For a novel that is intensely informed by a pervasively ironic tone, perhaps the greatest irony surrounding A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder is that in a very accurate way the narrative of the novel is symbolically played out in the real history of the book. What is the narrative? A group of men in the present discover a manuscript written in the past and spend much of their time debating its style and meaning. What is the real history of the book? Scholars and academics rediscover a mostly forgotten novel under-appreciated by critics at the time and applying contemporary postmodern and meta-fictional literary techniques spend much of their time debating its style and meaning. In effect, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder has become a strange manuscript found in a postmodernist ethos.
The structure of the novel is misleading. The author engages one of the most common tropes of 19th century literature—a framing device in which the real story is set in the past and the contemporary character are relating it second-hand through a historical perspective—and transforms into something actually integral to his themes. Just as an inordinate number of episodes of the 1960’s sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show were constructed as flashbacks for no readily apparently necessary reason, so too are most framing devices in all those 19th century novel essentially unnecessary décor. In fact, many if not uses of the framing device during this period seem to have been introduced for no other reason than that everybody else was doing it.
Such is not the case in this instance. Perhaps because so many critics of the time has recognized that this literary device was usually extraneous to any consideration of the value of the central narrative, they simply had been conditioned to overlook instances when the frame narrative was essential to comprehending the central narrative. What James De Mille has done here is devise a framing narrative that draws ironic and satirical parallels with the narrative of the past. Consider this exchange of dialogue between two of the men in the present timeline who have been reading this strange manuscript:
“Well,” said Featherstone, “More’s story seems to be approaching a crisis. What do you think of it now, Melick? Do you still think it a sensational novel?”
“Partly so,” said Melick; “but it would be nearer the mark to call it a satirical romance.”
“Why not a scientific romance?”
“Because there’s precious little science in it, but a good deal of quiet satire.”
“Satire on what?” asked Featherstone. “I’ll be hanged if I can see it.”
A contemporary reader would find nothing unusual here, recognizing it for what it is: a meta-textual commentary upon not just the fictional manuscript within the story, but the story itself. This sort of slyly humorous self-referential self-deprecation started occurring in nearly every episode of The Simpsons sometime between the 15th and 20th seasons. It is one of the recognizable symptoms of the postmodern condition. Reader and audiences today don’t even consciously think about how every text they encounter today exists and must be confronted on at least two levels: as story and as text. The tale and the telling of the tale are today just naturally assumed to be inextricable.
For 19th century readers...not so much. Critics approaching this novel only on the level of story are missing half the point. They are quite literally missing half the story. The running commentary of the discovers of the strange manuscript found drifting in that copper cylinder are the equivalent of today’s critics, scholars and academics who just so happened to be in the right place at the right time for De Mille’s story to finally be approached with equal intensity on the level of story and text.
