Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain by Heather Fielding

Abstract

Reviewed by: Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain by Heather Fielding Andrew Gaedtke Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain. Heather Fielding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 200. $99.99 (cloth); $80.00 (ebook). Heather Fielding’s Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain offers a rich account of modernist writers’ conceptions of narrative form and aesthetics in the machine age. In her illuminating discussions of the essays and fiction of Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West, Fielding demonstrates sustained efforts to formulate a theory of the novel in relation to the challenges and possibilities produced by modern media technologies. If middlebrow fiction and mass culture were thought to invite affective immersion and easy consumption, these theorists imagined an artistic form of the novel that would assert its own formal autonomy, keep the reader at a critical distance, and model synthetic cognitive processes at a time of information overload. Fielding’s most original contribution emerges in her claim that these conceptions of the novel were developed through comparisons to modern technology. In these theories, the novel should be regarded as autonomous such that its operations do not require the participation of the reader but function independently like modern machines. Fielding suggests that for Henry James the cinematic projector was the technological model for a narrative form that would mediate the pace, direction, and scope of the audience’s perception while foregrounding its own formal mediations. In Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–28), the telephone is the paradigmatic technology which establishes and interrupts informatic connections across space and time as a novel should. Wyndham Lewis and Rebecca West, Fielding argues, develop more abstract conceptions of technology as epistemic frameworks for knowledge production that guide their proposals for the artistic novel. Fielding provides a thorough guide to these and other modernist writers’ interventions in debates over the aesthetic and epistemological paths for the novel as well as modern understandings of technological media. [End Page 199] The cinematic eye is not subject to the audience’s control but mediates the movement of attention and the pace of information. Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903), Fielding argues, functions by imposing similar constraints; information is deferred or occluded to such an extent that it becomes fully eclipsed by the formal technique, such that the reader’s awareness is re-trained on the novel’s form. This is presented as a challenge to interpretations that see the reader’s lack of knowledge as correlative to the character’s lack of knowledge or to the protocols and prohibitions on explicit disclosures. While acknowledging that, “[a]s James puts it in one formulation, the point-of-view figure’s consciousness is what is projected onto the fictional scene,” Fielding argues that James’s novel and theory subordinate interest in subjectivity, character, and social protocols in favor of an extreme formalism that eclipses these potentially absorbing concerns (32). Her reading establishes persuasive links among James’s novel theory, his fiction, and his underestimated commentary on media technologies such as the projector. In Ford Madox Ford’s essays on the novel, information overload and a crisis of synthetic reason are the problems that the modern novel must stage and resolve. These problems and their technological manifestations are most clearly expressed in Parade’s End. Fielding convincingly shows how the telephone serves as an organizing principle of the tetralogy: telephone conversations are presented in fragments and separated by many pages, and this narrative technique becomes a figure for Christopher Tietjens’s failing efforts to establish cognitive links across the traumatizing time and space of the Great War. The difficulty of maintaining such connections is a challenge posed by modernity, and, one might think, it is a challenge that is also posed by Ford’s novel to the reader. However, against earlier theorists of literary impressionism, Fielding presents a theory of the novel that “pushes directly against such a vision of deep and necessary reader-text interaction” (63). For Fielding, the reader does not perform the work of recall, comparison, and synthesis; instead, “[t]he whole is there, and the fragments are connected—we just need to follow along as the novel carries...