understand archives themselves as employing techniques of speculation and to see novels as handbooks for reading them. Instead of the fixation on the find, the present-or-absent standard of truth, I propose instead a different orientation, one that does not depend on the payoff of documentary evidence. The misers of the Victorian novel amass hoards—of golden coins, of dust, other people's debts—that don't exist to be redeemed and have “no anticipation of the future.”Footnote 23 The act of hoarding provides its own logic and its own pleasure, queering the institutional collection's temporal orientation with its “future-negating sameness.”Footnote 24 Miserly hoarding retains what J. K. Gibson-Graham calls “the seminal fluid of capitalism” without any desire to make it reproduce through investment or circulation.Footnote 25 Yet the miser is nonetheless embroiled in capitalism; Marx labels him “a capitalist gone mad” who seeks “to save his money from circulation,” while the capitalist “constantly throw[s] it afresh into circulation.”Footnote 26 A “fetishist” in Stewart's description, the miser defies the logic of the “proper collection.”Footnote 27 Miserly accumulation endlessly defers the moment of redemption that is the centerpiece of both speculative finance and traditional archival research.
By refusing to reproduce financially or sexually, the miser creates an archive that flirts with a new standard of proof. It has no gaps or omissions because it has no moment of discovery or redemption—at least, not during the miser's lifetime. Queer temporality, as Kara Keeling defines it, “remains here and now” against speculative finance's “efforts to anchor the future to the knowable present.”Footnote 28 If the miser queers institutional collecting practices by refusing to speculate, by remaining in the “here and now,” his collection thus denies the pervasive archival logic of the “find.” There is no evidentiary money shot when something turns into nothing, paper turns into gold, dust turns into evidence. Misers in Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend squirrel away money in idiosyncratic ways, always shrouding riches in seeming poverty: the “poor heap” of a house that was “very rich in the interior,” for example, or the “richest escritoires” only to be “found to be in a dungheap in the cowhouse.”Footnote 29 As Priyanka Jacob has shown, this translates miserliness to “a mindset that interprets everything in the environment as a possible container, making and finding hiding places everywhere.”Footnote 30
This mindset invites us to imagine what proof might look like if it can never be found. The hoarding places of Our Mutual Friend—the dust-mounds, the overstuffed collector's shop, and the tantalizing promise of squirreled-away money—all stand in material contrast to the novel's obsession with the boom-and-bust cycles of financial speculation. Significant scholarship on the novel has explored these interrelated investigations of waste and accumulation, primarily in terms of value, or what constitutes a “functional moral economy.”Footnote 31 Less explored, though, are the evidentiary questions evoked by these hoards, especially how to know what someone has when they appear to have nothing—or everything. The question of wealth, in this novel, is always connected to the question of what might go on the official record—and what might be missed.
The novel's epicenter for hiding in plain sight is Queer Street. As scholars from Eve Sedgwick to Meg Dobbins have shown, Queer Street draws on both the financial and sexual meanings of the term as the home of usurious lending practices and the destination of those in debt.Footnote 32 The shameful secret of debt—the flip side to financial speculation—hints at another shameful secret, queer sexuality. But unlike the documentary evidence of debt, which comes in the form of bills, queer sexuality is harder to pin down. Our Mutual Friend brings them together through the figure of the “queer bill,” a debt of questionable validity, amassed in secret by Fascination Fledgeby, Queer Street's most secretive and profitable lodger, whose financial and sexual practices are just the kind of open secret that leave no trace.
Though Fledgeby isn't a miser in the traditional sense, he operates in conversation with Our Mutual Friend's other misers, all informed by Frederick Somner Merryweather's popular collective biography Lives and Anecdotes of Misers (1850).Footnote 33 A seeming speculator who instead secretly hoards, Fledgeby buys up queer bills “by the lump—by the pound weight” (275). But Fledgeby doesn't buy them outright—he hides behind Mr. Riah, a racist stereotype of the Jewish moneylender, pretending that he has nothing to do with the company, Pubsey & Co., that is profiteering from other people's debt and speculation. In the novel's terms, Mr. Riah is a “mask,” the beard of Fledgeby's queer financial operations (608). Fledgeby's queer bills—the tantalizing evidence of his sexual and financial practices—are everywhere and nowhere, hard to pin down as his and yet under his control. As such, they invite us to question present-or-absent standards for evidence.
Anjali Arondekar has argued that the histories of sexuality have too often operated by the logic of the closet, where queerness is defined by secrecy and absence in opposition to the recognizable record of heterosexuality. Yet, as Arondekar points out, this only reinforces the “teleological promise” of the archival find.Footnote 34 The miser's hoard refuses that promise without denying the allure or even the existence of proof. As Mr. Lammle complains to Fledgeby, “when all the rest of us are discussing our ventures, none of us ever know what a single venture of yours is,” and Fledgeby replies in a way that seems to confirm the existence of his ventures while repudiating any future moment of revelation: “I can do one thing, Lammle, I can hold my tongue. And I intend always doing it” (267). Fledgeby's financial and sexual secrets are mutually reinforcing, “coded through each other,” as Will Fisher describes the long relationship between usury and nonnormative sexualities.Footnote 35 By trying to make money produce more money, Fisher explains, “the usurer turns money away from (perverts) its natural use,” which is “commutation” or exchange.Footnote 36 The narrator of Our Mutual Friend asks snarkily why money is so precious to Fledgeby when he is an “Ass too dull and mean to exchange it for any other satisfaction,” but the answer lies in that very refusal (269). Fledgeby's invisible hoard redefines the satisfactions of proof.
That Mrs. Lammle does eventually out Fledgeby as the secret behind Pubsey & Co., a broker of queer bills and, by implication, a practitioner of nonnormative sexualities, happens not through empirical evidence but by the method of novel reading: inference. She has, she admits “no proof,” yet “the whole train of circumstances seemed to take fire at once, and show it to me” (608). She tries to convince both her husband and another man that Fledgeby is the head of Pubsey & Co., not Mr. Riah, but they are dumbfounded, repeating that there is “no proof” (608). Mrs. Lammle admits that she cannot offer material evidence—“I scarcely know how I know it”—but she also stands firm, responding, “I believe five women out of six, in my place, would see it as clearly as I do” (608, 609). “Proof,” to Mrs. Lammle's skeptics, does not mean inference, deduction, or the “train of circumstance” but documentation, a signature, or a bill, the evidentiary forms of business and of archives. But the novel hints otherwise.
It's the very queerness of her methods that allows Mrs. Lammle to make her unsubstantiated discovery—in the absence of documentary evidence, she reorients what constitutes a lack and what constitutes a find. To validate her findings, the novel performs an acknowledgment of the correctness of Mrs. Lammle's inference. As the ruined Lammles depart for the continent, Mr. Lammle leaves Fledgeby with a beating, “as furious and sound a threshing as even Mr Fledgeby merited” (705). The thrashing reinforces the queerness of Fledgeby's financial practices, even as it punishes them. Lammle finds Fledgeby without his dressing gown, in only his Turkish trousers and slippers, and beats him using a “a stout lithe cane,” the instrument and the scene recalling for Victorian readers the often-erotically-charged disciplinary practice of caning schoolboys, what Colleen Lamos describes as “simultaneously punishment for and an incitement of specifically homoerotic pleasures” (702).Footnote 37 Afterward, Fledgeby suffers privately and refuses to call for the police, insisting that “we had better keep it quiet” (704).
Fledgeby's queer financial practices exemplify the “ephemeral and unusual traces” that Ann Cvetkovich has identified as hallmarks for cultures “forged around sexuality and intimacy, and hence forms of privacy and invisibility that are both chosen and enforced” (8). They cannot necessarily be located on the record, but their absence is not a lack of proof, either. Instead, they join the pound notes never located in dust heaps, the signatures never scrawled on a note, the stripes from the cane that faded with time. The miser's hoard exemplifies the stingy proof that repudiates the logic of the future-oriented find to validate new forms of archival speculation.
Historical Subjects and Fictional Characters
As Jacques Derrida puts it, all archival research is a story of desire.Footnote 38 Yet the miser's hoard seldom puts out, and, in addition, the desire for knowledge of marginalized historical subjects is particularly fraught. Carla Freccero has described it as an “impossible wish” to find adequate evidence to give voice to unrecorded lives.Footnote 39 The wish is impossible not only because of the limitations of historical evidence, but also because of its fundamental desire: to imbue subjectivity. Typically, this has emerged as a desire to depict “the intimate dimensions” of a subject, to give agency or interiority to subjects from the past.Footnote 40 Taking a cue from the miser's hoard, I suggest that the researcher's impossible wish for intimacy may be inflamed rather than satisfied by the present-or-absent standard of empirical evidence.
We see this play out elsewhere in Our Mutual Friend (1865). In order to impersonate a miser, Noddy Boffin collects popular biographical anthologies of “odd characters who may have been Misers” (461). Boffin's greatest show is his “depraved appetite” for their stories; no matter how many misers Boffin collects, his appetite is “whetted instead of satiated” (461, 462). While this is merely a performance, his staging reveals the entanglements between miser as historical referent and as fictional character. Aaron Kunin invokes the Boffin miser plot to show how fictional character is always a “collection of examples,” a “seam” between the novel and history that Boffin mines as a fictional character reading collections of real-life misers to pretend to be a miser himself.Footnote 41 The miser thus stands at the nexus of fiction and research. As such, Boffin's miser plot points not only to the problematic desires that drive archival research but also to the potential value in refusing their satisfaction, in learning from the limitations of minor characters.
Boffin uses his misers to trick Venus and Wegg into thinking there is money hidden in Mr. Harmon's dust-mounds—a belief that seems plausible given how many of these miserly anecdotes turn on the revelation of hidden riches. The collections of miser anecdotes tantalize Venus and Wegg by elaborating all the unexpected “places [misers] used to put the guineas in, wrapped up in rags” (473). Venus and Wegg believe that the anecdotes of misers act as archival evidence—that the past misers’ habits act as proof of Harmon's—while Boffin deploys them as fictions, playing on the character of the miser. The scene plays these different methods against one another to demonstrate that the evidentiary standard is often beleaguered not by lack of evidence but by the allure of textual proof.
The scene's humor relies on Venus and Wegg's un-self-reflexive belief in historical evidence as they act out the process of research, understanding preserved texts from the past as unambiguous proof of material reality.Footnote 42 The scene is peak Dickens theater, with Wegg and Venus sitting together on a settle, reacting melodramatically to each new piece of evidence, and Boffin positioned in front of the fire, perhaps the better to survey the effects of his miserly characters. After Boffin produces Somner Merryweather's Lives and Anecdotes of Misers, Wegg's reading is quoted at length, interspersed with parenthetical stage directions. Wegg and Venus interpret each miserly anecdote as confirmation of Harmon's hidden wealth. For instance, when Wegg reads that one miser's home “had not been repaired for more than half a century,” the narrator reports, “(Here Mr. Wegg eyed his comrade and the room in which they sat: which had not been repaired for a long time.)” (476). As the evidence becomes more and more compelling, Silas and Wegg get more and more excited. Bank notes have been stuffed in wall crevices [“(Here Mr. Venus looked at the wall)”] and money hidden under chair cushions [“(Here Mr. Venus looked under himself on the settle)”] (476). Their responses evince a belief in the “find,” which here is both textual proof and actual treasure.
But the miser's fictionality reminds us that there are forms of knowledge which exceed textual evidence, in which case, satisfying the desire for proof can actually obscure knowledge. As Wegg reads, he and Venus respond with escalating excitement, the affective investment in the appearance of mounting proof played out in a greedy homoerotic climax from when Wegg first “pegged his comrade” at the mention of “secret hoards,” to when his leg “slowly elevated itself as he read on” about hidden banknotes, to when he “dropped over sideways” onto Venus (476). In the afterglow of this seeming proof, Venus and Wegg slump together on the settle, neither making “any effort to recover himself; both remaining in a kind of pecuniary swoon” (477). Despite their swoon, however, the satisfaction of textual evidence leaves them no richer—in knowledge or coins—than they were before.
This scene thus dramatizes the expectation of intimacy that, David Kazanjian argues, stems from historical empiricism. “A strict separation between historically contextualized reading and ahistorical reading” depends on the fantasy, he claims, that “one can adequately determine the context in which a text was written and linger in that context with the text in a kind of epistemic intimacy.”Footnote 43 But while Venus and Wegg want to linger in that episteme, Boffin has understood from the beginning the interpretive benefits of seeing historical subjects as fictional characters. Early in the novel, Boffin employs Wegg to read Gibbons's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) aloud and marvels at how “Commodious” fights 735 times as a gladiator that was “in one character only!” while the story of fighting a hundred lions was “in another character” (66). What seems initially to be a mistake of Boffin's illiteracy and naïveté proves an unexpected insight when, later in the novel, Boffin begins collecting misers. The genre of miser biographies echoes the multivolume histories from the beginning of the novel.Footnote 44 By using the concept of character to bring together Gibbons's more scholarly history with the miscellanies of misers and eccentrics, the novel connects new methods of collecting with fictional character. This confluence explores the value of oddities, of having a large number of specimens, each one represented in brief. In other words, it assembles a collection of minor characters. The misers’ implacable minorness—their value—inheres in the limitations wrought by being in the story but never at its center. Alex Woloch claims that “what we remember about the [minor] character is never detached from how the text, for the most part, makes us forget him.”Footnote 45 Like the marginalized historical subject, the minor character's significance inheres in the threat of their erasure.
In the face of that threat, these subjects’ meaning is made not through agency but through collectivity. We hear it in Boffin's cry, “Such characters, Wegg, such Characters! I must have one or two of the best of ’em to-night,” his use of “have” and the casual demand of “one or two” suggesting a series of interchangeable sames, each equally fulfilling or unfulfilling, each one equally knowable or evasive (473).Footnote 46 Much like minor characters, marginalized historical subjects can accrete meaning through accumulation, through pattern and repetition, rather than solely through individuation. They help us see the scope of a historical phenomenon, the size of loss, resistance, or joy. The character of the miser offers a way to understand the elusiveness of historical subjects, a way to bring them closer for examination but also to perform a crucial distancing. Searching without finding, knowing without interiority, the miser testifies to the value of not satisfying desire.
Minor Knowledge
To take the chill off the potential letdown of these unsatisfied desires, this essay now turns to the affordances of minorness as a way of knowing both historical subjects and fictional characters. Some scholars have argued for the value of depth and interiority in writing histories of marginalized figures, writing movingly about the process of “fill[ing] out their absence as one way” to make legible the humanity that has been erased or distorted in the historical record.Footnote 47 At the same time, however, archival scholars have also acknowledged the pitfalls of what Anjali Arondekar calls “search-and-rescue” missions that may, motivated by current political ideals, seek to give historical subjects an autonomy that they never chose or had.Footnote 48 Tavia Nyong'o argues that speculative archival work does not “emerge out of the depths of the subject, but instead plays out along the folds of its surface,”Footnote 49 a model first articulated by Édouard Glissant's concept of opacity as a form of resistance to the colonizing gaze.Footnote 50
In pursuit of this superficial knowledge—the hallmark of minor characters—the final section of this essay turns to a novel and a character that are minor many times over. George Eliot's novella Silas Marner (1861), with its “minor quality,” as F. R. Leavis puts it, has never occupied a central place in the Eliot canon.Footnote 51 Silas Marner is a miser, sure, but only in a minor way, as he is swiftly reformed. After he unexpectedly adopts an orphaned toddler, Marner stops hoarding gold and the plot reorients toward other characters. Most of all, the titular character—supposedly the protagonist—is actually a minor character. Joshua Gooch, for instance, argues that by “limiting access to his interior,” Eliot creates in Marner “a character that bears events rather than an agent engaged in their production.”Footnote 52
Against critical discourse about minor characters that has traditionally echoed Gooch's framing of minorness as passive or flat, this essay joins a recent rethinking of minorness as itself a value, not a lack of something else.Footnote 53 Minor subjects, in this formulation, offer an alternative to the Western liberal subject. A minor way of knowing doesn't seek to increase representation of specific demographics, reinstate lost agency, or define individuality through depth. Instead, minorness offers a way to mediate between polarized notions of marginalized subjects as powerless victims of social structure, on one hand, or sole agents of political action, on the other. As Hentyle Yapp explains, “the task at hand is not to gain legibility as minority subjects through the very means of the major.”Footnote 54 This echoes Saidiya Hartman's articulation of speculative methods as “not giv[ing] voice” but rather “imagin[ing] what cannot be verified.”Footnote 55
Emblematized by records but never fully recorded by them, misers offer more opaque forms of knowledge that queer the researcher's desire for intimacy. When he is hoarding, Marner's desire for coins is never satisfied, and through that lack of satisfaction, he comes to know his collected subjects in the same way that readers come to know him: deliberately superficially and bound together by structural relations. Marner hoards out of loneliness; he seeks to find in his collection the intimacy he lacks elsewhere. The novel makes this clear when his adoption of Eppie curtails his desire to hoard. Though critics have tended to read this as a compulsory turn to heterosexuality, it also speaks to the nonnormative intimacy Marner felt with his lost cadre of coins. The powerful, short-term pleasures of hoarding help Marner block out his painful past and his unfulfilling, lonely present.
Hoarding in Silas Marner thus anticipates theorizations of queer archives as motivated by trauma and, as Ann Cvetkovich describes it, “composed of material practices that challenge traditional conceptions of history and understand the quest for history as a psychic need rather than a science.”Footnote 56 The years of Marner's hoarding are marked by “narrowing and hardening” of the desire to acquire money without spending it, one that leaves him desperately alone, “in no relation to any other living being” (17). Centering desire or “psychic need” allows us to understand Marner's accumulation and his attachments to his collected subjects as well as the limitations on those attachments.
If, in Our Mutual Friend, Venus and Wegg's archival desires were inflamed by proximity, Marner models a different sort of archival desire, one that acknowledges its insatiability. Marner's weaving and hoarding create a repetitive cycle in which the redemptive future is replaced by the immediate pleasures of the accumulation—of gold coins, of inches of textile, of moments passed without a future objective beyond more of the same. Each night, after he has finished weaving, Marner draws out his stash. Though adding to and handling his coins was “like the satisfaction of a thirst to him,” we also know that each night of satisfaction just “bred a new desire.”Footnote 57 Like Boffin's insatiable desire for collectible misers or Venus and Wegg's plea for proof, Marner returns to his hoard because his “psychic need” propels his seeking. The intimacy he seeks with his collected coins grows out of that limited intimacy rather than chafing against it.
[H]e would on no account have exchanged those coins, which had become his familiars, for other coins with unknown faces. He handled them, he counted them, till their form and colour were like the satisfaction of a thirst to him; but it was only in the night, when his work was done, that he drew them out to enjoy their companionship. (18)
They offer “companionship,” unlike the coins “with unknown faces.” They had become his “familiars,” a term that suggests not only a substitute for human social relations but a form of nonnormative intimacy, as a familiar can also be a witch's demon companion. This intimacy is a kind of knowledge that is thorough without uncovering depth and, furthermore, recognizes the complexity of that attachment. When Marner relates to his coins as to his “unborn children,” the metaphor suggests both closeness and its limits, as Marner knows his coins better than anyone and yet understands that much that cannot be known remains (20). Through this minor form of intimacy, the miser redefines authentic knowledge of collected subjects.
Like minor characters, Marner's coins signify within a complex system—indeed, they create that system: “the money had come to mark off his weaving into periods, and the money not only grew, but it remained with him. He began to think it was conscious of him, as his loom was” (18). He “wanted the heaps of ten [guineas] to grow into a square, and then into a larger square” (18). Making a stack, then a square, then a larger square, the coins translate the repetitive action of weaving, the endless sameness of days lived, into a structure of recognizable epochs. The narrator tells us that a different kind of person might have lost track of time altogether, but Marner uses the accumulation and the structure of his money to “mark off” periods. Though Marner's collection is only minimally representative of its context, it nonetheless periodizes. He is in a world that, to Eliot's readers, would have felt nostalgic, familiar—a past England, rural and agricultural, after the Industrial Revolution introduced steam-powered factory production, but before the big exodus from country to city. Yet to Marner, living in that moment, it was a “strange world,” and he opts not to collect anything that helps him interpret it mimetically but rather to amass coins that give little clue to the world outside his cottage. In this, they exemplify Alex Woloch's point that minor characters are inherently structural, a way of representing a “complex narrative system.”Footnote 58 Marner's collection shows how objects can be nonrepresentational, divorced from context, and yet still perform a periodizing function.
Together, the elements of Marner's hoard offer a vision of opaque archival knowledge: it can be intimate without interiority; periodized and structured without relying on a traditional notion of historical evidence; and driven by the researcher's desire without permanently satisfying it. The collection is homogeneous, in both its contents (coins) and in its process: collecting is replayed daily, with no intention, desire, or plan for future redemption. Within that structure, the coins are valued for their surfaces, their inseparability. The coins have scant identifying features, and yet each one is irreplaceable. This model of minor knowledge reflects Marta Figlerowicz's point that flatness in fictional character can be “a mode of critical reflection” ultimately pointing not inward but representing the “limits to how much one's body and mind can offer for scrutiny.”Footnote 59
The minor character model for archival subjects centers the silences perpetrated by the archive and, at the same time, productively deviates from the individualized, agential subject. Kristen Starkowski describes minor characters as “ambassadors of elsewhere,” figures who gesture to the lives lived on the margins of the plot dominated by the protagonists.Footnote 60 Minor characters can also act as ambassadors of the archive, encouraging researchers to imagine with and beyond the insufficiencies of empirical evidence.
Ultimately, this essay's arguments about speculation and minor knowledge build on and contribute to a body of queer theory that gestures toward the role that literature has long played in offering glimpses of nonnormative “practices and experiences [that] are actually designed to elude what counts as the official archive.” In arguing that these fictional glimpses can, as Shane Vogel has argued, “compel creative and inventive ways to be remembered and preserved,” I hope this speaks to the value of fictional character and fictionality more broadly in archival research practices.Footnote 61 From inside the period when institutionalized collecting was initiated and professionalized, the fictionalized Victorian miser offers just such a glimpse. In their rejection of the future-oriented financial practices that shaped archival research practices, the miser and their hoard offer a different way to read the past. Both historical figure and literary creation, they help us reimagine knowledge of marginalized historical subjects, especially when it is partial or incomplete. The limits of minor knowledge paradoxically generate new possibilities for archival methods.
