to the smallest components and, working with a stopwatch, reconstituted work motions into the most efficient patterns. He developed a 'science' of efficient management and, as a result of a widely publicized court case, became a kind of media celebrity and initiated a Progressive Era national fad for efficiency, one that extended from high school curricula to home economics. Throughout American cul-476- ture, all the while, engineering was increasingly evident in bridges, tunnels, aquaducts, skyscrapers, and the figure of the engineer became the hero of boys' books, such as the Tom Swift series, of such toys as the Erector set, of best-selling novels like Richard Harding Davis's Soldiers of Fortune (1897), Rex Beach's The Iron Trail: An Alaskan Romance (1913), and Harold Bell Wright's The Winning of Barbara Worth (1911), which became a motion picture starring Ronald Colman. As Richard Harding Davis wrote, 'The civil engineer…is the chief civilizer of our century.'
Under the aegis of engineering, the American novel of the early twentieth century conceptually changed. The lineage of the narration yielded to one of construction, as such avant-garde novelists as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos reformulated the basis of the novel in accordance with the new paradigm of the engineered machine. Of course, readers, then as now, recognized certain traditional elements of the novel. Readers of Dos Passos's trilogy U.S.A. (The 42nd Parallel [1930,], 1919 [1932], The Big Money [1936]; collected 1937) encounter fictional characters whose lives can be followed throughout, just as Hemingway's In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises (1926) present the kinds of scenes and characterizations customary in fiction.
Yet the basis for novelistic design changes conceptually in the work of these two novelists, as the notion of fictional story yields to the engineering values of design and construction. The engineering value of efficiency, for instance, directly influenced Hemingway's much-discussed style. As a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star, he was tutored from a style sheet prepared at the height of the efficiency movement, its directives focused on short sentences and opening paragraphs, and on the elimination of adjectives. And one confronts that value in the opening pages of The Sun Also Rises, in which the narrator, Jake Barnes, repeatedly describes Robert Cohn in the adjective 'nice.' In college Cohn was 'a thoroughly nice boy…a nice boy, a friendly boy…who married the first girl who was nice to him.' Later, with the publication of Cohn's successful novel, says Jake, 'several women were nice to him….and he was not so simple, and he was not so nice.' One sees Hemingway wring multiple meanings from that one-syllable word, which ramifies to include purity, geniality, good manners, sexual favor, consideration for others — as if -477- Hemingway had moved resolutely through each dictionary definition for the one word. Like a fuel, the term 'nice' is utilized and reutilized until it is exhausted, and this becomes Hemingway's efficiency of diction.
Far from being a mere word game, this kind of verbal economy meant power, and Hemingway's characteristic declarative sentences became the equivalent of the engineer's steel beams. The Hemingway style is essentially the twentieth-century, machine-age diction and syntax advocated in The Elements of Style (1959), the rhetoric book for college students coauthored by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White. White attributed the following statement from the year 1919 to his coauthor: 'Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.' Vigor was the goal, achieved by the work or functioning of every word, with each to be considered a working component of an overall design. Hemingway's fiction is the exemplum of industrial-age writing.
In Dos Passos, too, the novel itself becomes a designed construction. Committed to the representation of twentieth-century American life in its sociocultural entirety, resolved to incorporate the diverse elements of popular culture from music to diners to train travel and movies, insistent upon a vertical cutaway view of caste and class, and determined to work on a continental scale, Dos Passos needed an innovative model for fiction. Lacking belief in an omniscient deity and inhabiting a modern world he believed to be loosed from traditional bonds of kinship and community, Dos Passos nonetheless felt committed to the all-encompassing fictional purview, the very one traditionally in accordance with the omniscient viewpoint. Had he proceeded to cast his novels from techniques of narrative omniscience, however, he would have found himself in an untenable state of artistic hypocrisy.
It was in machine technology that Dos Passos discovered the path out of his representational quandary. He found the structural paradigm for fiction in the complex machine. Dos Passos's genius lay in grasping the paradigmatic possibilities for fiction as these were displayed in machine parts. Seeing that he, like the engineer, could combine these component parts into an overall complex design, Dos Pas-478- Dos Pas- realized the opportunities for a new kind of fiction. It could be likened, say, to the structure of the automobile, with its electrical system, cooling system, braking system, engine, etc. Dos Passos organized his materials accordingly, systematizing them in subsystems within his panoramic design. The subjective consciousness would be presented in sections entitled 'The Camera Eye,' while biographies of representative, prominent Americans constituted another system (the efficiency expert Frederick Taylor was one biographical subject, along with Henry Ford, the Wright brothers, the silent-film star Rudolph Valentino, the dancer Isadora Duncan, and numerous others). Dos Passos's fictional characters constituted yet another subsystem, all of them American social types, as if prefabricated parts in an off-the-shelf inventory of the national population. A fourth system, the 'Newsreels,' included popular songs and slogans, together with newspaper headlines Dos Passos clipped (again, with the precedent of the prefabricated part assembled on site) and formed into a montage intended to capture the temper of the time. All these were coordinated within the novel as a whole, the text in its entirety a complex machine.
Readers of Dos Passos learn virtually immediately that this writer found corporate capitalism and its vast industries anathema to human interests. He detested powerful organizations of the corporate state with a vehemence matched, say, by that revealed in Frank Norris's The Octopus. Dos Passos's hostility, for instance, toward the corporate titan Henry Ford is palpable and, together with the kinds of antitechnological imagery noted earlier in this discussion, would seem to locate the author of U.S.A. as a novelist locked in firm opposition to technology.
It is, however, in the structure of his texts that Dos Passos reveals his inadvertent compliance with the machine age, just as Hemingway's novel about American expatriates of the 'lost generation' proves in its very sentence structure to be consonant with its industrial moment although it shows no more overt technology in the fictional scenes than a bus and a fly rod.
From these examples, in fact, it seems possible to hearken back to the mid-nineteenth century to ask whether Moby-Dick, whose author served a short stint in an engineering course, may have augured the industrial-age novel in ways we have failed to appreciate. Recent -479- work on the insurgence of an industrial economy in the midnineteenth-centuryUnited States has opened literary study to questions about the ways in which the canonical writers of the American Renaissance were participants in the newer means of production rapidly supplanting agriculture. It is possible now to notice that Melville's roll call of production workers on the whaleship compares them to 'the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads,' and to speculate that Moby-Dick not only shows the factory ship processing whales into oil but also discloses the ways in which the literary raw material is processed into a finished product, a symbol. The cetological chapters, 'Extracts,' 'Cetology,' the chapters on representations of whales, become, in this light, the writer's raw material that he converts, in full view of the reader, into the literary symbol. Viewed in this way, it becomes clear once again that technology bears a very complicated relation to the novel and the novelist, that antitechnological discursive remarks and negative images cannot, by themselves, suffice to answer hard critical questions about the part technology plays in the American novel.
To discuss the relation of technology to the novel is to understand that in any given era there exists a dominant technology that defines or redefines the human role in relation to the environment, that within the span of some three centuries technological orientation has shifted from a technology of visible moving parts, which is to say the technology Pound understood as one of gears and girders, to an electrical technology of broadcast radio (which Stanley Elkin exploits in The Dick Gibson Show [1973]) and thence to the micro-circuitry in which the cathode-ray screen has instigated fictional innovation. Bearing in mind that the history of American fiction is correlative with the history of technological development, it is necessary to indicate the ways in which broadcast television is currently affecting the American novel.
The novel itself has taken up arms against television, notably in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1950), which pits a totalitarian television culture against one of books and learning, and more
