The Columbia History of the American Novel

one of the ways by which we rapidly 'transform ourselves' is by exchanging 'codes disguised as art,' it is worth noting that since the 1920s the West's best novelists have encouraged not only cultural relativism, tolerance, and magnanimity but also a deep respect for the earth and other living creatures. Encoded in the art of these Westerners is the message that if we are ever to live in harmony — if we are indeed to survive, if we are to avoid ecocide and nuclear annihilation — we must begin to respond to the novel of the West by transforming ourselves. And we must do so not only as individuals but as a society, whole and complete and with unyielding purpose.

James H. Maguire

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Technology and the Novel

It is the novelist's business to set down exactly manners and appearances: he must render the show, he must, if the metaphor be permitted, describe precisely the nature of the engine, the position and relation of its wheels. - Ezra Pound, Patria Mia (1913)

Engines and wheels were everywhere in Ezra Pound's 1910s, with the automobile ascendant, rail lines ubiquitous, and large-scale images of machinery available even to the most rural of Americans who subscribed to a monthly magazine like Harper's or got the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Yet Ezra Pound radically redefined the novel when he invoked the analogy of the machine. In effect, he removed the novel from its lineage in print texts. From the 1700s, as is well known, American writers had allied novels with established genres, including history (for example, James Fenimore Cooper's 'Indian history'), moral philosophy (Charles Brockden Brown), romance (Nathaniel Hawthorne), biography (Herman Melville's Israel Potter [1855]) — all rubrics embedded in the tradition of print.

Invoking the machine, however, Pound disrupted that formulation in ways that invite inquiry. Shuttling the novel to a new rubric, one intended to seize the twentieth-century industrial moment and instate the prose fiction narrative in it, Pound assigned the novel a defamiliarizing relation to culture. He asserted that the novel could perform its traditional function — social disclosure — insofar as it met engineering standards.

Pound's statement, particular to the high modernism of the 1910s, additionally serves to focus the relation of the novel to technology throughout the history of the United States. In fact, his analogy assumes the 'long foreground' of machine technology dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when industrialism brought into -465- visibility the machines and structures identifiable from their gear wheels, pulleys, belts, pistons, ball bearings, etc., which were displayed to the public on railroad passenger platforms and at expositions and amusement parks, not to mention the numerous woodcuts and etchings of machinery appearing weekly and monthly in the periodical press. But Pound's statement, bonding the novel to contemporary technology per se, also implies the extension of the technological relationship into futurity. It suggests a time line through modernism into the postmodern age of telecommunications, during which the novel has continued to evolve according to technological developments. In this sense, over some three centuries, fictional narrative carries forward — and is carried forward by — a dynamic range of technologies from the American hand ax of Daniel Boone to the computer simulation of the cybernetic age.

Technology, at least since the 1960s, has attracted the attention of students of the American novel, who have recognized opportunities for explication in its very artifactual state, its presence as part of the material culture. In the literary text, technology thus can be seen to function at a base level for verisimilitude, say, when late nineteenthcentury New York is materialized by the representation of elevated transit lines (in William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes [1890]), or when the United States of the 1970s is evoked in the presence of portable TVs (in Mona Simpson's Anywhere but Here [1987]). In this way, technology assists in furnishing the fictional world or in establishing shared assumptions between text and reader.

One step up, interpretively speaking, technology has been approached as a sign or symbol representationally revelatory of the culture, for instance, the ax in James Fenimore Cooper's The Chainbearer (1845), which exalts 'the American axe [which] has made more real and lasting conquests than the sword of any warlike people,' or Mark Twain's utilitarian machinery of the contemporary late nineteenth century, say, the armaments and bicycles in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). In fiction published one century after Connecticut Yankee, it is the electronic technology of television that can be recognized as a central subject matter, for instance, in Meg Wolitzer's This Is Your Life (1988), with television in limousine backseats, with wristwatch design like a TV screen, with a picture window-sized television. The dominant figure in Wolitzer is a - 466- TV comedian, just as Twain's protagonist is a factory foreman. For purposes of social criticism, Twain's text exploits the arms factory as a comment on violence, just as Wolitzer's text exploits the TV sitcom to consider familial dysfunction.

Explicating technological signs and symbols in the American novel, scholar-critics have often proceeded to what seems the reasonable next step, namely, discerning the subject position taken toward the particular technology at hand, then generalizing about which attitudes toward technology prevail in the novel and constitute the presumptive views of the author. It might seem possible to say, for instance, that because John Dos Passos portrayed fatigued industrial assembly line workers as 'gray shaking husks' and scorned popular, that is, hack, writers as daydream artists 'feeding the machine like a girl in a sausage factory shoving hunks of meat into the hopper,' then his novels The Big Money (1936) and Three Soldiers (1921) are antitechnological. Similarly, Melville can apparently be judged as hostile to industrial technology because his narrator, Ishmael, in the 'Try-Works' chapter in Moby- Dick (1851), comments on the process of rendering whale oil: 'the smoke is horrible to inhale,' having 'an unspeakable, wild Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres,' then adds that 'it smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.' These kinds of local passages can appear to be emblems of the whole, and readers, self-identified as humanists in an adversarial relation to technological values, have understandably inferred an intratextual hostility to technology in the American novel over the past two centuries.

From this late twentieth-century vantage point, however, with cultural studies revealing ways in which technology is but one part of a larger cultural process, it is possible to reconsider the relation of technology to the novel, in part by surveying the ideological role of technology in national narratives dating from the seventeenth century, and in addition by taking Pound's statement as a factual, not a metaphoric, one when considering the relation of fiction to technology of the twentieth century.

Not surprisingly, technology was integral with representations of the New World before it found expression in the American novel. Colonial New England writers had particular millennial motives to -467- privilege technological power in their writings, since they thought it a means of expediting the Christian Millennium. While the Puritan minister Increase Mather was denouncing 'vain romances,' meaning novels imported into the colonies, his Puritan cohort Edward Johnson, a Massachusetts town clerk and engineer, wrote The Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New-England (1653), a historical narrative in which the Christian army, called to the New World, prepares for the Second Coming of Christ by carving farms and villages from the North American wilds. Technology — of carpentry, smithing, masonry, oenology, and every branch of artisanry — becomes the means for the development of the millennial New Earth prophesied in the New Testament Book of Revelation.

Narrative in the form of the epic poem continued in the Revolutionary and Early National periods to be invested with technological themes. Joel Barlow's Vision of Columbus (1787) and his subsequent revised version, The Columbiad (1806), both advanced the idea of an imminent secular millennium achievable via technology. Barlow's envisioned American empire encompasses the North and South American continents united in a vast transportation and communications network of engineers' flood-proofed rivers and canals, and to that end the poet formed a friendship with the inventor Robert Fulton, with whom he planned a collaborative poem, 'The Canal: A Poem on the Application of Physical Science to