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

For Tony E. Jackson, the novel's technology is writing. Building on classic analyses of orality and literacy by Walter Ong and others, The Technology of the Novel examines seven novels and a film in order to recognize these works' simultaneous dependence on and resistance to the properties of writing. Put this way, the book's project may sound essentially Derridean or poststructuralist, yet Jackson insists that his work is different, since it centers not on the nature of writing in the abstract but on its specific features as a technological medium, especially upon the properties that distinguish writing from speech and that separate novels from oral narratives. For instance, writing alters the nature of stories; no longer must a story be extraordinary, unreal, or larger than life in order to be retold and remembered. Indeed, realism's focus on unhistoric acts depends on the ability of writing to externalize memory on the page, to create an account that will persist even without being epically memorable.

In a similar fashion, the novel replaces the oral storyteller's adherence to familiar, communal stories with the literate value of originality, risking narrative arbitrariness, a risk that Jackson incisively locates at the core of George Eliot's famous remarks on the novel in Adam Bede (1859). Even more important for Jackson is the rift that emerges in written narrative between showing and telling—two keywords of his study. As Jackson recognizes, these categories relate to the classical opposition between mimesis and diegesis. But by shifting his terms to showing and telling, Jackson hopes to recenter narrative analysis around the body's relationship to storytelling. Whereas the oral storyteller was present to an audience and able to show the story, the novelist is confined to telling. It's not quite that the oral storyteller acts out that tale, but that oral narration seamlessly combines showing and telling through the visibility of the speaker's body and the immediacy of the spoken narrative.

An engaging close reading of Darcy's failed first marriage proposal and his epistolary follow-up in Pride and Prejudice (1813) reveals Jane Austen's alertness to the difference between oral and written discourse, between the embodied suitor whose bearing offends Elizabeth Bennet and the written voice whose appeals may be read and reread more neutrally. But later novels suggest more ambivalence about the losses entailed in writing. Again and again, for instance, novels seem to imagine a hybrid between oral and written language that would combine the powers of both—a fantasy that Jackson first notes in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) but which frequently reemerges as he analyzes a set of well-known novels from the next two centuries: Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852-53), E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931), Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962), and Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001). A final chapter on Citizen Kane (1941) escapes from British fiction altogether to investigate the treatment of writing within a sound film, a newer medium that restores showing to narrative art.

Its ability to identify such patterns across two hundred years of fictional narrative is the great strength of The Technology of the Novel and probably an indication that Jackson has indeed identified basic issues for prose narrative as a medium. Still, several aspects of the book and its argument seem curious. For one thing, while novels certainly cannot show in the way that plays or paintings or film can, it's not clear to me that the oral storyteller's physical presence quite constitutes showing in the way that those other forms do, either. If the storyteller's mere presence or absence is in itself the crucial issue, we seem to return to the deconstructive account of writing that Jackson has disavowed. Jackson's insistent characterization of the novel as essentially "alphabetic" (13), furthermore, brings...