Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America by Cecelia Tichi

Abstract

704 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. By Cecelia Tichi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Pp. xvii + 310; illustrations, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). As the title suggests, Shifting Gears explores a rather abrupt cultural transition: from the organic, nature-centered romanticism of the 19th century to an engineering-oriented functionalism inspired by the “gearand -girder technology” whose dominance peaked during the early 20th century. Very much aware of the subsequent shift to information technology, with its own metaphorical extension into the culture, Ce­ celia Tichi sets out to reconstruct the tensions of the earlier shift to a machine-age culture as manifested in popular journalism, in ad­ vertising, in children’s books, in magazine articles and stories, and in the works of both popular and elite literary artists. To a degree her work, which covers the period from the 1890s to the 1920s, chron­ ologically extends the story of the relationship between technology and culture told by John F. Kasson in Civilizing the Machine (1976). Tichi, however, relies on a more eclectic array of nonliterary sources to construct her arguments. But in the final analysis she concentrates more narrowly on elite literary works. Although promising to explore the effect of gear-and-girder technology on “diverse areas of Amer­ ican culture, from skyscrapers and autos to popular media and the arts of the written word” (p. xiii), Tichi ultimately focuses on “Amer­ ican writers’ efforts to reinvigorate imaginative literature” (p. xv) in response to the challenge of the machine age. Americans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to Tichi, perceived a world not created by God but designed by man. Railway stations, bridges, office buildings, canals, exposition halls, and such unique structures as the Ferris wheel and the Eiffel Tower in­ troduced them to the concept of an engineered environment com­ posed of artificial assemblies of identical manufactured elements. Anyone might trace and comprehend the rational arrangements of gears, pistons, pulleys, and other parts in the machines that dynamized this environment. While small boys played with Erector sets, their elders consumed magazine fiction celebrating the engineer as an in­ dependent type whose functional vision encompassed all of society as an efficient machine of interlocking parts. Tichi’s discussions of such well-known figures as Edward Bellamy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, and Herbert Hoover gain authority within this larger context of popular culture—a context graphically suggested by an impressive sampling of advertisements, popular illustrations, and other printed ephemera. In contrasting the romantic and machine-age orientations, Tichi maintains that the former drew spiritual sustenance from an emo­ tional relationship with the surface of things, while the latter empha­ sized precise knowledge of internal structures and processes and celebrated the power to manipulate and transform a wholly material environment. She embodies the two positions in a pair of symbols, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 705 “Alexander’s bridge” and “Wright’s blocks.” The former, a vast web­ like structure, is described by Willa Cather (in her novel of that name) in terms that recall Kasson’s “technological sublime.” The eventual collapse of the improperly designed bridge romantically mirrors both the engineer-protagonist’s psychological tension and Cather’s own dis­ trust of a threatening new world. Frank Lloyd Wright, on the other hand, first discovered the primacy of inner structure and process over superficial exterior impressions by manipulating Froebel kindergar­ ten blocks as a child. Although these symbols—“Alexander’s bridge” and “Wright’s blocks”—remain awkward with each successive invo­ cation, Tichi scores a clever victory by arguing Wright’s affinity for the machine age in the face of his reputation as a romantic organicist. Art that was truly of the machine age, she maintains, did not represent the machine in graphic or verbal images but instead took on the internal qualities of mechanical form and process. While even Jack London and Frank Norris incorporated crude machine images in their naturalistic fiction (thereby providing evi­ dence of the unconscious cultural process of “shifting gears”), Tichi chooses to analyze John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and William Carlos Williams as true exemplars ofunromantic machine-age writing...