Machines à écrire: littérature et technologies du XIXe au XXIe siècle (review)

The subtitle of this book does not fully reflect its content, since many of the references chosen by the author predate the nineteenth century. That minor caveat aside, Machines à écrire is an impressively wide-ranging literary and cultural study. Instead of simply investigating the concept of technology or the 'machine' as a literary theme (which would already constitute an ambitious undertaking), Isabelle Krzywkowski examines the ongoing interaction between literary writing and technological developments from three different perspectives, which produce the main sections of her book: 'Penser avec la machine', 'Dire la machine', and 'É crire avec la machine'. The fact that technological innovations can influence literature has been obvious at least since the invention of the printing press. A series of products, processes, and concepts (the typewriter, computerized word processing, hypertext, e-books) has gradually modified the activity as well as the perception of writing: 'Le passage du medium biologique (la main) au médium machinique, et du médium technique (le livre) au médium technologique conditionne un changement de pratiques' (p. 249). While some relatively recent art forms are themselves the results of ground-breaking inventions or discoveries (photography, cinema), the more ancient art of literature has been renovated from within through the gradual assimilation of technological advances: new genres (science fiction), new categories (hypertextuality), new formats (electronic books). Krzywkowski presents the successive encounters between technological modernity and literary traditions as following a pattern of imagination, appropriation, and integration. Writers, through their early rejection or acceptance of the latest technologies, at first endow a 'machine' with a 'substrat imaginaire' (p. 27) that is based on a dichotomy of the living and the mechanical. Once it has been given conceptual shape, or has gone through the initial process of literary imagination, the new invention or process is appropriated by writers not just as a plot device or as the source of a new genre, but sometimes to the extent of turning a mechanical object into a literary subject or character. The final phase is the full integration of new technologies into the process of writing itself, thereby altering or broadening literature as an art form: 'l'apparition d'outils nouveaux semble en effet une source de renouvellement fécond, dans les formes comme dans les pratiques' (p. 28). Perhaps appropriately, the conclusion of Machines à écrire is somewhat open-ended: 'Peut-on, pour lors, estimer qu'il existe une "littérature technologique"?' (p. 253). Now that technology has become so pervasively integrated into the acts of writing and reading (along with the intermediate stage of publishing), has literature as an art form been irremediably transformed, not just in technical but in aesthetic terms? The author does suggest that the generations born and raised since 1970, for whom the intertwining of technology and literature is an established (albeit recent) fact, might feel tempted to create a 'new classicism'. Krzywkowski's analysis is based on a remarkably extensive and multilingual literary corpus (pp. 255-75), which is presented separately from her equally ample bibliography of secondary sources (pp. 277-312). There is also a useful index of authors.