Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex by Timothy Wientzen (review)

Abstract

Central to Timothy Wientzen’s fascinating, lively, and flawed book is the split he identifies in modernist literature and art between, on the one hand, the discoveries of patterns, grooves, and the habits of organisms observed in John B. Watson’s laboratory in the United States and Ivan Pavlov’s laboratory in Russia, and, on the other hand, the drive to overcome any such programmatic physiological base within an organism through the artistic drive for creativity and experimentation with form. This split is characteristic in itself of modernity, of course, a dichotomy Wientzen identifies at one point as being between the “radical newness in art and culture” and “an era dominated by robots, hollow men, and automata incapable of escaping the grooves of thought and action patterned by society” (p. 170). In lesser hands, perhaps, the split identified here would be characterized in cruder and more predictable terms as the opposition between the new sciences of human behavior and a concomitant plea by artists and writers, with comparatively little scientific background or knowledge, for escape from their confines through the pure freedom of art for art’s sake, or a form of production that escapes the hyper-rationalized bureaucracy of industrial modernity. Yet, through careful reading of representative literary oeuvres, along with sections that join some of the dots in the history of the science of reflexes and the social implications of the concepts of habit and automaticity, the result is a more edifying and less predictable study of the interactions between the arts and the sciences in modernism. Among the four writers who feature in the four substantive chapters of this book, part of the Hopkins Studies in Modernism series, Wientzen finds ample evidence of reflexivity concerning their historical and scientific moment. In the examination of passages from D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West, and Samuel Beckett, Wientzen finds to varying degrees their awareness of, and response to, the troubling of human subjectivity, agency, and social control in the wake of the widening impact of the scientific and social scientific findings of human behavior and its potential for manipulation. There are four chapters sandwiched between a succinct introductory overview and a concluding chapter that assesses the implications of early-twentieth-century studies on twenty-first-century politics and media. For each of the chapters the structure remains largely consistent, starting with a contemporary set of related intellectual or scientific discoveries in the first half, followed by a sustained examination of