Writing the Machine

Page 24 American Book Review Writing the mAchine Anne C. McCarthy The iron whiM: a fraGMenTed hisTory of TyPewriTinG Darren Wershler-Henry Cornell University Press http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu 344 pages; cloth, $29.95 As nearly every book on the subject observes, the word “typewriter” initially referred to both the machine and its operator. Nowhere was this identification more explicit than in the typewriting contests at the turn of the twentieth century, where groups of typists trained for months at a time to sustain speeds of over a hundred words per minute for an hour at a time. For the contestants, even the “slightest trace of self-consciousness was a fatal drawback,” writes the author of The Wonderful Writing Machine, a 1954 paean to inscription technology. While panels of judges scrutinized each contestant’s output in order to determine the winner (a practice that made typing a less-than-ideal spectator sport), the mountains of text had no meaning or use beyond their function as an index of each typist’s accuracy. Descriptions of these contests, thus, present typewriting as a kind of pure performance, removing both machine and operator from their instrumental roles in the commercial office or the writer’s study. “More than anything else,” writes Darren Wershler-Henry in The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting, “all of the discipline in typewriting strains towards its own transcendence, a transcendence through speed.” Typewriters freed creation from the slowness of handwriting, offering the possibility of producing “writing that was clear, verifiable, and replicable, writing that had the status of truth.” Yet, as the typewriting competitions imply, that transcendence had the possibility to go even further, offering a spectacle of speed and mechanical reproduction, making what was reproduced into an afterthought. These are the broad tensions that Wershler-Henry sets out to explore, and what distinguishes The Iron Whim from earlier studies such as The Wonderful Writing Machine by Bruce Bliven, Jr., Michael H.Adler’s The Writing Machine (1973), and Wilfred A. Beeching’s Century of the Typewriter (1974) is its focus on “how typewriting shaped and changed not only literature, but also our culture, and even our sense of ourselves.” Using the methods of discourse analysis pioneered by Michel Foucault and developed by media theorists such as Friedrich Kittler, The Iron Whim articulates a history of typewriting as a “cultural logic.” As the “fragmented history” of the subtitle suggests , typewriting was never a simple process, and the “typewriting assemblage”—the “inspirational voice or voices (originating both within and without the dictator), dictator, machine, and amanuensis”—is, as Wershler-Henry writes, “capricious and subject to hijackings and rebellions of various sorts….” Typewriting did not, of course, invent this configuration, nor these problems. However, as Marshall McLuhan, whose influence on Wershler-Henry extends to the title of the latter’s book, writes in Understanding Media (1964), “[t]he typewriter fuses composition and publication,” drastically reducing the time between thought and inscription that continually proves so problematic for writing. At its most ideal, the typewriter creates a seamless relation between intention and its materialization.You press the “A” key, and an “A” appears on the page. The entire physical process is visible and understandable, which distinguishes mechanical typewriting from both its later electric models and from modern word processing, both of which obscure the relation between the key pressed and the letter that appears. Typewriters freed creation from the slowness of handwriting. The physical act of typewriting thus raises the seductive possibility of a writing that, through different modes of “speed,” could transcend error and achieve a kind of absolute legibility that encompasses both the accuracy demanded by the businessman and that to which the poet aspires. The typist who generates documents at previously unimagined speeds and the poet who uses the typewritten text’s “rigidity and distribution in space as a means of creating exactitude , of quantizing even empty spaces on a page as a metaphor for breath in a line of oration” both participate in this fantasy. The deliberation of the poet-typist reinforces presence, suggesting that the truth of the typewriter is not merely a matter of speed in general but rather of a specific collapse...