In 1854, the novelist and lawyer Samuel Warren exclaimed
Let us look for a moment to the past, and then to the future. To the past, when mankind could communicate together orally only, and no further than voices could carry; then, as far and as fast as writing and mechanical means of transit could convey; but now, how is it? Our converse with each other is literally with lightning swiftness; under ocean[,] through the air; from one person unseen to another unseen; in different latitudes and longitudes; and ere long, in different hemispheres! The land is rapidly being covered with a network of electric apparatus for the transmission of thought. [1]
Warren's excited observations were already commonplace by the mid-1850s. For many Victorians, the telegraph promised a new way of experiencing both time and space: distance magically collapsed in the wake of scientific advances, granting all communication a fascinating aura of presence. Your speech "arrived" as soon as it was uttered, as it were, and yet a physical chasm persisted between you and your addressee. What would it mean to converse without a time delay, yet not be "there"? More to the point, how would these advances reshape not just national identity in the UK and Ireland (by erasing local identities? by extending the metropolis into the provinces?) and the world (by facilitating empire? by enabling intellectual, as well as financial, exchange?)?
One of the notable things about John Griesemer's Signal & Noise (2003) is that it hones in on precisely this strand of Victorian technological optimism. The novel itself follows the frequently unsuccessful adventures of the transoceanic telegraph cable--the financial huckstering involved, the random acts of scientific egomania, and so on. Unusually for this type of historical novel, the principal figures and their associates--the American Chester Ludlow and his wife, the British sketch artist Jack Trace, the Lindts, and so on--are all fictional; there are brief appearances by Karl Marx, the Lincolns, Charles Dickens (writing pornography!), and the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, with William Thomson, Lord Kelvin playing a more substantial role. All of them are obsessed, to a greater or lesser degree, with the possibility of collapsing spatial and temporal distances--distances frequently associated with death or emotional separation, but also distances inherent in the act of communication itself. Is it possible, in other words, to be entirely present when with another human being?
The novel's structure itself forms part of Griesemer's overall theme. There are two timelines: the main narrative, which moves sequentially down the years, and Otis Ludlow's diary, which is set in 1866 and appears sporadically throughout the novel. The main narrative thus moves "towards" and finally "through" Otis' journal--which Chester himself reads only after Otis' death. Once drowned (a suicide), Otis somehow becomes his journal, "a bundle of personal effects and written obligations" (583), and it is absence in death that forms the basis for Chester's reunion with his estranged wife, Franny. The novel's two timelines merge, then inevitably separate again. Instead of total presence, the novel moves towards wisely accepting absence; communicating with another, even a beloved other, always presupposes a distance.
The most unstable characters fail because they cannot accept death, the ultimate distance of all. Franny Ludlow spends years as a successful and sincere medium, but always fails to reach her lost daughter, Betty; she gives increasingly fraudulent hope to others, but is herself trapped (especially by the nefarious Zephaniah Hermes, a spiritualist showman). In Mary Todd Lincoln's brief appearance on the stage, obsessed with the death of her son, we see a woman whose yearning to reach her lost child blinds her to the devotion of her husband, who uncomplainingly shepherds her to Franny's rooms in a violent rainstorm. Otis Ludlow, a more complex figure, turns to the mysticism of "transetheric" travel--teleportation, in effect--in part to atone for his inability to be there for Betty (like Otis, an epileptic, Betty dies by falling off a cliff during a seizure), in part for his refusal to be there for his artist father (whose death is finally explained only at the end of the novel). Otis' suicide is, in a sense, an attempt to be nowhere and everywhere at once, forever joined with the sea which he believes is speaking through the broken cable. And, less outlandishly, the beautiful Katerina Lindt's affairs with men (not to mention her husband) constantly falter on her desire to possess her beloved's total attention.
Most of the novel's characters believe implicitly in the power of intention: they will do what they set out to do, and what they accomplish will be what they desired. Griesemer pulls that rug out from under their feet by emphasizing the sheer force of accident, coincidence, and pure bad luck. (As Joseph O'Connor shrewdly observes, "At heart, this clever novel is a meditation on that most unAmerican of topics, failure, and Griesemer has the courage to let it be exactly that.") The cable venture fails over and over again; Brunel's "babe," the Great Eastern, suffers through a series of spectacular crises; Ludlow invents a cannon, only to have it shoved aside by the government; Katerina dies in a horrible train crash. Even Jack Trace, who is (in his own way) the most upwardly mobile character in the novel, dies before he can experience his magnum opus' popularity. This theme plays out as well in the Betty subplot, for (after an initial success) Franny only "sees" Betty when she isn't looking for her, as does Chester. Griesemer further underlines this point by frequently having various characters accidentally run into either each other or famous people (as in the initially comical appearance by Karl Marx). One reviewer in the list of pull quotes trots out the infamous adjective "Dickensian" to describe the characters, but there is something deliberately cod-Dickensian about the coincidences, which reveal neither a providential pattern nor the interlocking of social strata--just the "noise" of the universe, as it were.
Strikingly, unlike many neo-Victorian novels, Signal & Noise is, at base, an optimistic novel. Which is not to say that the optimism doesn't take its own gentle ribbing, in the form of the hyper-opportunism of J. Beaumol Spude and the final transformation of the Great Eastern into a theme park. But Jack Trace's final work of art, Progress, which fantasizes the possibilities of post-industrial England, spurs Chester to think about the future already in process: "Chester began wondering if such manners of flight and propulsion and communication could ever be built. He wondered if he could ever build any of them. Already, over in America, a Scotsman named Bell was sending not just flickers of light or clicks of a key but his own voice and music down a wire. Progress was everywhere. How could a man keep up?" (591-92) The subdued panic here--is progress passing me by? Is the world moving too fast?--exists alongside a sense of the future's just-barely imaginable possibilities. The moment's dramatic irony pushes us "away," reminding us that we who are distant from the novel's past are also moving into an unknown future.
[1] Samuel Warren, The Intellectual and Moral Development of the Present Age (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1854), 24.
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