Interruption Overload: Telephones in Ford Madox Ford’s “‘4692 Padd’,” A Call and A Man Could Stand Up —

Ford Madox Ford’s short story “ ‘4692 Padd’ ” (1908), his novella A Call (1910), and his novel A Man Could Stand Up — (1926) exploit the narratological potential of the rhetorical tropes of interruption. In each text, the interruption is caused by a cutting-edge contemporary gadget: the telephone. In “ ‘4692 Padd’ ” and A Call, the phone calls have a parenthetical nature. But by the time of A Man Could Stand Up —, Ford is experimenting with extreme interruption by telephone, or what is known in ergonomics as “interruption overload.” The narratological effect of interruption overload is both to record and recreate a specific historical moment of geo-political uncertainty: the end of the First World War.