Literary Secretaries / Secretarial Culture (review)

"Our writing materials contribute their part to our thinking." This observation of Friedrich Nietzsche's, made following his experiments with the spherical keyboard of a Malling Hansen Writing Ball, suggests a concern for the social and epistemological consequences of the new communication technologies of the nineteenth century—including the typewriter, the spread of postal and telgraphic communications, and the gramophone—shared by many recent cultural and literary critics.

But what of the men and women employed to operate these new technologies, the stenographers, typists, telegraphists, and personal assistants whose typically unacknowledged labor ensured the smooth transit of words from voice to page? To what extent have they, too, contributed their part to our thinking, and how has this part been represented in literature, film, and other media? These are the questions posed by the seven essays in Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell's splendid collection, Literary Secretaries / Secretarial Culture . Focusing principally on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the articles provide a much needed corrective to the critical tendency to represent the new systems for the sending, storing, and retrieving of data as the driving force in the transition from an industrial to knowledge economy. In their different ways, each of the contributors imagines technology and culture in a complex interrelation, each informing the expectations and meanings of the other, with particular consequences for our concepts of authorial agency, that is to say, for what it means to "write," rather than to merely "type," "transcribe," or "record." The results will be of interest not only to those concerned with the representation of laboring bodies in popular literature and culture, but with what it means to live at a time in which information is not so much a means of understanding the world as it is a kind of universal currency, the value of which demands the effacement of the manual labor of which it is a product.

The ideological reverberations resulting from the increasing dependence of governments and businesses on printed matter were felt most acutely in the sphere of gender relations. The number of women occupying clerical positions in Britain increased massively in the six decades preceding World War I, by which time they accounted for nearly a quarter of all such labor. Many of the positions occupied by women clerical workers were new, but the perception was that young women willing to work for nominal wages were displacing the men who once dominated the field. The anxieties occasioned by woman's shifting place in what Friedrich A. Kittler has called the "discourse networks" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is explored in several of the volume's contributions. Victoria Olwell, for example, examines the fantasy of the operatorless typewriter, a machine that is able to transcribe the thoughts of an employer without the need of a woman to work the keyboard. Such fantasies, Olwell argues, are indicative of the challenges posed by the female typist to received norms of gender, race, and class. Where the supernatural tales of machines taking dictation from the dead seek to suppress these challenges by imagining a form of auto-transcription, Grant Allen's picaresque novel of life at the keyboard, The Type-Writer Girl (1897), foregrounds the ineradicable materiality of both the typewritten word and the typist's body. The female presence does not so much disappear in this text as inscribe itself within the body of the typewritten page, providing a guiding hand to the male love interest's efforts to become a poet. Olwell's argument is enriched by its close attention to Allen's unique blend of evolutionary thought and social criticism, but it might have been strengthened by a more detailed consideration of the novel's own processes of composition. The Type-Writer Girl , as Olwell suggests, is an act of "literary transvestism" (59), but this transvestism was not limited to the author's adoption of a female pseudonym (Olive Pratt Rayner) or the overtly romantic nature of the narrative. It extended, in fact, to...