The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century by Helmut Müller-Sievers (review)

Helmut Müller-Sievers’s interdisciplinary study brings together philosophy, history of science, theories of narration, and media studies to show that the transmission of motion in cylindrical machines left an indelible mark on realist literature. In the first part of the book, the author offers a very accessible history of machine development that lays plain metaphysical arguments about the nature of movement and laws of thermodynamics to outline the rise of modern, secular notions of motion. He then builds upon this “prehistory” to trace a genealogy of modern motion that begins with the steam locomotive’s piston-cylinder combination and ends with the rise of electricity, radio, and X-ray technology at the end of the nineteenth century.

Some readers may leaf through the detailed discussion of the epoch’s cylindrical motors, tools, and products, but the chapters on the kinematics of narration are the most interesting parts of this study. While painting or photography present critics with valuable ways to think about literary realism, Müller-Sievers interprets novels by Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, and Henry James to encourage us to think about how narration, the publication of literature, and its reception can be understood in terms of motion—seriality, panoramic enclosures, gears and screws, helical strands (158). If we take the printing press’s rolling cylinder as an example, we would acknowledge that “the attributes commonly reserved for the realist story—irreversible temporality, the inevitability and contiguity of events—instead describe the realities of serial publication and the forms of reception it generated” (112). The contemporary reader of realist fiction encountered a sense of moving and motion in the description of space for characters and in the open-ended, evolving stories that seemed to coincide with the temporalities of his modern, city life (132). To name another example, the cylinder’s enclosed curvature and scalability would influence the form of the period’s panoramic narratives and, in turn, reproduce the reader’s experience of space (136).

This reviewer was struck by the reverence with which Müller-Sievers tirelessly enumerates the epoch’s cylindrical devices but could not help but wonder whether some emphasis could have been shifted from classification and detailed description of these objects and processes to more close analysis of literary texts. Potential readers should note that the author is most interested in the history and rhetoric of the novel. He does not consider other nineteenth-century serial publications—feuilleton immediately comes to mind—and the scope of his study is further narrowed by a focus on British and French novels. How might the panoramic literature of Karl Gutzkow or the commercially successful ‘trivial’ Viennese city literature written by Adolf Glaßbrenner, Heinrich Adami, or Willibald Alexis complicate his analysis? Müller-Sievers anticipates that some readers might want to know why there is a lack of German realist writers in his study, and he responds to this concern in his epilogue. The realism that German writers developed is for the most part connected to tragedy, he observes. These works “make visible the primordial conflict between the translational pull of being and the arresting power of human beings” (165). Tragedy, he continues, “pulled German literature and its most ambitious authors away from the heteroglossia of serialized narratives, from their compromises, their improvisations, and their dependence on embodied technicality” (166). Despite the evocative language, it seems that a different selection of texts might challenge his definition of European realism. In any case, Helmut Müller-Sievers’s richly illustrated, innovative study will be a great contribution to debates on realism, as long as the reader does not depart from an established canon of technical modernity.