Modernist Fiction and News: Representing Experience in the Early Twentieth Century by David Rando

Abstract

Reviewed by: Modernist Fiction and News: Representing Experience in the Early Twentieth Century by David Rando Mark S. Morrisson (bio) MODERNIST FICTION AND NEWS: REPRESENTING EXPERIENCE IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY, by David Rando. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 208 pp. $80.00. That we live in an "information age" has been repeated so often it has lost some of its force to impress or disturb. Yet terms such as "personal," "human experience," "memory," and even "history" are still troubled by the possibilities of an abundance of information [End Page 452] almost beyond our comprehension. In 1985, a character in Don DeLillo's White Noise could smugly proclaim, "[Y]ou are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that."1 Twenty years later, the futurist prophet of a technological singularity, Ray Kurzweill, announced with zeal that rapidly accelerating technological change would "rupture the fabric of human history."2 It goes without saying that the media contribute greatly to our information saturation, shaping our consumption of information, data, and news. But media members themselves must constantly adapt to technology-driven changes. The impact of the twenty-four-hour cable news cycle on our civil society seems almost a quaint concern in the face of the blogosphere, social-media-driven lives, and an internet accessed by more than a billion people, downloading perhaps as much as two hundred terabytes of information per second. And, for the first time since the seventeenth century, the very survival of print media is truly in question. But concern about the impact of media-driven information on human experience is not unique to the internet age. In his thought-provoking monograph Modernist Fiction and News, David Rando reminds us that "[t]he early twentieth century was the first period to face the impossibility of adequately storing, remembering, and prioritizing the avalanche of information that new recording technologies and mass communication networks pressed upon consciousness, thereby altering not only human experience but also reality itself" (1). Newspapers were a major component of the modernist period's proliferation of information. While European newspapers date back to the seventeenth century, by the modernist era, news barons such as Lord Northcliffe and William Randolph Hearst had transformed them utterly into enormous institutions, on a scale that would have been unimaginable even a century earlier. According to Rando, Northcliffe fancied that his publishing empire might "extend its purview to life as a whole" (2),3 and he argues that modernist writers understood that the rapidly changing media of their era fundamentally challenged humans' abilities to process experience. The scope of information and the rapidity with which it can be shared has changed vastly since the modernist era, but Rando passionately and convincingly proclaims that this modernist response offers our era something important. Rather than falling into simplistic, dated binaries such as literature versus journalism or high culture versus mass culture, Rando accepts as a given that the news media weighed on modernists as they sought a role for the novel in twentieth-century culture. With his stylish and lucid prose, Rando then traces this concern through classics of modernist difficulty—Virginia Woolf's "Sympathy" and "The Mark on the Wall," Joyce's Finnegans Wake, John Dos Passos's U.S.A., and Gertrude Stein's Everybody's Autobiography and Wars I Have Seen.4 [End Page 453] Difficulty, then, does not become the mark of high culture but, rather, a way of responding to informational overload. Rando's interpretive framework is largely based on Walter Benjamin's diagnosis of a shift at the heart of modernity from Erfahrung, which emphasizes the accumulation of lived experience, to Erlebnis, "'immediate'" or "'living'" experience (1).5 Readers of the JJQ will be interested to note Rando's emphasis on Finnegans Wake, rather than the more commonly explored Ulysses, as a response to the news—in this case, to scandal-reporting. Rando reads the Wake's episodic structure as elaborating on the possibilities of Benjamin's understanding of anecdote. Seen through this lens, the experience of scandal animates the Wake, which "springs scandal upon its readers anecdotally, in such a way that facts and actors remain primarily elusive but something of the experience of...