Modernist Informatics: Literature, Information, and the State by James Purdon (review)

Modernist Informatics pursues an ambitious double thesis: that the apparatus of the modern informatic state was brought into being in the late nineteenth century and consolidated in the early twentieth, and that modernist writers worked with and against entanglement in these “new informatic webs” (p. 16). The first of these claims is pursued in the introduction and serves as a framework for the case studies that follow: of Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent; scenes of identification in “dossier fiction”; the social survey movement Mass-Observation; John Grierson and documentary film; and Elizabeth Bowen’s Blitz novel The Heat of the Day.

Underlying the two main arguments of Modernist Informatics—about changes in statecraft, and the “entanglements” of narrative—is a more fundamental proposition: that narrative itself came to be transfigured by the new discourse of protocols and documents. At its broadest, Purdon makes the case that in the period he is considering “communications technology moves out of the office to encompass and mediate all human activity” (p. 18). A highly focused version of the argument comes in the first chapter, on Conrad, who faced the problem that “the delimitation of the ‘literary’ as a subset of writing constitutes a preprocessing system of its own” (p. 30). “Novels, no less than empires,” writes Purdon, “seek to manage their own coherence and security by a careful organization of those contingent factors which are the conditions of the real before they become the effects of realism” (p. 30). This is a provocative notion, and it is explored in a suitably complex chapter, which weaves together a close reading of The Secret Agent, biographical details about Conrad’s own interactions with information systems and a history of the dual notion of privacy/secrecy as it played out in the postal service and government offices. Ultimately The Secret Agent is said to resolve paradoxes of representation by “acknowledging that impressions are not limited by the senses but are partly determined, or preprocessed, by the wider informatic networks which already structure the possibilities of perception, semiosis, and interpretation” (p. 19). Purdon’s analysis travels down through layers of cultural history, biography and narrative until it hits upon the grisly detail that gives The Secret Agent its particular character (and which has determined readings from the first reviewers to recent theorists): amidst the extreme degradation of the body of the Greenwich bomber resides precisely the “preprocessed” clue that unlocks the mystery. High-brow artifice and low-brow schlock meet in mingled flesh and text; the “medium” is, in a gory sense, the message; information survives mortal loss.

This all sets rather a high bar, which is cleared in the chapters on “dossier fiction” and “information collectives.” The first of these provides capsule readings of narrated encounters between characters and their “data doubles” alongside rich theoretical reflections on identity, narrative form and paperwork. Here is a modernist, bureaucratic sequel to Leah Price’s How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Where Price showed how books themselves circulated within narrative—as objects, markers of status, bargaining chips—Purdon brings the range of new early twentieth-century official documents into view within narratives of conflict, travel and pursuit. World War I was decisive in the development of forms of official documentation (the passport, the identity card), and therefore also in the shaping of modern(ist) subjectivity. This involves a series of surprising inversions: The “fragmented” modern selves of older theories of modernism are reintegrated through “techniques of identification” (p. 71); paperwork is nothing like its dry-as-dust ideal type, becoming the substrate of a whole range of affective states, mysteries, confusions and horrors; and that last bastion of coherence, the human body, is “abjected” (p. 76)—a failing index of its photographic and inky traces. This is the fate that befalls “D.” in Greene’s Confidential Agent (1939) after he loses sight of his papers: “They were his authority and now he was nothing—just an undesirable...