Sewer, Furnace, Air Shaft, Media: Modernity Behind the Walls in Native Son and Manhattan Transfer

The least ambiguous aspect of the collection of 1,369 incandescent bulbs illuminating the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s 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 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 fictional ones) of modern novels are uninterested in the infrastructural systems that, like the narrator himself, require illumination. When the contemporary visual artist Jeff Wall described the production of his arresting “After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue 1999–2000,” he noted that “Working on that picture, I really learned about what Ellison’s 1,369 light bulbs means. You can only have a few on at a time.”⁴ Wall’s statement about the paradoxical situation of staging in material form a scene from prose fiction points out what Ellison’s novel registers by other means: that you see how the grid works only when it doesn’t.

Two aspects of domestic America’s favorite cliché during the first decade of the twenty-first century, “crumbling infrastructure,” also describe the infrastructural modernity emergent in the American novel of the early twentieth century. The first is that, when invoked, the reference to infrastructure always refers to physical structures and to the collectivities conjoined by them, that there is always something metaphoric about infrastructure. The second is that these structures tend to remain invisible until blocked, broken, or struck by catastrophe. Although these aspects must by necessity be taken for granted in the contemporary narrative (or at the very least obscured by the status of cliché), what becomes more clear in the modern novel are the ways in which infrastructural networks form at once the physical and figurative connective tissue between persons, or operate as material symbols that produce the social and describe it. And in these texts, it is in the insistent and fraught movement between these registers of meaning that infrastructure identifies its status as a medial object, one through which the novels identify their own operations as media.

Infrastructure holds a privileged status in the topography of modern American fiction. This is a landscape in which stopped pipes, traffic, congested ventilation and jammed signals reveal the complex, communicative relays systemically connecting persons and spaces that would otherwise work undetected. It is no accident, I will argue, that these blockages are effected by the bodies of infrastructurally connected and constituted persons. My examples, including the corpse-choked furnaces and air shafts of Richard Wright’s Native Son and the fetus-clogged sewers of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, provide a compact catalog of forms these encounters can take. And it is the explicitly communicative status of these forms, I contend, that accounts for the becoming-visible of infrastructure in this particular moment in American literary history.

Familiar materialist accounts of compulsive literary reflexivity focus precisely on...