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Singing the Body Mechanic
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12930 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1987 |
2,600 Words |
| Author
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Gregory Wolfe
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THE MECHANIC MUSE
Hugh Kenner
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986
136 pp., $13.95
Hugh Kenner stands apart from most of the literary critics of our day for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that his books are widely read. That may seem an odd claim, given the surge in popularity of literary critics espousing radical ideologies, including writers like Jacques Derrida and that semiotics professor-turned-novelist Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose. But these literary ideologues write impenetrable prose; except for the most assiduous graduate students, most people refer to them at cocktail parties and faculty clubs by paraphrasing a few quirky ideas.
Kenner, on the other hand, writes with vivacity and elegance about those "difficult" poets, the High Modernists (Joyce, Eliot, Pound, et al.). In fact, Kenner has been criticized by fellow critics for being too involved with his love of style and generalization. Denis Donoghue observes that in Kenner's prose "liveliness has to fill the space by making each phrase and clause an event: distinctions of a scholarly nature...are eliminated from the space of the only dialogue in the case, that which takes place between Kenner and his typewriter." Add to these strictures Kenner's association with William F. Buckley, Jr.'s conservative magazine National Review, and one can see that any of Kenner's books will be an "event" that will provoke controversy.
The Mechanic Muse is no exception. In a little over a hundred pages, Kenner attempts to demonstrate that the Modernist writers were both subtly influenced by, and consciously aware of, the way modern technology affects our perception of reality. In doing so, Kenner manages to assault one of the most cherished prejudices that we have inherited from the Romantics: the notion that the poet or imaginative writer has divorced himself from the harsh, impersonal world of the machine in order to cultivate a more sensitive personality. Indeed, we are accustomed to the idea that the poet gained a special civilizing mission with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. In political terms, the artist has often been seen as the antagonist of materialistic capitalism, upholding the beauty of nature and the simplicity of the common man.
Between the Virgin and the Dynamo
As with many prejudices, there is a measure of truth in these notions. But as Kenner points out, even a Romantic poet like Wordsworth was an avid student of the new science of psychology and sought to write poetry that would function as an "experiment" intended to see how well the artist could apply common speech to the poetic medium. Henry Adams may have seen the Virgin and the Dynamo as opposed principles representing two different cultures - the medieval and the modern - but the architects and builders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries found no radical division between the mathematical precision that made possible the miracle of a Gothic cathedral and the Virgin whom the cathedral honored. Kenner notes that Leonardo da Vinci's ability to paint, write sonnets, and invent cannons and helicopters represents an integrative and unifying vision that seemed to have been lost after the Renaissance.
The dichotomy
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