Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain by Joseph Drury

Abstract

Reviewed by: Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain by Joseph Drury Mark Blackwell Joseph Drury. Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain. Oxford: Oxford, 2017. Pp. xii + 269. $85. Novel Machines begins with a tour-de-force reading of Cervantes’s Don Quixote that sets the terms for the ensuing chapters. Drury proposes that, to a degree heretofore unacknowledged, eighteenth-century British novels are both about machines and about narrative fiction as a kind of machine. Thus his set-piece analysis of the ways in which Quixote’s encounter with such “relatively new technologies” as windmills and fulling-hammers throws a wrench in “the ‘ill-founded machine’ [la máqina mal fundado] of books of chivalry” cleverly intimates that from the very beginning the modern novel developed through a self-conscious engagement with companion technologies. After an introduction that situates the project amidst recent work on the novel, on technology, and on narrative form, the first chapter, “Narratives and Machines in Enlightenment Britain,” explores “the emergence of the eighteenth-century idea of the narrative machine.” Drury aims to reconstruct a theory of mechanical form that will counter the Romantic organicism privileged in Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp. Tracing the idea of the mechanics of narrative from Bacon, to Dryden, Dennis, and the Royal Society of the 1660s, and then to Addison’s early eighteenth-century hostility to rule-bound notions of literary form, Drury works to link developing ideas about the machinery of narrative to “the broader history of Britain’s industrial and technological development.” In a book whose richness of evidence and scrupulousness of argument are generally unimpeachable, Drury’s thin substantiation of the claim that period writers and critics increasingly viewed literary art through the lens of mechanics comes as a disappointment. The notion that, as the eighteenth century unfolds, thinking about narrative and thinking about technology are inextricably imbricated underpins Drury’s project, but the book devotes a mere four pages to canvassing the evidence that the language of mechanics infused period ideas about the work of writing, and thus does not adequately support the sweeping claim that follows: “Throughout the eighteenth century, then, narrative was often understood to be a machine [End Page 71] made up of a limited number of component parts that could be combined according to a set of established scientific rules” (my italics). Nonetheless, the rest of the chapter, especially its description of the novel as a “model of human life” (Fielding’s term) analogous to other period simulations, such as automata, is compelling, as is Drury’s discussion of the novel as a kind of tool that, like the “machinery Crusoe uses to gain control over his island,” might provide knowledge about human nature while also refining the passions. The four subsequent chapters focus on specific narrative innovations that serve as case studies illustrating Drury’s broader argument that fiction is a kind of machine constructed to address particular social, moral, and technical problems. Chapter 2, “Libertines and Machines in Love and Excess,” reads Haywood’s novel as an intervention in period debates about the human machine, arguing that she renders her female protagonists “thinking machines” whose actions are determined by external causes but whose long periods of “anguished deliberation” distinguish them from the “libertine machines” with whom they contend by demonstrating that they have—and must learn to properly exercise—will. Drury argues that Haywood articulates a “compatibilist position that the automatism of desire does not deprive the individual of either freedom of action or responsibility.” Unlike her men, Haywood’s women—and her readers—must “fram[e] their wills to the local, contingent norms which must be observed if they are to survive and flourish in their particular environment.” Drury embeds Haywood’s work in debates about the implications of mechanical materialism and then links the “pattern of arousal and deferral that structures [her] novels” to the development of domestic fiction later in the century. Chapter 3, “Realism’s Ghosts: Science and Spectacle in Tom Jones,” builds a reading of Fielding’s novel on the unlikely foundation of a few allusions to John Freke, a natural philosopher and controversialist who...