Narrative Machine: The Naturalist, Modernist, and Postmodernist Novel by Zena Meadowsong

Abstract

Reviewed by: Narrative Machine: The Naturalist, Modernist, and Postmodernist Novel by Zena Meadowsong Dan Colson (bio) Narrative Machine: The Naturalist, Modernist, and Postmodernist Novel, by Zena Meadowsong. New York: Routledge, 2019. xiii + 253 pp. Cloth, $140.00; Ebook, $140.00. In the opening paragraph of “The Mechanics of Fiction,” Frank Norris claims “of all the arts . . . novel-writing is the least mechanical” (147). He then proceeds, for some eight pages, to outline novels’ mechanics— the “wires and wheels and cogs and springs of the affair”— suggesting that “no work is so . . . artistic that it cannot be improved by systematizing” (151, 153). “Defective machinery” will leave an author with “hastily constructed [End Page 228] boilers” that “will flounder” when “the storm” comes (152). This mechanistic perspective on writing may seem strange coming from a writer so fixated on “romance,” but Norris is equally as fascinated with machines. Here, he figures the internal workings of novels as constituent parts comprising an aesthetic whole. Elsewhere, we find the tentacled railroad, the cacophonous machinery of the Little Dipper mine, and the ceaseless chattering of the telegraphic stock ticker. His era’s technologies saturate Norris’s work, even, it appears, creeping into his understanding of craft. Zena Meadowsong’s Narrative Machine: The Naturalist, Modernist, and Postmodernist Novel intervenes at this precise point: the interstices of mechanization and narrative. In it, Meadowsong reconsiders machines’ role in not only naturalist novels but modern and postmodern novels as well in order to make a two-pronged argument. She unearths a long trajectory of what she calls “the monster machine” (7) and simultaneously pays “specific attention to the narrative consequences of mechanization” (15). In other words, her text offers both a fresh reading of machines’ representations and an intriguing claim that these machines determine the narrative form of the texts in which they appear. Her exploration of mechanical monstrosities stretches from the 1870s to the present; from England to France to the United States; from Émile Zola to Thomas Pynchon. Along the way, she offers readings of novels from each of three major literary periods, sampling a veritable who’s who of literature from the last 150 years. In her three chapters on naturalism, she analyzes novels by Zola, Thomas Hardy, Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, George Moore, and George Gissing. In the modernism section, she discusses works by D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf. And her concluding chapters on postmodernism examine novels by J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Georges Perec. This expansive scope— stretching over multiple literary movements, more than a dozen decades, and the Atlantic Ocean— is both a strength and a weakness of Narrative Machine. On one hand, it allows the book to provide a broad perspective on the role machines play in fiction from across almost the entire span of modernity. With a nearly audacious disregard for periodization, Meadowsong challenges traditional boundaries, which positions her to trace an evolution in literary form that would otherwise be impossible to see. On the other hand, only a few novels receive extensive analysis. When the text dedicates substantial space to a single novel, its claims are incisive and compelling, but addressing more than 25 [End Page 229] novels in such a short space (the naturalism section, for instance, covers 12 novels, though it runs fewer than 60 pages) leaves some of the book’s arguments underdeveloped: the central premises of its readings are at times ingenious, but some of the book’s analysis remains more tantalizing than convincing. Running through each of these readings we find the text’s two intertwined argumentative threads, as Meadowsong identifies the manner in which the novels’ various monstrous machines shape their narrative form. While her reading of machines distinguishes itself admirably from previous treatments of industry’s and technology’s thematic and symbolic appearance in novels, Narrative Machine’s most ambitious contribution comes from its formalist approach— the insistence that machines operate not simply as content in these texts but that representations of the mechanical shape, distort, and determine novels’ form. The nature of this determining influence transforms as both technology and literature evolve, yet Meadowsong finds...