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Reading Matters is less a natter about matter than a series of hymns to machines. The book assembles essays that attempt to question the place of narrative in a "new media ecology." Consequently, my reservation regarding the collection as a whole is simply that it engages the question of equipment rather than environment. It is not ecology, but an echo-logy of technology. The finest moments in the collection pose questions about how to write in a culture of savage obsolescence and all things prefixed by the ubiquitous ciphers of hyper and cyber. Those parts of the volume that worked to interpret literary responses to technology are preferable to the attempts to apply technologies to literatures. This is not to imply a mutual exclusivity in means of approach: after all, as Geoffrey Winthrop writes in his eloquent and elegant essay on Thomas Mann, "1. narrative is a media technology; 2.narratives depend on media technology; and 3. narratives deal with media technology, particularly their own" (30).
The major ghosts in this textual machine include Virilio, Benjamin, Deleuze & Guattari, and Pynchon. The essays on Pynchon are particularly productive. Kittler and Johnston move deftly through Pynchonian denseness. They draw out the most useful theses about technology's relationship to literature in their analyses of film and military technology as they influence Pynchon's postmodern textual pyrotechnics. Moreover, both insist on Pynchon as an example of the persistence of writing as a great assimilator no matter what bombs may be bursting in air or elsewhere. Though Pynchon consistently incorporates technologies, sciences, and parasciences into his work, one does well to note that Gravity's Rainbow, a boundless catalogue of technocatastrophies and entropic comedies, was handwritten in pencil on graph paper. This question of the manuscript also figures in an interesting meditation on Lowry's eschewing the typewriter. Wutz deploys a judicious dash of Heidegger to illuminate Lowry's vacillation between the precision plot mechanics of Under the Volcano, and the draftsman's distrust of writing machines. The concept of the writing machine occurs yet again in Bensch's essay on Kafka. Bensch's analyzes Kafka's traumatic encounters with the weapons of stenography, linking the dictaphone and the literal death sentence from In the Penal Colony.
This assemblage is not without its glitches; there are a few critical cogs that fairly squeak for the lubrication of a little more elucidation. Hyperventilating, hyperbolic hullabaloo about hypertext, be it ecstatic or elegiac, smacks of those twin interpretative gremlins: trendiness and tediousness. The essay on technothrillers, for example, which seemed to swerve into a cultural studies cul-de-sac, is bereft of charm; sneering and asides to the presumably academic reader stalled scrutiny and analysis in a somewhat grinding gear. The essay on the canon in the age of its technological obsolescence seems a tad pre-emptive, if not out- and-out off, in describing literature as an informational transaction. For literature, while certainly possessed of machinic properties, is mercifully mercurial and infernal. The best of the volume's essays recognize the sputters, stammers, and spanners in the works that make literature anything but informational transaction: the pieces on Kafka, Pynchon, Mann and Lowry all intimate that the literary response, and resistance to such informational transaction is narrative expenditure, with its fits and starts.
There are a few clever assays at using other heuristics, most notably those of chaos theory, to describe these fits and starts. These work, in a way, for catching that literature is what cannot be caught or definitively decoded. The array of authors in this assemblage refer repeatedly to the writing machine, and seem to concur that writing is but one of many technologies that aid and abet, circumscribe and encrypt the ways we think and live. The less intriguing manifestation of this idea treats literature as a product that processes data; but there are also fine interpretations of literature as data processing that processes itself as well, thus eluding the dank, saleable stall of the product in remaining diabolical, productive of differences, rather than more dismally crunchable computerized facts. Reading Matters is good reading matter when it remembers how exactly reading matters through the material experience of narrative expenditure. It falters when it forgets that virtual reality is the only reality up and running, and that the virtual reality works shuddered to life with the earliest utterances, the first tales told.
Laura Penny
University of Western Ontario