The Shock of the New

Elizabeth Bowen’s 1929 short story ‘Dead Mabelle’ describes the impact of the violent death of the eponymous silent film star on William, her most devoted fan, who, the reader is told, spends much of his precious leisure time – he works as a bank clerk – travelling around London to view screenings of Mabelle’s works. Towards the end of the story, having read about the star’s death in the newspaper, William goes to see her final release, The White Rider. Although film might seem to be a means of keeping Mabelle alive despite her actual demise, William knows that it is only a fragile medium: ‘In another month or so, when her horror faded and her vogue had died, her films would be recalled – boiled down, they said. He had heard old films were used for patent leather; that which was Mabelle would be a shoe, a belt round some woman’s middle.’¹ William confuses Mabelle’s image and her actuality: rather than ensuring that she ‘lives on’, film itself is seen here as merely one stage in Mabelle’s commodification, and William conflates her actual death and the ‘death’ of her image, its recycling into accessories. Having fantasised in almost surrealist fashion about Mabelle’s image being remodelled in this way, William goes home and, in despair at the loss of his idol, throws open a desk drawer which, if this was a film, would contain the fatal revolver: this not being a film, he is denied a dramatic exit from life, the drawer containing nothing more deadly than a pencil stub.

Published just as sound was beginning to be introduced into cinema, ‘Dead Mabelle’ is interested not only in how an individual might engage with and react to the still relatively young medium of film, but also in the effects and potential effects of that medium on an individual’s understanding of their place in the world, and, importantly, their understanding of materiality. David Trotter’s new book is concerned with how literature represented the new communications technologies that emerged, and that grew in popularity, in the interwar period; how, for instance, telephone conversations were incorporated into the novel. In this regard he builds, as he notes, on Keith Williams’s British Writers and the Media 1930–45 (1996). But the effects of such technologies on the experience of living in the world, on material and spatial relations, are also central to Trotter’s important new study. The period covered, 1927 to 1939, saw not only the advent of sound cinema but the continuing rise of the telephone and the beginnings of television. Acknowledging that the divide is not an absolute one, Trotter distinguishes between devices used for communication, such as the telegraph and telephone, and those used for storage and representation, including photography and cinematography. Representational media, including literature, are made in one time and place and received in another: the telephone brings together two different places at one time. In this context, Trotter suggests, representational media ‘find themselves called upon to reinstitute the necessary, desirable lapse between technique and technology: a space for reflection upon reflection’ (p. 8). New media do not simply displace the old; rather, existing forms adapt in order to encompass and engage with the new, and, in this analysis, literature is crucial for assessing the effects of these changes.

This means that Trotter is interested in, for instance, how the incorporation of telephone conversations into the novel might affect the ‘balance within it between dialogue and narrative’ (p. 4). But while there are some fine close readings of individual literary works included here, Trotter situates these readings in relation to not only the history of the marketing of the telephone and the complex relationship between the telephone and domestic and public architecture, but also the invention and popularisation of plastics, the quest for a mackintosh that doesn’t smell bad, and the introduction of customs checks at national borders. This is a book, then...