Technological Enthusiasm
2.3 American Literature and the Machine-Based Aesthetic
As shown above, authors who foretold innovation summarized the pace of change, either repudiating a machine-based aesthetic or, on the contrary, enthusiastically endorsing the speed of progress. Despite arousing the contrasting feelings of fear and fascination, technology can undoubtedly be counted as one of the classic tropes of American literature. The new wave of change over the second half of the 19th century produced a literary image of technology, illustrated by American narratives in the dichotomy between the devaluating potential of innovation and the exciting power of technical novelties (exemplified by the combination of pastoralism and technological intrusion). Having noted the relevance of the recurrent presence of the machine contained within American narratives, Cecelia Tichi sees American literature as the fertile context in which technology could be represented (17).
Indeed, the technological revolution has coincided, in some sense with the emergence of a new form of fiction, which arose on the verge of the new century and thus described an ideal, that of the machine destined to become one of the canonical images of modern and, to a greater extent, postmodern American fiction. Through the love-hate relationship to the technological medium, illustrated throughout the 19th and the 20th centuries, American narratives portray either the concern for a disturbing reality or the captivating potential of technological faith. It would therefore be easy to argue that, by symbolically and esthetically representing innovation, American authors perpetuated
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the modern symbol of change, the machine, stressing the physical relationship with the technological tool and eventually illustrating the challenges to personal identity.
Looking at the ways in which narratives express these implications leads us first to consider the literary illustration of the complex interconnections between the human body and technology. In describing the recurrent presence of metaphorical images of what we shall define as “bodily electricity” within the context of Modernist literature, Armstrong perpetuates the belief that “Electrical metaphors create from a literary perspective a new sense of the body” (18). The application of technology as an extension of what we can venture to define as a sort of pre-post-human ethic had begun to populate modernist literature since the first technological experiments of the mid-nineteenth century. Interest in new forms of technology stimulated the creation of hybrid bodies enhanced by technical progress. The canonical literary example in this sense, from its European incarnation, is the the first and most widely-recognized electric image of the body, created by Mary Shelley in her primordial science-fictional classic, Frankenstein (1818). In this notable example, the machine becomes a complex metaphor of the symbolic pairing of creator vs. creature, in which a corpse is assembled and then through the usage of the machine is monstrously brought to life via electricity.
An implicit reference is made here is to the technique of mesmerism, widely discussed by American authors such as Poe and Hawthorne, deriving from a form of electromagnetism which penetrates the mind through a sort of mental electrification of the body.
A more traditional and yet typically American metaphor is the poetic image created by Walt Whitman in “I Sing the Body Electric” (1855). Through a vividly exhalated corporeal image, a praise to the physicality of the body is illustrated by a sort of electrification of its component parts in a machine-like image. In the index of American narratives, an engaging and almost unusual reference to an artificial body replacement is found in the mechanical, de-humanized corpse in Poe’s satirical short story “The Man that Was Used Up” (1839). The story describes an archetype of hybrid identity through the funnily decorated caricature of eminent General John Smith, dismembered in war and eventually stiffly reassembled in a body whose components have been
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almost entirely mechanized, and which is, for the most part, composed of protheses.
Through the assemblage of the general’s prosthetic appearance, here Poe seems to acknowledge the importance of technology as the backdrop of the artificial remaking of the body, claiming that,
We live in a wonderful age, parachutes and rail-roads- man-traps and spring-guns! […]
And who shall calculate the immense influence upon- social life- upon arts- upon commerce-upon literature- which will be the immediate result of the great principles of electromagnetics! Nor, it is this all let me assure you! There is really no end to the march of invention (Poe 262).
Through an unusual perspective on the cultural industry of the time and a mechanical body assemblage in a pre-post human figure, Poe’s story suggests how modern technologies lead us to a perpetrated, questioned de-humanization. In so doing, through the devaluating potential of progress, authenticity is substituted with artificiality. Poe’s narrative trajectory certainly represents a valid example of a physical collage through the advancing of a technological system in which the protagonist is eventually un-manned and un-made.
To contextualize this image along with many others illustrated within the context of American literature, Alessandra Calanchi sees the relationship between humans and machines as converging in an ambiguous game of alterity (Calanchi 40).54 In this way, to a certain extent, technology leads to a mutilation of the body, recomposed in grotesquely fragmented elements. Moreover, Solomon observes how these corporeal disfigurations appear in most of American fiction during the Great Depression (4). This statement therefore provokes a reconsideration of mutilated, oddly re-formed bodies as symbols of a gruesome otherness, in which human beings are eventually reshaped by means of the machine. One can therefore assume that the continuous assimilation of
54 My translation, as are the following ones from the same author unless otherwise indicated.
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the human into the machine leads to a sense of semantic fragility and abstract identity, as a consequence of this ongoing mechanization.
The nature of the body which comes from a theorization rooted in psychoanalysis and which, in its most intimate conception, also concerns gender sexuality, lead in the second half of the 20th century to the emerging presence of a new post-modern image in its relationship to the machine. In the 1980s “the body became enriched with a sort of futuristic materiality” (Iuliano 24) linked to a technological impulse.55 In her seminal study on hybrid bodies from a gendered perspective, A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Donna Haraway questions the traditional image of the body. From a postmodern perspective, the body becomes deeply shaped both by the historical and cultural reality, or even more prominently by the technological influence on society, creating new corporeal entities defined as cyborgs, beings composed of mechanical appendages.
As she observes,
The cyborg is a creature in a post-gendered world; it has no truck with bi-sexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions through an organic wholeness, through a final appropriation of all the powers of parts into a higher unity. (Haraway 150)
It is in this way that, according to Haraway, the cyborg body is formed, representing a corporeality which is continuously assembled, modified and produced by the machine, in a regular re-fragmentation of bodies. This state of physical dissolution reminds us of the Lacanian body in fragments. For Lacan, the body can be considered as a set of detached pieces, developed through the well-known “mirror stage,” according to which the child, observing his own reflected image, recognizes his own body, which until then had been immersed in a primitive state of fragmentation in his self-concept.
55 An interesting perspective on the body in its American conception is widely expressed by Fiorenzo Iuliano who in Il Corpo Ritrovato. Storie e figure della corporeità negli Stati Uniti di fine Novecento (2012) seeks to offer a new perspective on the role of corporeality and a new image of the body by looking at the recent political and historical events over the last ten years. The translation in the quote is mine.
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All this recalls the potential of the machine to blend together the human condition and the inhuman technical status. In this way, in a post-human ethic, the body is enclosed in the collective image of a single machine made up of hybrid components, concretely de-humanizing the ethics of corporeality.
However, from a more recent perspective, Anne Balsamo describes “the cultural conjuncture in which the body and technology are conjoined” (2). In a literal sense, she considers how machines assume almost a maternal function and corporeality is redesigned through the influx of high-tech innovation. In his pioneering study on media, Marshall McLuhan suggests how bodies, in the post-modern age, assume a dual form that is both hybrid and realistic. In other words, technology becomes an extension of the human (McLuhan 1964), and thus, the machine turns into an unconscious projection of the physical structure. In this mechanism, defined as “the body-machine model” (Lake 79), through a technologized body, identity is no longer corporeal but linked to a virtual image and a substantial condition of incorporeity. The overall concern based on the boundary between human and machine reminds us of Pynchon’s critical reflection in “Is It Ok to Be a Luddite?” (1986). In this case the expression of Luddism represents the merging between the real and the technological, identifying the contact with the machine as a perpetual mechanization driven by technophobic persuasion.56
Given the aforementioned chronology of texts, it is be implicit that postmodernist narratives prominently reveal the disturbing consequences of the body manipulated by electrification, which involves both the empowerment of a new artificial self and at the same time exhibits the dangers of mechanical transcendence. Indeed, a prominent section of post-modern American fiction is based on this premise. From an overwhelming and unsettling perspective, Pynchon describes the almost erotic impulse of one of his characters in V, who fantasizes about the image of an almost entirely mechanical female body, composed of artificial parts eventually dismembered and
56 Among the images that most represent this sense of Luddism, for Pynchon are figures such as Frankenstein and King Kong that mark the contact between the body and the machine.
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reassembled if needed: “Someday, please God, there would be an all-electronic woman…Any problems with her, you could look it up in the manual. […] Remove and replace that was all” (Pynchon 1963, 3-61).57 Once again, this example not only offers a perpetrated sense of lust for technologization, but it also suggests the sexualized role of technology as a seductive force. Following a similar analogy, problematizing the doctor-patient relationship through the usage of a techno-medical machine, DeLillo’s main character’s illness in White Noise is diagnosed through a scientifically developed technology. Through the electronic tool doctors see a body that is eventually scanned and transformed into data, thus making it an artificial extension of the machine in question. In view of this, it should be clear that American literature expresses the identification processes of the binomial homo-machina, or even better, homo ex machina, in the American process in which the individual is transformed into an artificial corporeality becoming almost “un-manned” (Calanchi 41).58
Although in any literary debate on humans and machines it is necessary first to consider the relationship with the body and then to refer to the post-human as the dominant literary genre, we shall now analyze the psychological dynamics of identity in relation to technology. Such a statement, to some extent, leads to the conclusion that when we examine the literature of the machine, we inevitably encounter the artificial nature of personhood. As witnessed through previous examples, the machine inevitably fragments the Self for the sake of an ambiguous otherness which takes place beyond the material human experience. As we have seen previously and we shall examine in the following section analyzing the role of communication technologies, the ethics of personhood are constantly being manipulated by the direct contact with the machine.
57 What is also thought-provoking in the novel is the perspective of the body described by Pynchon through the employment of plastic surgery by Dr. Schoenmaker who is passionate about using cosmetic surgery to eliminate personal war mutilations.
58 My translation. For a broad debate, from a recent perspective, on the relationship between humans and machines, see Uomini e Macchine - ACOMA, no. 15, Fall-Winter, 2018.
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In this sense, metaphors of electricity figure subjective, unmaterialistic Selves, showing the disembodied force of technical innovations.
In his study on aesthetic materialism, electricity and American romanticism, Paul Gilmore contends that electricity has served a variety of writers as a vehicle for imagining the aesthetic experience as in scientific sociopolitical and spiritual terms of unrealistic identities (5). The subject’s automatization, through the mesmerizing potential of the first communication technologies, led to the construction of a sense of an artificial Self, filtered by the machine. This mechanism implies the abandonment of oneself for an unrealistic reality, and therefore, creates a thread in which identity becomes a game of ambiguities produced by the interaction with technology.
Following this logic, Hawthorne’s twist of equivocations in The House of the Seven Gables depicts an ancestral family lineage in which innovations become the broader backdrop of the complex dynamics of identity, evidenced in part by progress, which represents, as Hawthorne seems to demonstrate, the limit between the real and the unreal. In the aforementioned description of the electric body, also Whitman also empathizes the production of an identity that we could almost define as electric and that, in a certain sense, incorporates body and soul in an otherness which profoundly questions the nature of personhood.
Focusing for the moment on nineteenth-century American narratives, the potential of the early means of communication gave rise to the original artificial experience of the Self, torn between technologization and reality. Considering Katherine Biers’
definition of virtual self in relation to writing and technology in the progressivist era, it could be easily asserted that the term virtual, per se, oscillates between the opposite poles of fake vs potential (Biers 2). Comparing this statement to early systems of communication and their use in the digital age, we witness a splitting of the Self, created in an artificial dimension and thus counterfeit, alternated with the realistic personality of the user, who also maintains his concrete individuality by his mere approach with the communicative tool. As Biers argues, identity wavers between a copy of the realistic one and the potential created through intercommunication with the machine. In this mechanism, the Self is converted into a mere form of representation
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and the mean becomes a way to evade reality, offering the possibility to develop a masked personality.
The contrasting nature of identity vacillating between materiality and artificiality, is well described in Henry James’s novella In the Cage (1898). Although set in Victorian England, the narrative illustrates the virtual experience of a telegraphist, confined within the intriguing possibilities of the new communication technologies, deciphering clues to her clients’ personal identities over the circuit. Offering the image of an identity trapped in the wire’s potential, the protagonist eventually finds herself cornered and encoded at the dawn of the virtual age. In this sense, James’s tale seems to suggest how technology generates what Biers has defined as “disturbing subjectivism” (7), questioning subjectivity and thus providing a concrete experience of the virtual. Evoking the art of the novel in the pre-multimedia age, James’s narrative account seems to offer a compelling example of the modern novel, enriched with a sort of virtual potential. The self becomes a mere object of the machine, no more authentic but instead suspended and trapped in a technological and artificial reality. From the origin of the first forms of communication technologies, we witness a virtual turn in 19th-century American literature which, as we shall see, has been able to represent the complex manipulation of personal identity through contact with the first machines in what could be defined as the poetics of the virtual.
Through the blurred relationship between bodies and their contact with the communicative tool, a casual survey of American literature illustrates an incessant preoccupation with hybrid identities, challenged by technological means through the extension of the human condition. As we shall see, there is a persistent re-negotiation of the concept of identity and a reformulation of the notion of personhood, both physical and virtual. The idea of unrealistic forms of identity is represented in most part of American literature as the essence of a machine ethos. Tracing the complexities of this view, American literature reveals the hyperrealism produced by forms of communication as well as the complex identity-technology dynamics culminating in a literary performance of unrealistic identities. Recurrently elaborating the thematic trope of mechanical interconnections, literature has illustrated the achievement of a
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version of the self that “forces us to ask questions about the materiality or not of consciousness and the status of identity in time and space” (Goody 158). As following sections will show, American fiction has often outlined the dangers of electricity and the psychological challenges to individualism.
Let us now draw our attention to the evolution of the concept of personal identity, beginning with the telegraph. This will allow us to consider this means as the first form of communication which outlined the consequent redefinition of the Self by technology, as seen through the lens of American literature.
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