The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (review)

It will no doubt startle readers who know his other work that Darren Wershler-Henry's long-standing cyber-focuses have here been diverted by the typewriter; it's as if 50 Cent decided to cover a Four Tops tune. Indeed, Wershler-Henry, who calls himself an 'unabashed techno-geek,' says he wouldn't be caught dead using such an antiquated machine. Moreover, in the book's coda, 'Aftermath: Typewriting after the Typewriter,' he takes great pains to separate typewriting and computing. While 'the qwerty keyboard has become our default interface for computing, ... computing is a discourse whose rules are determined by the functioning of software and networks, not by mechanical devices and hierarchies.'

The only caveat I have against this erudite and entertaining book is its title. A better one than The Iron Whim – a strained, uncompelling allusion to Marshall McLuhan and his Understanding Media – might be (pace Jeanette Winterson) Typewritten on the Body. Too theory-savvy to produce a mundane history of the typewriter, Wershler-Henry commits to the following: 'I'm interested in typewriting as discourse; one of the systems of ideas and rules that structure our lives in ways that are subtle and brutal by turns. My goal in writing this book is to begin to understand how typewriting shaped and changed not only literature, but also our culture, and even our sense of ourselves.'

To this end The Iron Whim engages gender issues, playing on the doubled dimension of the typewriter as object as well as person, usually a female, operating it. Another section is devoted to typewriting as 'discipline.' Taking off from Foucault's notion of that term, Wershler-Henry scours old typing manuals and keyboard construction possibilities as ways into reading the containment of women and the harnessing of their bodies in their interactions with the machine. As his epigraph from J.G. Ballard has it, ' It types us, encoding its own linear bias across the free space of the imagination.' Drugs and guns (Remington having manufactured both typewriters and weapons) are also woven into what Wershler-Henry calls his 'special kind of archaeology.' So too is the heroic modernist writer hammering away at his (!) typewriter.

A better subtitle for The Iron Whim might be (pace T.S. Eliot) These Fragments I Have Shored against My Runes. From typewriter jewellery as well as typewriter toys and typewriter porn (available at Tijuanabibles.org) to Archy, the typing cockroach, and Arli, the typing dog, this book reads most engagingly when it relays offbeat material and becomes typing's Trivial Pursuit. Examples include the great typewriter race of 25 July 1888 and the following string that 'appears across Twain's first typed letter: BJUYT KIOP M LKJHGFDSA:QWERYUTIOP:,98V*6432QW RT HA.' Wershler-Henry examines this outpouring as if it were part of Eunoia, his sidekick Christian Bök's jeu d'esprit. Digressions, too, on such topics as fingerprinting and the etymology of factoids are unapologetically introduced in this least pedantic of books.

Buoyant and scholarly: these two traits are infrequently yoked in academic writing. The reason the combination occurs in The Iron Whim can be found in the acknowledgments, where Wershler-Henry writes, ' There are other books to be written about typewriting. At least one of them will be written about typewritten concrete and visual poetry, because I'll be writing it next.' Whether with pen in hand, on a typewriter or a word processor ... or whatever comes next, Wershler-Henry manifests the will to write and the love of writing.