Fast Books Read Slow

Fast Books Read Slow: The Shapes of Speed in Manhattan Transfer and The Sun Also Rises Sam See (bio) Speed of itself is not dangerous but the inability to stop is dangerous. —C.S. Rolls, co-founder of Rolls Royce Ltd.1 Festina lente [Hurry slowly]. —Latin motto of Aldus Manutius, 16th-century publisher Historicizing Speed and Narrative Space F. T. Marinetti, founder of the Italian Futurist movement, programmatically declared in 1909 that, because it must yoke the period's unprecedented speed technologies for aesthetic purposes, modern art "can only be violence, cruelty, and injustice" (Marinetti 13). In 1915, Marinetti extended this imperative to humanity itself: "one must prepare," he insisted, "for the imminent and inevitable identification of man with motor" (256). Based on such pronouncements, a considerable body of scholarship has taught us that early 20th-century speed technologies are historically imbricated with violence; that modernist aesthetic movements, like Futurism, fueled this relationship; and that subjectivity is at stake when a culture accelerates beyond the ability to stop.2 Foremost among such scholarship, Stephen Kern's The Culture of Time and Space (1986) and Paul Virilio's [End Page 342] Speed and Politics (1977), while methodologically divergent texts, concur that, especially between the world wars, technological innovations in the automotive, film, radio, and martial industries "created a 'cult of speed' for a generation that wanted 'to conquer time and space'" (Kern 111), if not "to annihilate time and space" (Virilio 62). By these accounts, the advent of cultural products ranging from pocket watches to Futurist literature manifested a desire for speeds that could not only contract but imperil the time and space of modernism.3 While we have learned much from such histories about the effects of fast travel, fast sex, fast machines, and, in the case of Futurism, fast literature on modernist culture, we have learned much less about how the modernist attempt to conquer and/or annihilate time and space influenced literary production in traditions other than Futurism.4 How fast did literature become, after all, and what role did it play in the culture of violent acceleration and its antagonism toward time and space? Did modernist novels, for instance, contribute to the "violence, cruelty, and injustice" that Marinetti describes? Or was it possible to participate in the culture of speed while upholding an ironic view thereof? As Michael North asks, "In what way could modernist works of art derive their own sense of exhilarated technical freedom from social conditions that also seemed to mean oppression and even experiential paralysis?" (151). Endeavoring toward "technical freedom" by harnessing technology, in other words, did fast novels create or relieve Marinetti's mechanized man, what Virilio calls the "man deprived of a specific place and thus of his identity" (78)? One way of answering these questions is to consider the most famous form of interwar modernist novels, what in 1945 Joseph Frank deemed "spatial form," an umbrella term designating the techniques with which writers disrupt the linear, chronological sequence intrinsic to narrative. Interrupting narrative diachrony with synchronic reflexivity, spatial form techniques include analepsis, prolepsis, parataxis, leitmotifs, fragmentation, and juxtaposition, among other familiar modernist formal experiments as typified in James Joyce's Ulysses or Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Useful though it is, Frank's theory has been assimilated so readily into critical discourse that few scholars have asked why spatial narratives pervade modernist literature.5 If it is true, as Frank says, that "changes in aesthetic form always involve major changes in the sensibility of a particular cultural period" (10), how might the interwar conflict between speed [End Page 343] technology and space illuminate why spatial form was amenable to modernist writers?6 In short, if novels became fast during this period, may that also explain why they became spatial? John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925) and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) offer responses to these questions because they are both spatial form novels preoccupied with speed and violence; moreover, Dos Passos and Hemingway served noncombatant roles in WWI and were throughout their careers troubled by the relationship between speed and politics.7 Whereas Futurist doctrine might have licensed the destruction of time and space, Transfer and

Art · Parallel computing · Transfer (computing · American and British Literature Analysis · American Literature and Culture · Computer Science · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

• Manhattan Transfer and the Metropolitan Subject

  A C Goodson•Arizona quarterly/ The Arizona…•2000

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• Six Memos for the Next Millennium

  Craig R Frisch, Italo Calvino•Modern Language Notes•1989

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• The condition of postmodernity

  David Harvey•The condition of postmodernity•1989

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• The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918

  Paul Theerman, Stephen Kern•Technology and Culture•1985

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• Spatial Form and Plot

  Eric S Rabkin•Critical Inquiry•1977

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