Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction

2. Infrastructural Modernity

When Melville’s Bartleby wants to take in a view of the world outside of his office, he looks out the window at a light shaft. The narrator lingers on this particular technology for circulating light and air: “My chambers were up stairs at No.— Wall-street. At one end they looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom. This view might have been considered rather tame than otherwise, deficient in what landscape painters call ‘life.’” Instead of the airshaft, Jonathan Parker’s 2001 film adaptation of “Bartleby” translates the object of the eponymous hero’s “dead-wall reveries” into an air-conditioning vent. Parker’s Bartleby stares up rather than out, at a dusty, rattling ventilation portal . Lest that vent go unnoticed as the object of and frame for observation (like the “view” it replaces), a repairman painstakingly removes a dead pigeon from the ventilation system to which it provides access. The excessive literalness of associating a dead letter carrier with a former employee of the dead-letter office also includes the blocked 79 2 INFRASTRUCTURAL MODERNITY Saying that this system includes the telephone, the telegraph, television, the highway system, maritime pathways and shipping lanes, the orbits of satellites, the circulation of messages and of raw materials, of language and foodstuffs, money and philosophical theory, is a way of speaking clearly and calmly. —Michel Serres, The Parasite Publicity it seems to me is as necessary as ventilation. . . . It lets in fresh air. —John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer conduit fixing both of them, involving and literalizing the ventilation system as a message carrier as well. Bartleby makes the relays between messages, messengers, and infrastructure—already visible in Bartleby the fiction—a guiding concern, but in doing so offers a reminder that what’s modern about this instancing of modern communication is not just the communication technology, but the communication process itself. The air-conditioning system and the earlier ventilation and circulation technologies to which it refers point to a communication process that is at once exhaustively connective and constantly breaking down. This is another way of saying that they point to a communication process that works, for noise, disruption, and breakdown not only reveal that communication was going on in the first place, but also allow it to keep going. Melville’s short story and its adaptation draw explicit attention to how things, abstractly informational or aggressively physical , circulate. And the embodied, but dead, letter of the pigeon shows how strangely alike these two poles can be. These two Bartlebys selfconsciously operate as story and film, but the tension between their treatments of ventilation instances a problematic particular to printed fiction as it positions itself within a larger field of media forms. This dynamic operates also in another contemporary interpretation of an infrastructurally invested text, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Perhaps the least ambiguous aspect of the collection of 1,369 incandescent bulbs illuminating the narrator of Invisible Man is that they are attached, and in turn attach him, to the municipal power grid. Though the significance of the number of bulbs remains as elusive as the narrator’s name throughout the novel, it is clear that their function is closely tied to Invisible Man’s project as a work of fiction. Not only are these bulbs likened to tiny cinematic observations systems (we are told that the narrator “sat on the chair’s edge in a soaking sweat, as though each of my 1,369 bulbs had every one become a klieg light in an individual setting for a third degree”),1 but their mediality also becomes a question of form. “Without light I am not only invisible , but formless as well,” the narrator explains, continuing that “to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death.”2 The narrator’s description of a self-reflective, formal and formed subject depends on his sometimes gleeful, sometimes rueful theft of energy from Monopolated Light & Power. That theft, while exempting him from one aspect of urban social bureaucracy, also crucially 80 infrastructural modernity counteracts his enforced isolation from the world above. When he dismissively suggests that “it won’t matter if you know that I tapped a power line leading into the building and ran it into my hole in the ground,”3 he is also assuming that readers (even...