ABSTRACT
This chapter considers texts that, while more orderly than those of Joyce and Lawrence, also take on mechanical dimensions to contest the deforming consequences of mechanization. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the structure of the novel depends, like the postwar world it represents, on the machines that destroy its veteran protagonist—but that structure is everywhere overwhelmed by the subjective experience, rendered in interior monologue, it is built to constrain. In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the functional order of Jake’s narrative emphasizes an instrumental proficiency that is both an attempted remedy for and a result of a machine-made injury—but the mechanical coherence of his narrative continually breaks down under the pressure of the trauma it seeks to repress. And in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time , the telephone that exposes the narrator’s grandmother to a terrifying deformation—detaching her voice from her body, it seems to prefigure her death—also becomes the basis of a knowledge capable of undoing the estrangement it has itself induced: a knowledge as seemingly “impossible to attain as it seemed impossible to speak from one town to another, before we knew of the contrivance by which that impossibility has been overcome.”
