The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (review)

Midway through her appealing book on technology and literary modernism, Sara Danius cites the famous story of the English painter J. M. W. Turner, as related by John Ruskin: When a naval officer remarked that the ships in one of his paintings lacked portholes, Turner is said to have replied, "Yes, I know that well enough; but my business is to draw what I see, and not what I know is there." This anecdote nicely encapsulates Danius's argument, which is that the literature of European modernism both records and expresses the passage from knowing to seeing, from an abstract theoretical stance to an aesthetic stance grounded in the perceptual faculties of the human body. Behind this bold assertion of the human sensorium, of course, are the radical extensions of early-twentieth-century technology. Through a close and theoretically informed reading of the epic novels of Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, Danius seeks to demonstrate "the nexus of perception, technological change, and literary form" (p. 1).

The Senses of Modernism begins with a substantial theoretical introduction in which Danius sets out the argument she will pursue: This will not be a catalog of novelists' attitudes toward technology, nor will it serve as a simple inventory of technological themes and motifs in modern fiction. Rather, the effort will be to show that new "technologies of perception"—photography, cinematography, telephony, and other modes of reproducing visual and audible experience—are fundamentally constitutive of modern literature. The ways in which technology frames the modern literary sensibility, however, are subtle and often surprising.

The first of the three pillars of modernist literature that Danius analyzes is Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924), the saga of Hans Castorp, that hapless European Everyman who ventures off to the Berghof sanatorium to visit his ailing cousin and stays on for seven years, succumbing day by day to the pathologies that medical instruments are newly able to detect. The Magic Mountain has long been recognized as the classic Bildungsroman of the twentieth-century antihero, but Danius goes further to suggest that it is actually the experience of the machine—the X-ray machine in particular—that is vital to the formation not only of the central character but of the novel as a whole. "Mann's modernist aesthetic," she argues, is inseparable from "the emergence of visual technologies that made available new optical spaces and new realms of knowing" (p. 57).

Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27), another of the defining texts of European modernism, is the second of the three novels that Danius subjects to her own visual scrutiny. Once again, the problem is not to determine whether Proust was "for" or "against" technology, but to identify the manner in which the preoccupations of his unnamed narrator—the irreducibility of sensuous experience, the predilection for subjective time, the interest in individual memory—are shaped by photography, cinematography, and even the fixed lens that is the windshield of the speeding automobile.

If Mann and Proust were still grappling with a world in transition, Joyce's Ulysses (1922), which Joyce himself once described as a twenty-hour "epic of the human body," takes the process of technological modernization as complete and translates it into a problem of literary form. Joyce's narrative strategy of differentiating and isolating each of the senses reflects the extension of the industrial division of labor into the human body itself. For Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and the rest of their fellow Dubliners, the experience of talking on the phone or riding in a tram are commonplace activities, no longer exciting feelings of wonder or sensation: "The dialectic of the new and the old has been exhausted, suspended in favor of a now that continually reinvents itself" (p. 191). Technologically mediated "matrices of perception" have now become thoroughly naturalized and internalized.

Overall, this is a challenging and...