Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (review)

Rather than a historical study which draws on popular literary sources to make arguments about a society’s relationship to the development of new information networks, Richard Menke has written a literary study which draws on the published history of networked communications technology to make arguments about the development of new techniques of writing by popular Victorian-era authors of British fiction. Menke calls these new technology-inspired fictional techniques “telegraphic realism,” but his book is actually about much more than telegraphy. In a narrative that spans nearly a century, Menke outlines a slow change in the methods of representing identity, community, and action in novels, short stories, and plays that takes inspiration not just from electrical telegraph systems, but from national postal systems, cheap newspaper publishing, new photographic technologies, and wireless radio systems as well. His work echoes that of N. Katherine Hayles, whose 1999 book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics explored a similar relationship between technology and fiction surrounding mid-twentieth-century notions of cybernetics and computers.

Although Menke claims to explore “the changing nature of textuality in the nineteenth century—of the kind of existence written language seemed to have, its link to human minds and bodies, its connection to an author, its relationship to an audience”—his analysis is centered on a small selection of texts and the authors who produced them, not on audience reception or the wider political economy of print culture. Menke argues that “Victorian fictional realism” was related to “new methods of transcoding and transmitting the data of real life” (p. 3). In other words, attention to how “thought was transmitted in the flows of an electric network could inspire new considerations of what consciousness might look like outside the human mind and in prose, just as thinking about how visible things appeared in a photograph could encourage new interest in how words might render a frozen, repeatable image that was also a true impression.” Menke calls this the “realistic treatment of things unseen” (p. 7).

In analyzing this new set of representational and narrative practices, Menke draws on a media ecology approach, arguing, “The new media ecology of the nineteenth century tended to align storage with materiality, transmission with immateriality, so that writing—with its dual capacity for storage and transmission—occupied a shifting and ambiguous ground between the two” (p. 11). For example, he argues that the idea of the “network,” drawn from new transport and communications technologies, “justified literary forms such as the ‘multiplot novel,’ a work whose storylines link an entire range of characters, and one of the distinctive forms of nineteenth-century fiction” (p. 15). But one of the most interesting chapters departs from this media ecology of point-to-point communication technology (post to telegraphy to wireless) to discuss Victorian-era photographic technology. Unfortunately, the insights of this chapter are not well woven into the rest of the narrative.

Menke’s book will be most useful (and accessible) for those already familiar with the authors and stories he uses as examples; he has not attempted to write an introduction to modern narrative realism for historians of technology. Although his text proceeds more-or-less chronologically through a series of focused examples, Menke does not take enough time to synthesize and summarize his overall arguments apart from the detailed particularities of the cases he considers. Because of this, it is difficult to judge whether the authors and works he has chosen are representative of the birth of “realism” in British fiction, of Victorian literature as a whole, or even of that subset of Victorian realistic fiction which took communication technology as its inspiration. And instead of a clear conclusion, a brief “Coda” ends the story a bit too abruptly.

Telegraphic Realism isn’t for everyone, but for the reader with a deep background or strong interest in Victorian literature, it demonstrates what might happen when a literary scholar takes the history of technology seriously...