The Technology of the Novel: Writing and Narrative in British Fiction (review)

When The Technology of the Novel does not read like a series of footnotes to Plato, who disparaged writing through his mouthpiece Socrates, it resembles confessions from a therapist's couch as canonical British novelists admit to skepticism about their enterprises. Tony E. Jackson's purpose, however, is to analyze the ways that storytelling capitulates to the technology of writing until hybrid media subsume narrative communication. Although Jackson distinguishes writing not only from language, but also from print, he declines to factor in mass production of novels, hoping instead to recapture the essential features of oral recitation and alphabetic writing before subsequent media alter them. This McLuhanesque strategy is glancingly successful; as Jackson concedes, "it is not entirely possible to think oneself out of literacy once writing has been learned" (p. 17).

According to Jackson, the principal difference between oral and literate stories is between showing and telling. Oral speakers embody language through voice and gesture, "showing" a story through embellishment in time and space, responding to cues from alert live audiences already familiar with the ritual tale. By contrast, writers can only "tell" a story in a fixed form from which the disembodied author is physically removed but nonetheless responsible to the isolated reader for its content. Whatever is gained by realism, honesty, and sincerity is offset by the writer's invention; originality, as communication theorists remind us, comes at the price of uncertainty shared by both receiver and sender of messages. Complicating matters further is the tendency of readers to "naturalize" the written word to the point that they assume a narrator even when there is no such voice, as if the communication between writer and reader were, Jackson tells us, "telepathic." That we commonly use "storytelling" as the default term for both modes does not help.

Even so, Jackson says, British authors have been troubled by the distance between showing and telling since the novel's inception, and their discontent constitutes a critique of the technology of writing itself. The greater their precision, the more "realistic" their artifice, the deeper the novelists' awareness of the lost intimacy and authority of live speech. Such nostalgia surfaces in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which the monster seems doubly divorced from nature because he must learn to speak by first learning to read and write. Less convincing as comment on technologies are Elizabeth's struggles in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to reconcile what she hears with the correspondence she reads and the by-now-familiar indignities endured by characters oppressed by the letter of the law in Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Discussion of Virginia Woolf's experiments with multiple voices in The Waves, of E. M. Forster's focus on the collision between the oral culture of India and the literate colonialism of Britain in A Passage to India, and of Ian McEwan's warnings about the dangers of solipsistic writing in Atonement better advance the volume's argument. If novelists frustrated by inability to "show" a story do not yearn to sit in front of a tribe of listeners, what they do seem to want is articulated by Doris Lessing, whose fictional diarist in The Golden Notebook wishes that her story could be a movie.

A little oddly, a final chapter considers the non-British Citizen Kane, a motion picture about how writing can obscure the resonant presence of a single word, and a medium that combines sound and image to boot. Despite this ending, Jackson insists that he intends no elegy for the novel, and it is probably significant that most of these novels have been translated to the screen. As new media reinterpret cultural artifacts, moreover, it is important to investigate how earlier technologies constructed meaning. Aside from frequent provocative insights, the volume's value may lie in Jackson's observation that conflating spoken and written language leads to post-structuralist trashing of meaning on the...