Technology, Literature and Culture

Alex Goody

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745639543
  9780745639536
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745637280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teoria della critica letteraria

Technology, Literature and Culture provides a detailed and accessible exploration of the ways in which literature across the twentieth century has represented the inescapable presence and progress of technology. As this study argues, from the Fordist revolution in manufacturing to computers and the internet, technology has reconfigured our relationship to ourselves, each other, and to the tools and material we use.

The book considers such key topics as the legacy of late-nineteenth century technology, the literary engagement with cinema and radio, the place of typewriters and computers in formal and thematic literary innovations, the representations of technology in spy fiction and the figures of the robot and the cyborg. It considers the importance of broadcast technology and the internet in literature and covers major literary movements including modernism, cold war writing, postmodernism and the emergence of new textualities at the end of the century.

An insightful and wide-ranging study, Technology, Literature and Culture offers close readings of writers such as Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Ian Fleming, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, Jeanette Winterson and Shelley Jackson. It is an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike in literary and cultural studies, and also introduces the topic to a general reader interested in the role of technology in the twentieth century.

1

Introduction: The Twentieth-century Technological Imaginary

Technology is a key defining factor in twentieth-century culture. From the early Fordist revolution in manufacturing to computers and the Internet, technology has reconfigured our relationship to ourselves, each other and to the tools and materials we use. A technological imperative emerges as the driving force of the century, impelling societies and individuals to a ceaseless invention and advancement of new machines and machine methods. Under this imperative, it seems, natural processes were superseded by artificial ones and technological development took humanity further and further from the limits of their biological organism. As the dominating episteme, technology impacted on all aspects of human existence and, as will be explored, had profound implications for what it means to be human. Technology in the twentieth century was not a neutral force or objective apparatus, but a material practice that necessarily had political and social causes and effects; as the following pages disclose, technology cannot be examined as discrete from human culture. Rather than simply being the outcome of human invention and resourcefulness, technology needs to be considered as a generative cultural intensity that makes us just as much as we make it.

Just as technology is inherent in human culture so, as the twentieth century revealed, is technology inherent to human nature. Freud argued that all technology (from writing to houses, motors to microscopes) is an extension of the human, ‘removing the limits’ to make man ‘a kind of prosthetic God’ (1929: 37–8), but it is possible, in the light of actual developments in the twentieth century, to go beyond Freud’s perspective and argue humanity is never distinct from the technologies that it generated and that underpin its civilizations. What the twentieth century reveals about technology is its profound fusion with the human; as the century progressed it became impossible to maintain an absolute distinction between the organic expressions of human nature and the technological processes, forms and devices which recorded and communicated those expressions as culture. Similarly, the nature and limits of human experience in the world (and even beyond it) were overwhelmingly configured through some form of technology. But what becomes apparent in an examination of the literature of the twentieth century, and what this study is concerned to highlight, is that technology does not ultimately release humankind from the material burdens of being. Instead, it binds us ever closer into the physical processes and substantial connections that constitute our existence in the world.

The following pages will explicate how Anglo-American texts across the twentieth century have represented and explored the inescapable presence and progress of technology. Looking at media technologies, textual technologies, technologies of destruction and the cyborg or technologized subject, this book considers the technological imagination of different decades, movements and cultural phenomena. Drawing on theoretical perspectives on technology, the continuities and contiguities as well as differences and changes across the century are considered, as the discussion ranges from the early years of the century to the millennium. The picture that emerges is one in which technological innovations and the increasing technologization of human culture and existence have had an inevitable impact on the literature of the twentieth century in terms of its thematic concerns, its formal innovations, and in what that literature is held to be. As the human relationship to machines becomes more and more complex, literature can fruitfully be considered as a transcription of that complex relationship and the literary work cannot, by the end of the twentieth century, be viewed simply as the natural expression of an isolated, organic individual. Literature is firmly inserted into the machinic interconnections of a technological world of production, destruction, replication, malfunction, communication, transmission and reception.

VICTORIAN TECHNOCULTURE

The destabilizing of a liberal-humanist conception of self and art by technology begins a long time before the networked age of global communication; the many innovations that mark the great expansions of the Victorian era, and that the twentieth century inherited, served profoundly to disrupt conventional notions of the human and human culture. With the invention of the telephone (1876), the commercial typewriter (1873), the phonograph and microphone (1877, 1878), the cinematograph (1895), the wireless (1896), and the modern internal combustion engine (1885), the technologies that were to transform the culture of the twentieth century had already arrived, but what subsequent generations inherited from the Victorians were not only specific machines, objects and processes, but also attitudes to, and ideas about, what technology was and what it did in the world. The figure of the cyborg, ideas about the post-human, and various examinations of the interactions between ‘meat’ and ‘data’ in the world of wireless communication and digital culture are all prominent features of contemporary academic discourse. These specific features of the late twentieth century would appear to set us apart from preceding generations and cultures and far remove us from the materialist, humanist world of the Victorians. However, as Herbert Sussman points out, there is a ‘new sense of technoculture … the stirrings of a new project in Victorian studies’, in which the nineteenth century is seen as the ‘birthplace of the information age’ (2000: 288). Friedrich Kittler’s account of late nineteenth-century recording technologies in Discourse Networks (1990) has been very important in generating this sense of Victorian technoculture. Kittler examines how, with the advent of visual- and sound-recording technology (phonography and film), the material signifier replaces the transcendental signified of previous (Romantic) ideologies of the word. These new technologies enabled non-literary data processing, and the differentiation of data streams (aural, oral, visual), in which language and the signifier, like the machines for recording images or sounds, are reduced to ‘mechanisms’. At the same time, Kittler points out, the typewriter was also a form of standardizing writing, making its mechanisms apparent, disconnecting it from a universal point of origin and meaning, rendering it incapable of authorizing a coherent and stable self. He serves to demonstrate that the discourse networks of the late nineteenth century – ‘the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store and process relevant data’ (1990: 369) – and their effects on ideas of the subject were not so different from our contemporary ‘wired’ world of data and digital communication.

In recent examinations of the relationship between science, technology and culture in the nineteenth century, the network technologies – the telegraph, undersea communication cables, the railway telegraph and Charles Babbage’s proto-computers, the Difference and Analytical Engines – have been given precedence over the more manifest technological advances of the nineteenth century such as steam engines, railways, bridges, manufacturing machines. Thus, as Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh highlight, ‘studies of the imbrication of telegraphs, typewriters and gramophones with re-configurations of modern subjectivities have stretched from ventriloquy, via spiritualism and automatic writing, to the emergence of the serial killer as an exemplary subject-position of a newly saturated machine culture in the late nineteenth-century’ (2002: 7). This new idea of Victorian technology, and its links or indeed similarity to our own information age, is explored in both fiction and theory. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s ‘steam-punk’ novel The Difference Engine (1988) imagines an 1850s world radically altered by Babbage’s computer engine, while in Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technocuture (1998) Sadie Plant focuses on the Victorian woman Ada Lovelace, the self-proclaimed ‘High Priestess of Babbage’s Engine’. She uses Lovelace’s explanation that Babbage’s planned ‘Analytical Engine’ would ‘weave algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves’¹ as the starting place for her theorization of the affinity between women and the nets and webs of digital culture.

Our present-day concerns about what it means to be human, and what the impact of the networked world of data and communication might be on human culture, may not mark an absolute rupture with previous generations, but our predecessors did have their own distinct concerns and enthusiasms about technology. It is vital to acknowledge the specifics of what the Victorians bequeathed the twentieth century in terms of a technological imaginary – a set of ideas, articulations and metaphors – and not simply assume the Victorians were like us. The technological advances of the nineteenth century did mean an increase in manufacturing productivity, in the speed of travel and communication, and in the amount and quality of leisure time and amusement, which fundamentally transformed the landscape and urban environments of the Western world. Leo Marx’s study of nineteenth-century America, The Machine in the Garden, characterized the period as one in which the fascination with technology gave rise to a ‘rhetoric of the technological sublime’ which celebrated the ‘unprecedented harmony between art and nature, city and country’ this technological development would enable (Marx 1964: 195). Such unfettered technophilia, a utopian faith in technology, was not unchallenged and was certainly made more complex by various discoveries and movements of the late nineteenth century. As Nicholas Daly points out, the anxieties about industrialization and machine culture that permeate the novels of 1840s and 1850s England do not disappear in the later years of the century. For Daly, the industrial accident as a concern of the early Victorians is recast in the popular railway rescues of the stage dramas of the 1860s, which ‘thrill[ed] audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, and at both fashionable and cheap houses’ (2004: 12). Using large amounts of lighting effects, smoke and other illusions, dramas such as After Dark: A Tale of London Life (1868), Under the Gaslight (1867–8), The Engineer (1863) and The London Arab (1866), presented the spectacle of a bound victim on the railway tracks in the path of a train approaching at full speed, only narrowly missing death as they are saved by the hero or heroine. The danger of machines and the fear they evoke is used in such dramas to create an audience that is ‘thrilled rather than traumatized’ by the threat of technology (Daly 2004: 32).

The railway crash and its repercussions, which Daly also considers, very usefully highlight the ambivalences around technology in the late nineteenth century. It is well known that Dickens survived a fatal train crash on 9 June 1865 during which he helped wounded and dying passengers, and that the after-effects, including a terror of train travel, remained until his death five years later. The danger of railway technology was a widespread concern, far exceeding the actual dangers of rail travel. There were terrible accidents, such as the Abergele accident on 20 August 1868 in which thirty-two people died after a collision between trains,² but the actual efficiency and reliability of the railways laid the foundations for a fundamental reconfiguration of cultural and geographical space. Train travel transformed the social, cultural and physical landscapes of Britain and America, leading to standardized time, the rapid availability of fresh produce in cities, the speeded-up delivery of mail and the possibility of cheaper leisure excursions, among many other effects. But, as many critics have pointed out, it also brought entire populations into contact with a very visible modernity. The uncertainty of the modern world that railway technology embodied is what appears to lie behind the ambivalence it evoked. The Saturday Review, for example, commented after the Abergele disaster: ‘We are, in the matter of railway travelling, always treading the unknown … All that we know of the future is that it is full of dangers; but what these dangers are we cannot conjecture or anticipate’ (29 August 1868: 281).

The shock of train travel inspired a range of cultural and literary responses, from the railway melodramas to novels and poetry of the period. In Tennyson’s poem ‘Charity’ (1892), a young bride experiences a terrible accident:

Two trains clash’d; then and there he was crush’d in a moment and died,

But the new-wedded wife was unharm’d, tho’ sitting close at his side:

In Amy Levy’s poem ‘Ballade of a Special Edition’ (1889), the sensational newspaper hawked round the streets of London sells its stories of ‘murder, death and suicide’ through such ‘Shocking Accidents’ as occur when ‘misdirected trains collide’. Levy’s poem goes further than the melodrama of Tennyson, connecting the shocking sensations of railway technology and its potential consequences with the emergent media technologies of the time that were harnessed to great effect in ‘yellow journalism’ (the forerunner of tabloid journalism). Dickens himself used his experiences in the story ‘The Signal-Man’, in which a railway worker has premonitions of his own death in an accident. Dickens’s post-traumatic suffering links him to a new illness produced by modern technology: ‘Railway Spine’. This term was coined in the 1860s by medical practitioners to describe the physical disorders of seemingly unharmed train-crash survivors, such as the tremors experienced by Dickens. Debates about the exact causes, nature and legal responsibility for ‘Railway Spine’ continued through later decades, with the foremost expert, John E. Erichsen, first locating the cause in an internal compression of the spinal column, then later seeing the condition as more of a psychological nervous disruption.³ ‘Railway Spine’ demonstrated how technology could disturb the proper functioning of the human body long after its immediate impact was felt, and that the impact was greatest in the unseen or invisible dangers that technology posed.

The railway carriage itself, with its different class of compartments, may have maintained social distinctions, but the train crash was a social leveller, bringing everyone equally under the destructive power of this technology. As Ralph Harrington describes, the train crash ‘crystallised in a single traumatic event the helplessness of human beings in the hands of the technologies which they had created, but seemed unable to control; it was a highly public event which erupted directly into the rhythms and routines of daily life; it was no respecter of class or status; it was arbitrary, sudden, inhuman, and violent’ (Harrington 2003: n.p.). In the train crash, and in ‘Railway Spine’, the victim is not just vulnerable to technology, but invaded by it – a technology that brought great benefits but, in its destructive effects, actually blurred the boundaries between classes and positions, between the inner and outer, between the physical and mental, demonstrating that the effects of technology were often invisible to the naked eye.

The visual technologies of the late nineteenth century, technologies that changed what was visible or changed how things appeared, are also an important element in the technological imaginary of the Victorians. Photography was well established by the end of the century, with advances such as smaller, portable cameras, shorter exposure times and easier-to-use photographic plates making it possible for amateurs to take it up as a pastime. Rather than capturing formal or ceremonial moments only, therefore, the photograph of the 1890s could also capture an unwary moment, a passer-by or a street scene. As Lynda Nead explores, the hand camera evolved into secretive forms of the ‘detective camera’ that could be hidden or disguised on the body of the photographer (2007: 112–22). This illustrates how the photographic ‘revolution in visual representation was thus two-fold … it created a new aesthetic and a new way of looking and … it expanded the range of possible subjects that could be turned into an image (112). Late nineteenth-century photography, and the moving images of cinema film that emerged after the premiere of the Lumières’ Cinématographe in 1895, are a development from previous optical experiments and devices: the Daguerreotype had been unveiled in 1839 and the nineteenth century abounds with stereoscopes, dioramas, magic lantern shows, mutoscopes, zoetropes and peepshows. And the emergence of a visual technological culture in the late nineteenth century is apparent in a range of cultural forms, including sensation theatre with its special effects, department-store windows and tableaux vivants and wax museums. The new ways of looking, animating and interpreting the visual world were well served by photographic techonologies which could capture previously unseen aspects of human and animal motion, as documented in Eadweard Muybridge’s studies in the 1880s, or could attempt to engage fully with the physical, intellectual and emotional experiences of audiences: many early Cinématographe films, for example, deployed ‘phantom rides’, filmed from a moving train. Photography and film thus gave access to a previously unexperienced world, offering scientific knowledge and popular entertainment, while also transgressing the proper, decorous boundaries of the individual who could, by the beginning of the twentieth century, be easily captured on film. In a foreshadowing of the late twentieth-century culture of surveillance, this could happen without permission, as in one form of ‘actualities’, the term used by producers for their films of everyday life: Nead describes how Lumière Cinématographe operators made and showed real-time films of London street scenes in the 1890s (2007: 124). The individual could also be psychologically and physically transported by visual technology. The spectator caught up in the sensation of a phantom ride, or unexpectedly caught on camera, could thus be interpreted as a victim of these new technologies, in much the same way that she could suffer the effects of train transportation. This highlights the fundamental ambiguity of late Victorian technology: an essential part of modern life that brought both big advantages and grave dangers.

UNCANNY TECHNOLOGY

That technology may have been understood as an ambiguous vehicle of progress by the late Victorians is hardly surprising, but what comes to prominence during this period is not only the ambiguity, but the magical aspect of technology, its potential affinities with the vibrant world of spiritualism and telepathy which had gained great popularity across the nineteenth century. The strangeness of electrical technology and the uncanny transformations worked by the inventions of Thomas Edison and his peers, in particular, brought the realm of technological advance into proximity with the ineffable realm of the spirit. The work of Edison who, in a 1920 American Magazine article, is attributed with creating a spirit telephone that could communicate with the dead, exemplifies how inexorably the supposed science of technology was imbued with strange and magical powers: Edison earned the nickname ‘the Wizard of Menlo Park’. The magical powers of the entrepeneur-inventor clearly had a dark side: the link between electricity and death, for example, was forcefully asserted by Edison, as is discussed in chapter 4 below, in his attempt to prove the dangers of the alternating current (AC) system invented by Nikola Tesla and used by the Edison Company’s rival, Westinghouse Electric Company. Edison’s activities demonstrate his own partiality and showmanship, but his energies were directed into many outlets. His invention of the phonograph in 1877, the kinetoscope (to rival the Lumières’ Cinématographe), the Kinetophone (aiming to synchronize a phonograph cylinder recording with motion pictures) and the fluroscope (for taking X-ray pictures), together with his improvements to the telegraph, telephone and so on were the type of enterprises which made Edison the embodiment, in the public imagination, of the amazing wonders and potential of technological innovation. Edison appeared as a character in literature both during and after his life: he is fictionalized as the inspired inventor of a fantastical android in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve Future in 1886, is the model for the boy inventor Tom Edison Jr. in Philip Reade’s sequence of dime novels (1891–2), stars in Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars (1947), and represents the triumph of American invention and mass production in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy (1938).⁴

Electricity, electrical science and e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Twentieth-century Technological Imaginary
• 2 Writing Technology: Literature and Theory
• 3 Media Technologies and Modern Culture
• 4 Cold War Technologies
• 5 Technological Texts: From Typewriters to Hypermedia
• 6 Robots, Cyborgs and the Technological Body
• Select Bibliography
• Index