Abstract

What I refer to is how our thought in inventing, designing, modifying, and using machines carries over into acts we do not consciously associate with them—like writing or reading poetry. An airplane in flight may be “pure poetry,” or a Ferrari “a poem in steel”; it intrigues me to consider that beneath such object comparisons an object-of-thought connection may be made. Or in other words, there may be really something to a hackneyed compliment like “poem in steel.” My preference for thought form over object form makes me less interested in machines that we can see than in those that we can’t, and it makes me direct my inquiry along two lines, concerning two questions about invisibility. The first involves the history of technology: How is it that machines “disappear”—become less visible, impinge less and less upon popular consciousness? The effect cannot be imputed entirely to familiarity. The second involves the history of literature: If machines have disappeared, are there “disappeared”—or “invisible”—machines in literature? It is reasonably clear that we go to considerable lengths to hide the machines that surround us and that we choose, or our artists choose, insofar as such choice can be located, to restrict the appearance of machines in art.3 Commonly their restricted appearance in art is understood as a kind of resistance to some form of machine takeover, while their concealment has only uncommonly received analysis and is not generally discussed in context with the matter of artistic representation. But we do accept, at least in theory, the idea that style of living and style in literature are connected. If the machine penetrates our style of living, then—and this is the end of my inquiry—these invisibilities are of interest to literary criticism, for they have something to do with the way literature is written, with whether or not, that is, writers choose to describe machines, use them as characters, or give them any role at all to play in surface structure. Since the artist often works to reveal what his society works to conceal and since the postmodern period has so far been one of crisis in the relations between society and technology, we may expect to find in postmodern fiction, or in writing to come, some greater revelation or simple exposure of the workings, than we could have seen before. 3. I use “restrict” in a statistical sense, for since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution there have been artists to celebrate the machine; today’s hyperrealist movement offers contemporary examples. These artists—Tom Blackwell, Ron Kleemann, Ralph Goings, and others—work a transformation like that of Andy Warhol with the pop object. They present not so much a celebration as an effort to turn looking into seeing, here directed at automobiles in particular, so much a part of everyday life as to have become indistinguishable from one another and as a species from the other parts of the semiurban landscape—the mailbox, the front lawn, the visiting relatives staring into the camera. Strother B. Purdy is the author of The Hole in the Fabric: Science, Contemporary Literature, and Henry James. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Stalingrad and My Lai: A Literary-Political Speculation” and “Reply to Lawrence W. Hyman