The Flying Machine and Modern Literature by Laurence Goldstein

Abstract

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. In the most important sections of her work, Tichi demonstrates that Dos Passos acted as an engineer in designing the interlocking assem­ blies of parts (“Newsreels,” “The Camera Eye” sections, etc.) that com­ pose his machine-like trilogy U.S.A.; that Hemingway applied to prose the values of the efficiency movement; and that Williams constructed what he himself referred to as “machines made of words.” Though perhaps flawed by what is in the final analysis too literary a focus, Shifting Gears is a provocative work offering original insights on the nature of the relationship between technology and culture. Jeffrey L. Meikle Dr. Meikle is associate professor of American studies and art history at the University of Texas at Austin. The Flying Machine and Modern Literature. By Laurence Goldstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Pp. xv + 253; illus­ trations, notes, bibliography, index. $27.50. This study emerged, Laurence Goldstein writes, from his desire to examine the rhetorical similarities between romantic poems addressed to birds and modern poems on the airplane. From this almost purely literary concern he has moved—to the benefit ofall who are interested in the relations of technology and society—to a consideration of “the complex transactions between the dreamers, makers and landmarks of human flight.” His journey takes him from the Daedalus-Icarus myth to the moon landings; landmarks along the way include Leonardo da Vinci, Wells, the Wright brothers/Kitty Hawk, World Wars I and II, 706 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Lindbergh, and the beginnings of space flight. A careful reading of a wide range of texts is combined with an imaginative and scholarly ex­ amination of human aspirations and motivations that illuminates the place of the flying machine in history. Evidence presented is both pro­ vocative and compelling in support of Goldstein’s belief that a con­ tinuing, closer “interaction of art and science in the field of aerial technology” will be a major force in shaping human destiny. The most interesting aspect of the book is illustration and clarifica­ tion of the opposing attitudes toward flight, admiration first for birds and then for men who fly on the one hand, and fear of the conse­ quences of flight on the other, a reflection of the conflict between spirit and body that has been evident from earliest human history. Thus, Leonardo da Vinci celebrated the breaking of limits on human achievement while acknowledging the uglier possibilities of new in­ ventions; H. G. Wells wrote of the benefits of air power but viewed its impact with pessimism; reaction to Lindbergh’s flight expressed both the triumphant union of man and machine and the Butlerian fear of subordination of mankind to his mechanical monsters. Hart Crane, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Frost, and other lesser poets used Kitty Hawk as symbol of an important moment in American progress, but they dis­ agreed as to the symbol’s meaning. Aviators—and their...