Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain, by Heather Fielding; Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel, by Angela Frattarola

Abstract

The juxtaposition of the two works under review isolates a spirited tension in the literary critical field. Although the two books survey roughly congruent sets of canonical, primarily British modernist authors, each tracks a starkly divergent legacy for literary modernism than the other—so much so, in fact, that each stands at a point almost exactly opposite the other within the present coordinates of modernist literary studies. One book seeks to recuperate the efforts of some modernist authors to resist having their works subsumed into the experience of their readers, while the other aims to demonstrate how some modernist authors created works that modeled heightened forms of receptivity for their readers. While one holds up the aesthetic autonomy guaranteed by formal narrative techniques meant to distance readers from texts, the other prizes the inclusiveness promised by formal narrative techniques meant to encourage attunement between texts and readers. Both books provide compelling localized readings and cogent synthetic arguments about modernist production and reception, but they diverge at fundamental junctures about the significance of their claims in the context of present-day critical and theoretical debates. Were this a duel, they would have taken their allotted number of paces and be readying their aim.Yet this standoff is not a duel, but something more like an effect of the critical field. In Heather Fielding’s Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain and Angela Frattarola’s Modernist Soundscapes, we are presented with two vigorous arguments for the value of literary writing, which in each case is located in its ability to outline relations not yet or not fully evident in the present, its potential to extend a sense of how things might be other than they are. Even as they are quite at odds in how they see this value manifested in the works they consider and to what end, both see this literary value as tightly bound up with technology. As a marker both for specific mechanical or electrical devices and for an overall system of applied knowledge, technology here offers the novel a chance to be and do otherwise, for it enables authors to break with established or dominant representational modes and develop innovative formal procedures that could alter the relationship of the literary text to the act of reading. And it is this relationship that turns out to be the big crux. Both books locate the novel and reading within a wider domain of knowledge production in the (broadly construed) modernist era, but also keep their attention trained on narrowly defined literary relations. In Fielding’s account, modernist writers look to the machine for a model of how novels could operate of their own momentum and thereby actively deny readers the chance to establish emotional and experiential attachments to literary texts: intellectual detachment, managed by formal control, is key. In Frattarola’s telling, sound reproduction technologies suggest to modernist writers how to capitalize on the immersive character of sound, but also on the new qualities of auditory and linguistic perception these devices promote: intimate communication, animated by formal technique, is paramount. As different as the two books finally are, then, they tacitly agree on the issue about which they reach divergent conclusions. Fielding notes the “intractability of the problem of reading” (7) for modernist authors made anxious by text and reader moving into ever closer proximity, but Frattarola observes how “modern novelists tend to use auditory perception to bridge the distance between subject and object” (4–5); yet there is more at stake in this polarity than simply assessing the merits of one critical tendency against those of the other. For what the two authors together make clear is the persistent ambivalence through the twentieth century about connectivity, a word that indeed appears in the two books, in both the humane and mechanical senses of the capacity for interconnectedness. And with the stress each book places on the integral relationship between literary value and technology, it is not hard to recognize how this ambivalence about connectivity speaks very much to present-day conditions in the literary critical field, most notably to political and ethical debates about the experience of reading in the postmachine “device age.”Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain is an exacting study. Writing a book about authors who actively worked to frustrate their readers is a tough assignment, but Fielding admirably succeeds in carrying her own readers through this patient analysis of the formal strategies and critical theories the four writers (Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West) she analyzes developed to mount a “resistance to reading” (15). Starting in part from Friedrich Kittler’s notion that technological media in the discourse network he names “modernism” were designed to store rather than to express, she mounts a sustained retrieval of the strain of modernist novel theory claiming that works should not be given over to experience, but instead be apprehended as aesthetic wholes and as intellectual objects. The book falls neatly into two parts. In the first two chapters, Fielding explores how specific technologies provided modernist writers with comparative models for how to defend their works from the “bad habits of middlebrow readers, who manhandle novels to produce desired emotions” (87). In turn, the final two chapters consider how authors could claim the “epistemological and social implications” (87) of the novel once it was understood to operate within the category of technology itself. By doing so, new ways of perceiving and knowing the world might overcome the affective jumble brought about by “information overload.” In the first chapter, “Point of View as Projector,” Fielding considers how the late novels of Henry James found the author working through the “aesthetic potential of techniques of perceptual management” (56). Drawing usefully on Jonathan Crary’s analysis of perception in modern culture, she traces how James came to construct narrative point of view as something more like a projecting apparatus than a window, a lesson she sees him as having gotten from the example of magic lanterns, cameras, and film projectors. Instead of insight and clarity, the reader of a scene finds form projected on top of content, a shadowed image or outline in place of sharp delineation. For James, this method pointed to aesthetic autonomy, or “a condition achieved by imagining point of view not as a clear portal through which a reader sees a scene but rather as a device for managing a reader’s view” (57). At its most intense, this technique functions like compression (although Fielding does not call it this), as the narrative “result omits information but produces a condensed visual picture, an aesthetic whole” (52). Constrained by absent content from determining the depth of view, the reader must instead take the text as it presents itself.In “What Carries the Novel,” the second chapter, Fielding examines Ford Madox Ford’s use of the telephone as a figure for reimagining “connected thought” in what he believed to be the modern era’s state of “information overload” (65). While he associated the telephone with irruptive violence, Ford also registered its ability to unify. Fielding very convincingly traces how, in Parade’s End (1924–28), Ford rejects “a vision of deep and necessary reader-text interaction” (63) in favor of a form of writing that worked “to connect its fragments as though it had a telephone line running through its interior” (62). This mode aimed to create its own momentum by ushering readers onward through scattered narrative fragments, often of the same scene but relayed from two different vantages. With the novel carrying them forward, readers could not become distracted with projecting their experiences on the text, but instead became aware of the connection of dispersed fragments in the unified aesthetic whole. Fielding suggests that the “liveness” of the novel turned on this relationship of distraction and connection, that the reader less sidetracked by the buzzing routine of modern life was in a better position to recognize the novel’s “potential for recuperating connected thought and rejuvenating meaningful communication” (65). For Ford, the telephone offered the best model for this potential because its system of disparate points, all connected by lines, gave at once the impression of modern fragmentation and latent wholeness. Staying close to Ford in this view of the telephone, Fielding never really probes what the point-to-point model of communication he takes for granted might also need to assume about mediation and social totality. There is no party (or trunk) line here, or even a switchboard operator, let alone mention of the General Post Office’s control of the network, but only one voice at this end of the line and another at the that end. This chapter is absorbing, but it would have been useful every once in a while to put Ford on hold, in order that Fielding more finely distinguish her critical voice from his authorial voice.A similar qualm arises in relation to the final section of the book, where Fielding examines how Wyndham Lewis and Rebecca West “theoriz[ed] the novel not as a homologue to a particular device but as an integral part of technology itself ” (87). These are challenging chapters, the one on West in particular demonstrating a deft skill in constructing its critical narrative; but like the first two, they both remain very close to pure explication, such that it is not always apparent where Fielding lands in regard to the ideas of the authors in her study. Although it is certainly refreshing that she is not prone to rhetorical bombast or continual self-positioning, a reader might wish at times for a bit less critical deference to the framing premises of the works under consideration. This point is perhaps most acute in the third chapter, in which Fielding argues that Wyndham Lewis saw his theory of distancing readers as a theory of technology. For him (and the other authors she surveys), technology offered a way to “imagin[e] how the novel can escape from the reader’s volition, and thus maintain distance and autonomy from the reader” (92). She is an indulgent reader of Lewis’s caustic assaults on middlebrow readers, as well as of his pamphleteering, where satirical ideas had an energy that always seemed to flag dramatically when put into practice in his novels. In his estimation, the ideal novel was one that could be read in an instant, as a “concrete, intellectual object” (102), while the ideal reader would function like a machine operator, unattached to and without feelings about the novel (as literary genre or aesthetic form). Fielding perceives utopian potential in this vision, since it reimagines what novel reading is and how a future intelligentsia might be configured: “[Lewis] uses novel-reading to reinvent the mechanical worker and the mechanical worker to reinvent novel-reading, mutually redefining art and machine” (107). She presents this process of “reinvention” as the pedagogical ambition of Lewis’s cultural criticism but does not say much more about its potential effects. At the end of the chapter, she notes that to “understand the novel as a machine is a polemical, not a descriptive act” (116). That is undoubtedly correct. Given the possible implications of Lewis’s “utopian” vision, less for the novel than for middlebrow or “common” readers, one nonetheless would like a more direct sense of what she understands the stakes of this polemical act to be.The book’s final chapter and conclusion follow Rebecca West into fascinating territory, where the novel becomes “a device for gathering and organizing knowledge” and a “tool for information collection” (118). Beginning with “The Strange Necessity,” her famous long essay published in 1928, West sought to move the novel toward “usable knowledge” (118) of the world and away from experience and, in this, to see its “primary effect as epistemological rather than affective” (119). Unlike the other writers Fielding examines, she is not averse to experience, as long as it is transformed into knowledge. It is the novel, West believes, that can best effect this transformation, in the manner of a scientific experiment. Its formalism keeps the novel separate from life, while still enabling it to provide ordered knowledge about life. Fielding shows how, decades later, West somewhat regretfully came to see her essay as a precursor to Marshall McLuhan’s arguments in favor of interactivity, which she understood to “replace specialization and depth of knowledge with an economy of participation” (120). For Fielding, this recognition is a fitting summation to her overall thesis in the book that, in fact, the modernist struggle between form and life was waged over the idea of interactivity and the implications of connectivity. Although her analogy to the scientific experiment leads in several places to the conflation of information and knowledge, this final point about the presumed virtues of a notion of participation that is at once grossly distended and dismally attenuated is a good and important one. At the close of this commendable study, Fielding looks back at the work of the authors she appraises and provocatively finds “a specifically modernist moment, where technology and technics offer something other than a model of interactivity to fiction” (143).Modernist Soundscapes has no truck with this antitheatrical understanding of literary works, for it claims modernist novelists, in their attention to new forms of perceptual sensitivity, wished ultimately to bridge the distance between subject and object. In this desire, they believed the interplay of reader and novel to be distinctly and laudably participatory. The book is less interested in novels where various auditory technologies can be found than in those in which formal representations of characters listening become the means to encourage readers to listen. It argues that technologies invented in the final quarter of the nineteenth century changed auditory perception; these changes then enabled modernist writers to “conceive of audition as allowing greater receptivity to the other” and, in doing so, to create “new modes for connectivity and new forms of intimacy through the ear” (26). Throughout Modernist Soundscapes, Frattarola places a strong emphasis on the association of listening with “intimacy,” which, while never defined, seems to indicate being in a state of unalienated and empathetic connectedness with others. While the book is not always as careful or precise in its arguments as it might have been, it displays a fine awareness of textual surfaces and formal linguistic features that yields insights that are occasionally quite striking and always rewarding.As Fielding did in her first two chapters, Frattarola uses the link between a single author and a single technology to set up each of her chapters: Dorothy Richardson and silent film, Virginia Woolf and the phonograph, James Joyce and headphones, Jean Rhys and gramophone recordings, and Samuel Beckett and tape. This structure can lead to some very interesting local observations—as is the case in the Richardson and Woolf chapters—but too often in this book one comes across establishing claims such as this one: “Although there is no evidence that Beckett heard musique concrète, he devoted a great deal of his time to listening to records and playing the piano” (142). None of this is false, but it is at best thin, and much more could have been said (based on Beckett’s letters, for example) that would have provided solid grounds for her subsequent claims. Later in the same chapter, one reads that Watt is “filled with digressions that resemble magnetic tape loops” (148), an association that may seem appealing enough, except that magnetic tape of the type invoked here had not yet been invented when the novel was written. Although the Beckett chapter does not mention translation or autotranslation, it finds its footing toward the end, when it analyzes the “hundreds of repeated phrases framed around the act of saying” (155) that especially mark The Unnamable. While the link remains in need of full justification, there is something in this detail about “the act of saying” that exists in the ambit of the manipulated “organic sounds” of musique concrète, but it is not one to be worked through by analogy alone.The back-to-back chapters on Woolf and Joyce revolve around the ethical relations of individual subjectivity and shared belonging. Calling Woolf “a perfect case study for the modernist tendency to aestheticize real-world sound” (69), Frattarola contends that the author’s frequent use of onomatopoeia functions like a phonograph, as a device for capturing the sounds of reality. By creating such “auditory narratives” filled with the verbal markers of the “background noises of the soundscape,” Woolf presents readers with representations of a shared auditory world, at once the domain of “communal connections and private individuality” (70). For Frattarola, this technique enabled her vividly to depict the chorus as a social formation that by necessity relied on the individuality of its constituent members. This positive emphasis on the chorus she hears in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and (most demonstrably) The Waves (1931) gives way, however, to misgivings about collective entanglements, as Woolf became more and more anxious about the political energies of the late 1930s. These misgivings would color the sonic world of her final novel: “the onomatopoeia of Between the Acts tends to stand alone and intrude on her narrative, demanding the reader’s attunement to the noises’ texture and resonance; sounds begin to disrupt semantic signification and draw attention to the acoustic qualities of words” (88). This late preference for sound over sense, Frattarola maintains, offered a check on the domineering imperatives to unitary meaning found in masculine, patriotic, and militaristic discourses. This critical note carries her into the Joyce chapter, where she reads his innovative forms of interior monologue as an example of what she calls “auditory cosmopolitanism,” or “a cosmopolitan inner speech that transgresses the boundaries of Dublin and Irish culture” (109). While this understanding of Joyce as ethically above or beyond the parochialisms of his background (particularly its nationalism) is an old one, Frattarola provides a new twist, by linking cosmopolitanism to the auditory “headspace” that headphones bring into being. Rather than the conventional image of headphones isolating listeners from the world around them, she instead argues that they allow for other voices to enter private acoustic space. This mix then fosters the “attempts to identify with multiple subject positions and interests” (112) that she associates with cosmopolitan receptivity. In a last turn, she sees this process as fundamentally akin to the pedagogical ethics of the reading process, one that she likewise perceives as the infusion of other voices into the stream of consciousness.The strongest chapter of the book, “Inner Speech as a Gramophone Record,” deals with Jean Rhys, whose lean, cutting depictions of the social world are shown to have had remarkably consistent auditory properties across the span of her writing career. Frattarola focuses primarily on the novels Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight, but includes several very compelling readings of Rhys’s early stories in The Left Bank, where she finds the key to the author’s subsequent analyses of social space in some of its more lupine configurations. For it is in these short stories, many of which describe the Parisian café scene, that Rhys hits on the linkage of interior monologue and popular music, as a way to demonstrate how “the inner speech of her characters is mechanized and infiltrated by cultural, often antagonistic, voices” (117). With this technique, Frattarola argues, Rhys established a blurred soundscape of unthinking cruelty and fleeting tenderness, in which “bourgeois readers [could] feel as though they are eavesdropping on a voice and tune that both repulses and entices them.” This simultaneous pull of aversion and attraction is central to how Frattarola understands Rhys’s milieu, not only the slumming interlopers, but increasingly the female protagonists whose own interior monologues have become saturated with bits of song lyrics and a thousand casual slights. In her reading, this spinning inner recording possesses an edgy, resistant quality for these women, a purposeful use of cultural commodities to redefine the strictures that have been placed on them. This effect is most evident in Sasha, the narrator of Good Morning, Midnight, whose voice repeats and replays precisely in order to deny the acquisitive gaze of those around her: “Rhys purposely portrays Sasha as a bohemian, who makes her life into art but does not produce artwork that can be consumed. The artwork that is to be consumed is the novel’s interior monologue itself—Sasha’s voice” (137). While it is difficult to accept such a fully affirmative reading of this novel, it is nevertheless encouraging to realize the extent to which critical appraisals of Rhys’s protagonists can now go beyond diagnosis to broach such issues. In Frattarola’s telling, “the interior monologue form gives these characters a voice that demands to be heard. As we read these voices, the inner speech of another penetrates our consciousness” (140). Here is a scene of the kind of “intimacy” she associates with listening, one where, she claims, we are offered a sense that things could be otherwise.With Rhys as our guide, however, it is possible to recognize that this condition of intimacy is bound up with the mercenary character of modern social relations. In both of the engaging critical studies under review, technology is seen to provide authors with the opportunity to make the novel something other than what it has been, precisely in order to alter the relationship of the literary text to the act of reading. In this, each book has much to recommend it. At the same time, it must be noted that this crucial relationship of the literary text and the act of reading is not a one-way path, but, as Raymond Williams (1977: 87) puts it, a “complex and interrelated process of limits and pressures.” Rather than interactivity, the process Williams defines here is determination. This notion allows for a much fuller analysis of the highly relative characteristics of literary production and reception, not least because it positions these characteristics within a much wider field of communications. In this regard, the world of modernist writing and reading speaks forcefully, if also not always exactly, to the contemporary literary critical field. Fielding and Frattarola extend two responses to an underlying concern, for they offer opposed defenses of literary value at a moment when practical conditions of access are markedly changing the experience and meaning of reading. The human actors behind the “device age” may mount a “resistance to reading” in the very forms of reading their algorithms have produced and reward, while also ferociously monetizing the kinds of interactivity that may once have promised some measure of real fulfillment. Do data analytics represent one mode of both the subsumption and synthesis of the machinelike autonomy and readerly interactivity under consideration in these two studies? In the world of today, where the relationship between literary value and technology remains as dynamic as it was in the modernist period, one need only be reminded of this dominant meaning of “connectivity” to find confirmation of Rhys’s acid prescience.