McTeague, The Machine, and Modern Life
I find that most of the modern books, movies, or poems I have read have had problems reconciling the notion of the Author’s fear of machinery and a desire to understand it. Many authors seem to have been rejecting the idea of modern aspects coming into life, while the masses accept the advent like drones. On the other hand, artists embraced it as far as adaptations of their chosen medium to reflect machine-like functions. Gertrude Stein was a well-known perpetrator of this; she focused so much on style and form that her work is sometimes unreadable as far as content.
In McTeague, we get a sense that the drones in San Francisco are confused by the advent of modern life. Trina’s family for instance, is representative of the old country; at the picture show, they are unable to connect with the “kinetoscope” and its function. Especially Mrs. Sieppe. She seems enraged by the inherent trickery involved in using such a machine. Frank Norris, unlike Trina and her family, was interested in using similar aspects of new technology to update the form of the novel. Frank Norris actually echoed the function of the projecting kinetoscope: “The ideal, kinetoscopic novel that collectively emerges from these allusions is engineered…for what I call telling descriptions, that is, narrating stories via discrete, concrete images while obscuring the overt traces of narration as a discursive act.”
It was representative of Norris’ “plea to readers to differentiate realism from naturalism according to how description functions in each genre.”
