Literature and the Taste of Knowledge by Michael Wood

Abstract

2o8 Reviews associated with the railway,which frequently provided itssubject-matter and, in the early practice of fastening amovie camera to the frontof amoving train, its technolo gical correlate. Daly moves into theconsideration of cinema via a sharp and suggestive reading of the convergence of trains and movies inRudyard Kipling's strange story 'Mrs Bathurst', inwhich a South African widower is tormented by the sight of a woman of his acquaintance caught on a documentary film stepping out of a train inLondon. Against the background of theBoer War, which turned somany of the departing soldiers thatwere filmed into ghosts, Kipling's own story itselfbecomes a kind of flickering 'Boerograph' (a popular alternative name for the cinema during the South African war). The last two of the book's fivechapters take us briskly through to the end of the twentieth century. The emphasis increasingly is not on the agitated, anxious, time pestered railway body of thenineteenth century,but on the sexualized body induced by cinema. Chapter 4 charts the appearance and ramification of 'It'-charisma, ani mal magnetism, or sex appeal-through an analysis of the successful novel of the same name, by Elinor Glyn, and subsequent filmstarringClara Bow that appeared in I926-7. Here Daly's leading hypothesis thatcultural formsprovide a kind of coer cive training for modernity seems to lose something of its force.The suggestion that 'themachinic body can be a body forpleasure, and that industrialmodernity can be, among other things,breathtaking fun' (p. I02) makes one wonder what theremight be to object to or be uneasy about. Ballard's Crash, the subject of the final chapter, providentially brings together the themes of the book, involving as itdoes both the literal collision of bodies and machines, and the creation of a specifically machinic sexuality. Daly concludes that,where earliermechanical fictionsoffered humans the consolation ofhair's-breadth escapes from the machine, here we are able to feelbraced inour humanity only because of our thorough engagement by the cinema machine. It is fittingthat thebook should end with Ballard's novel, since this is itselfa book of collisions and convergences rather thanof systematic continuities, itscharacteristic mode being the jump-cut rather than the long-shot or even the lap-dissolve. Slim, but brimming with ideas and insights,Daly's book is a distinguished contribution to theunderstanding of the complex human relationship with machines. BIRKBECK,UNIVERSITY OF LONDON STEVENCONNOR Literature and theTaste ofKnowledge. By MICHAEL WOOD. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005. X+205 PP. ?I4.95. ISBN 978-0-52I-60653-0. Michael Wood's critical forte is to communicate the readerly experience, or at least that of an unusually appreciative reader. Having lived through an age of theory, and being himself philosophically literate, he is alert to conceptual questions while keeping faithwith literature as a primary mode of thinking.His book offers some extended reflection on fundamental questions, both ancient and timely, about the meaningfulness and truth-claims of imaginative literature. Controversially, he puts pressure on thedevice of personification inhis basic claim that literature not just is,but possesses, a formof knowledge. The reader isperhaps never very sure in how metaphorical a spirit to take this claim but that very fact allows it, like the literary text itself, to act as an exploratory means. Similarly, rather than pursue a systematic argument of his own,Wood often prefers tohold up to the light the remarks of others treating them inmuch theway he treats literaryquota tions.As hemodifies and massages in thisway, literature comes tobe respected as an unknowable knower in something of theway that living persons might be, whether to others or to themselves. A person doubtless knows in the sense of having a bank MLR, I03. I, 2oo8 209 of experience fromwhich to act, but not necessarily in a sense that could be readily articulated. Or if the person were articulate, the articulation would not necessarily correspond towhat isactually known. So too, Wood's ear isconstantly alert to ranges ofmeaning in the textwhich escape both the reader's paraphrase and the author's likely conception. For Wood, a significantwork of literature not only shows rather than tells,but knows more than itshows. The forceof this is evident in the firstchapter,which...