Conclusion

This chapter offers a brief recapitulation of what has been learnt by approaching British and other literatures of the period 1850 to 1950 from the perspective of the ideas of signal and interface. It concludes that, while the pressure these ideas exerted did indeed remain constant throughout the period, it took an eccentric emphasis on aspects of form to reconfigure the text itself as a manipulation of signal-to-noise ratio. The ‘modernism’ which took shape in works by Lewis, Loy, and Mirrlees was a specialist affair. The chapter concludes with two further case studies. The first has to do with the function of a particular architectural feature—the corridor—in nineteenth-century British poetry and fiction; the second with the hugely influential theory and practice of the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, who thought that political solidarity was best expressed by means of what we would now term ‘social media’.

The Telegraphic Principle in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

This chapter concerns the attitudes, practices, and figures of speech that during the course of the nineteenth century prepared the way for the eventual separation of the idea of the signal from that of the sign. It has to do with the emergence of the telegraphic principle (initially by means of the Napoleonic-era optical telegraph) as a thrillingly effective implementation of remote intimacy. Its main focus is on the intimacies developed remotely, by signal rather than sign, in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and in novels by Thomas Hardy: in particular, A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Return of the Native, A Laodicean, Two on a Tower, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and The Well-Beloved. In Hardy’s fiction, sexual desire expresses itself in, or as, an adjustment of signal-to-noise ratio. The Wessex the novels map is at times less a terrain than the basis for a telecommunications system.

Introduction

This chapter establishes a genealogy of the concept of ‘connectivity’ from the foundation of the US Army Signal Corps in 1860 (motto: ‘Getting the message through’) via cybernetics and information theory to the first stirrings of the World Wide Web in the 1990s (motto: ‘What matters is in the connections’). Three key terms are defined and briefly illustrated: signal, medium, interface. The book’s primary concern is with literature’s ability to illuminate from within the complex, vivid, unpredictable romance the principle of connectivity has woven through the enduring human desire and need for remote intimacy. It offers, in its first part, an alternative view of canonical ‘British’ writing from the Victorian era to modernism; and, in its second, case studies of European and African-American fiction, and of interwar British cinema, designed to open the topic up for further enquiry.

Flying Africans, Black Pilots

This chapter resumes the exposition of the interface as a cultural form begun in Chapter 2, in relation to Conrad’s sea captains. In advancing that account into the middle decades of the twentieth century, it addresses a new technology: mechanically powered flight. The paradigmatic interface was now the cockpit of an aeroplane, rather than the quarterdeck of a ship. This is not a straightforward story of technological progress. In the United States, race had come to determine what is gained and lost by passage across the threshold of the interface. The chapter’s topic is the conjunction of interwar aviation technology with a version of the slavery-era legend of the Flying Africans which gained traction in African-American politics and culture (especially Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement) in the 1920s, and subsequently caught the attention of blues singers like Lead Belly and writers like Sterling Brown, Claude McKay, and Ralph Ellison.

Women Spies

If ever anyone had an incentive to establish a channel of communication by rigorously excluding third parties, it is surely the spy with hard-earned intelligence to transmit from behind enemy lines. This chapter examines how the thriller as a genre adapted to the increasing range and sophistication of telecommunications technologies. Examples discussed include John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), and the film Hitchcock made of it, The 39 Steps (1935); Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu (1913); and Jose Luis Borges’s ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (1941). But the main focus is on espionage as an extension of the ‘feminization of channelling’ (Jill Galvan) which had long seen women act as go-betweens under a variety of circumstances. Examples discussed include Marthe Cnockaert McKenna’s neglected memoir, I Was a Spy! (1932), and British spy films from Victor Saville’s Dark Journey (1937) to Charles Crichton’s Against the Wind (1948).

Starry Sky

The aim of this chapter is to ‘showcase’ two stellar (in more than one sense) modernist texts which met with relish the challenge presented by the pace of technological and literary change, and which remain to this day essentially uncategorizable: Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Enemy of the Stars’ (1914) and Mina Loy’s ‘Songs to Joannes’ (1915). These texts put a cosmological understanding of the universe as medium in dialectical tension with the generation of exclusive closed circuits and loops (an exclusiveness that might be thought to amount to madness). Lewis and Loy aimed not simply to represent, but to reproduce, the idea of communication as an adjustment of signal-to-noise ratio. The chapter concludes with a discussion of cryptographic modernism, and of the poems of Harriet Monroe.

After Electromagnetism

The topic of this chapter is a quickening in the pace of change, in both technology and literature, brought about from the 1880s onwards by the harnessing of electricity’s alliance with magnetism to transform methods of telecommunication. The consequent opening up of the ‘Olympian frequency domain’ (Friedrich Kittler) fundamentally undermined the sovereignty of human consciousness. The chapter explores two uses of the metaphor of lightning in literature, philosophy, anthropology, and folklore: first, to mark the limit of unaided human perception; secondly, to indicate, by an emphasis on the return stroke, that two-way communication between earth and heaven is at least conceivable. The focus is on D. H. Lawrence’s fiction, essays, and poetry (especially the extraordinary ‘Bare Almond Trees’); and on Hope Mirrlees’s encoding of her relationship with the eminent classicist Jane Harrison into Paris (1920), a modernist long poem worthy of comparison with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).

The Interface as Cultural Form

This chapter demonstrates that the question of the interface as a cultural form arose most productively during the nineteenth century in the context of technologies relating to sea rather than land. The ‘system’ or ‘medium’ at issue was that of the crew and material apparatus of a sailing ship: the ship’s captain gained access to it by means of the quarterdeck, and the ‘digital command’ (Rachel Plotnick) the quarterdeck affords. The question of the interface arises in Joseph Conrad’s most notable sea tales: ‘The Secret Sharer’ and The Shadow-Line. The chapter provides an analysis of these tales, and of Heart of Darkness, in which a sea captain ventures upriver on a steamboat. Marlow’s demonstrable if anguished mastery of his ship-medium can be understood as an attempt to repair and extend the connectivity that sustains empire. Conrad examines the political and moral cost of assuming that the medium is the message.

Kafka’s Strindberg

This chapter, the first of three case studies designed to carry the story of representations of connectivity forward from the moment in the history of literature in English at which Chapter 5 left off, develops its own version of island theory in order to revalue the two novels Strindberg wrote about islands in the Stockholm archipelago, The People of Hemsö (1887) and By the Open Sea (1890). Islands insulate and isolate. They insulate the connectivity which sustains both empire and international trade from social and political circumstance; and, in doing so, isolate their inhabitants. The popularity of local colour writing offers a context for stories of isolation by Strindberg, Lawrence, and Sarah Orne Jewett, as well as for Kafka’s rewriting of aspects of By the Open Sea, a novel he knew well, in The Castle. The chapter concludes by analysing the distribution of the term Verbindung (connection) in The Castle.

Giving the Sign

This chapter extends the emphasis on signal and interface developed in Chapters 1 and 2 to the work of a writer usually positioned between colonial, anti-colonial, and decolonized perspectives. Mansfield’s interest in methods of telecommunication crystallized in stories about modern urban (mostly London) middle-class existence. But it did not diminish when she began in the final years of her life to draw increasingly on memories of her childhood and youth in New Zealand. Detailed analysis of the narrative structure of some of her best-known stories shows how signalling practices act as the catalyst for expressions of gendered and sexual identity. The late Auckland-set ‘The Stranger’ is compared to James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. The chapter begins with an account of turn-of-the-century views of Englishness; and concludes with a discussion of Waterway (1938), by the Australian novelist Eleanor Dark.