Editor’s Introduction: Organisms and Machines

In a lively and ingenious new book, The Maiden Machine (Edgewise Press, 2012), the Italian philosopher of aesthetics Brunella Antomarini contemplates “a dual vocation: the machine’s desire to become organic and the organism’s desire to become a machine” (65). That dual vocation is at the heart of this issue, which itself offers lively and ingenious views about the desires Antomarini names.

Suppose mechanical inventions desire to become organic by reaching the human organism through the medium of fiction. Three essays at the near-start of the issue suggest as much. Matthew Schilleman hypothesizes that the typewriter worked a “mechano-inscriptive effect” on Henry James, whose late prose then virtually seeks to become the typewriter; Alicia Rix sees the automobile add itself on to James’s body of work; and Kate McLoughlin argues the telephone’s takeover of Ford Madox Ford’s narrative form. The writers appear to become the machines, because the machines appear to become the writers—and their texts.

Antomarini quotes the Russian electrical engineer, physicist, and mystic Pavel Florensky who says, “Technology is a fragment that tears itself away from the living body.” Our leading off with Martin Lockerd’s address to the living body in Georgian writing suggests that the bodily organism comes first, and technology comes after. It is the decadent, self-destructive body that Lockerd focuses on, one in need of recovery. T.S. Eliot’s poetry does the healing. No mechanical or technological supplement appears to be needed. The same seems true of bodily sight as Virginia Woolf ’s prose portrays it, in Rosemary Luttrell’s account of To the Lighthouse. There the bodily organ supplements its already constituted adequacy with transcendent vision.

Yet the very transcendence argues the desire of the organ and the organism to escape themselves, to become some radical alternative. Just what is organically human, if humanity desires to move beyond what it is, bodily and mentally? Samuel Beckett’s moments of vision, as he looked at postwar painting in Paris, abetted his turn away from conventional human interests. Kevin Brazil traces Beckett’s consequent “negative anthropology,” his appearing to desire the life of objects in preference to the life of the political animal, man. Negative anthropology is perhaps a variant of the organism’s desire to become a machine. Karalyn Kendall-Morwick further pursues Beckett’s post-human orientation, symptomized by the salient presence of dogs in Beckett’s narrative mechanisms.

Given the fluctuating attractions and repulsions of the machine and the organism, of the non-human and the human, we might not be able to articulate the separable identities of either. D.H. Lawrence, according to Deanna Wendel, initiated the question of the human and the post-human in Women in Love, without discovering answers. The question remains open. It might be premature, then, to forecast the triumph of the cyborg, as Ria Cheyne argues in her essay on the unresolved self-contradictions to be found in cyborg fiction. The coupling of the organism and the machine has a way to go. Still, the human, such as it is, desires to join unlike things. The melancholy failure of it is on display in The Professor’s House, whose protagonist, according to Madoka Kishi, cannot surrender desire for his original object: his young self, to which he remains mechanically attached. We return in Kishi’s essay to Lockerd’s subject, a self-destructive body, its desire turned inward, dangerously close to what is inorganic. We also return, in the next essay, to transcendence: Ross Hair’s study of upward-soaring, mystical desire in Robert Duncan’s engagement with Avicenna. In the context of the essays preceding it, Hair suggests that the mutual desire of the machine and the organic repeat, and displace, the mutual desire of the human and the divine for each other.

Schilleman’s essay on James-the-typewriter ponders the question, “What writes?” Our final contribution ponders “What reads?” In using Eliot’s Four Quartets as a test case for an answer, Jurate Levina scrutinizes the technology of reading. She argues that reading is the rebirth of meaning by way of...