Sharon Stockton
Agency, Inscription, and Bodies of Depth:
Rape and Technology in Twentieth-Century Literature


	My airplane runs on its wheels, skates along, and then 
	up again in flight! [...] Continue the massacre...! 
	Watch me! I seize the stick and glide smoothly down... 
	See the furious coitus of war, gigantic vulva stirred 
	by the friction of courage, shapeless vulva that 
	spreads to offer itself to the terrific spasm of final 
	victory... ! I raise my sights to a hundred meters...! 
	Ready...! Fire!
			--Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1909

Marinetti's encouragement to war depends upon traditional as well 

as distinctly twentieth-century constructions of the subject. 

Clearly, subjectivity here is synonymous with masculinity, and 

agency is predicated on the projection of that subjectivity out of 

and by way of the body. The passive recipient of this harsh gift 

reciprocally validates the projecting agent through a spectacular 

transformation from formlessness to order. This is an old story: 

the object-woman is emptied of subjectivity in order that she 

might be brought to life--or to meaning, value, or order--through 

the violence of masculine inscription. As Jean-Joseph Goux 

expresses it, what woman is said to bring to creation in Western 

mythologies is "matter"--mater, raw material, open space; what man 

brings to creation--to the violent moment of his own identity 

formation--is form, the power to give order, meaning, and value to 

matter (213). The subject of violence "is always, by definition, 

masculine; 'man' is by definition the subject of culture and of 

any social act" (de Lauretis 43). Thus, as Higgins and Silver 

argue, violence against Woman is the context for Western identity 

formation, and rape is the metaphor of choice in figuring this 

establishment of agency.



What is distinctly twentieth century about Marinetti's revision of 

the old story is its attempt to conscript the machine into the 

services of the idealistically phallic subject, and what is 

covered over is the scent of vulnerability which hangs about that 

powerful seat astride the flying machine; technological mastery is 

a two-edged blade. When we look at other modernist writers--D. H. 

Lawrence, for example--we see that prosthesis turn on its master, 

metamorphosed into a corporate industrial body forever outside of 

human control. The Lawrentian protagonist finds himself curtailed, 

castrated--feminized. As in much fiction of the twentieth century 

generally, Lawrence's master narratives and manifestoes give way 

to micronarratives and renegade action, and the sovereign subject 

becomes the pirate rapist in a world where gender distinctions 

blur and shift and where aency is thus reduced to the unsteady 

reinscription of masculinity on a hard technological body which 

has inexplicably become feminine. In this way, Lawrence foresees 

the ironic project of masculine, "high," postmodern fiction, a 

genre structurally marked by the paradoxical conjunction of lost 

sovereignty and attempted rape (ironic rape, parodied rape, 

symbolic or metaphorical rape, failure to rape, cyber-rape, etc.). 

Nicholson Baker's heavily ironic The Fermata is a classic example. 

In this novel, rape is rescripted in a particularly postmodern 

fashion as renegade human action on the sterile and lifeless 

corporate body of late capitalism. Displaced by technology, the 

masculine protagonist also depends upon the technological nature 

of things to open--literally, playfully, monstrously--a space for 

himself on the otherwise slick and unmarkable surface of his 

world.



R. W. Flint and Earl Ingersoll have both pointed out that 

Lawrence's attitude toward the machine was not entirely negative. 

In spite of a little unease, for example, Lawrence admired 

Marinetti greatly, and in spite of the usual Lawrentian mouthpiece 

who heaps anathema on technology (e.g. Mellors in Lady 

Chatterley's Lover), he nonetheless celebrates the machine when 

its function is clearly phallic prosthesis. Ingersoll has pointed 

out, for example, how central the motor-car is in the crucial 

"Excurse" chapter of Women in Love (151). Here Ursula succumbs--in 

a car--to Birkin's dark and "electric" force, acknowledging him as 

a "son of God." This positive conjunction of man and machine is 

typical in Lawrence; also typical is the turn away from the 

traditional association of phallic power with (electric) light: in 

Lawrence's fiction, the mastery of the machine is accomplished in 

phallic/anal darkness and warmth. When man enters the (cold) 

light, on the other hand, he makes himself vulnerable to a machine 

that has metamorphosed into a nightmare of mechanic and feminized 

proliferation.1 In Women in Love, the masculine victim is Gerald 

Crich, son not of God but of an "industrial magnate," explicitly 

characterized by Lawrence as technological master of feminized 

nature. His is a world of light and visibility, and he tolerates 

no fecund shadows. As "Deus ex Machina," Gerald does not partake 

of Lawrence's dark imagery of primal masculine fertility but only 

of the white light of technological production, and because this 

is the case, he is vulnerable to the more powerful and more primal 

light of that "other" machine.



The figurative castration and murder of the "industrial magnate" 

is accomplished at the hands of the Magna Mater, "the mother and 

substance of all life" (337). Gudrun Brangwen is associated 

throughout Women in Love with frozen white power, an image that 

refers simultaneously to the moon, thus eliciting the archetypally 

feminine, as well as to technology in its most negative aspect 

(Birkin's motor-car, framed positively, deifies man in darkness). 

In either case, Gudrun's brilliant inner light prevents her body 

from being the matter--the "vessel"--which can be filled with 

Gerald's potency, thus identifying him as subject: even in the 

midst of their violent sex, Gudrun is Gerald's "white flame," his 

"snow-flower" of such moonlike power that, although "he had 

subdued her," "her subjugation was to him an infinite chastity in 

her, a virginity which he could never break, and which dominated 

him as by a spell" (210). Thus although he rapes and throttles 

her, she wins and he dies; although "it was his will to subjugate 

Matter to his own ends," it is his fate to die in a "cradle of 

snow" below an icy moon, "a painful brilliant thing that was 

always there, unremitting, from which there was no escape" (464).



By the time Lawrence writes Lady Chatterley's Lover (11 years 

later-1928) this empathy for the technologically castrated man has 

all but disappeared; in Clifford Chatterley, Lawrence ridicules 

the "generation of ladylike prigs with half a ball each" which has 

been castrated by technological production--the war machinery, the 

prostheses, the collieries of which type Clifford is lord, and the 

"motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes [that] suck the last bit 

out of [men]" (217). Clifford Chatterley is, in fact, almost a 

cyborg; crippled and rendered impotent by the war, "his 

manhood...dead," he is not only dependent on but a part of his 

motorized wheelchair (290). Constance Chatterley is his wife and 

extension, and as such she articulates the ambivalent relationship 

of modernist man to technology: she is both phallic supplement, 

cold white representative of the corporate machine, and she is 

autonomous feminine body--sexually frigid (cold), brilliant and 

hard in her corporate resistance to masculine interjection. Lady 

Chatterley is not properly "frigid," of course; her "problem" is 

rather that her orgasms are self-controlled, a pathological 

condition which reduces man to "merely a tool" (8). Like the "evil 

electric lights" and "diabolical rattlings of [the] engines" of 

Tevershall pit, the woman's body ultimately dehumanizes man, 

alienating him from his own productions and his own potency.



Mellors's rape of Lady Chatterley is a renegade attack on that 

corporate industrial other.2 The violence within the narrative 

thus constructs the subject position of "natural" man, a figure 

who opens a new space on the cold and alienating--but ultimately 

permeable--surface of industry. Bereft of the machine-as-phallic-

prosthesis, the modernist text produces the rapable machine--

technology as aestheticized object-victim, validating its 

masculine "other" through its oddly conceived vulnerability. The 

permeable machine serves the same function as does the feminine 

body in Laura Tanner's argument; the rapable body is a "text on 

which his [man's] will is inscribed, a form that bears the mark of 

his subjectivity even as [the female/feminized victim] cannot 

divorce it from her own" (115). In Lawrence, the violent signature 

is as indelible as it is triumphant: Mellors's "will" and his 

"mark" are not only printed on Constance's body and mind but are 

embodied in the growing fetus. At the deep level of Lawrentian







psychology, even her most inner self has been accessed; she is 

healed, redeemed, and alive--awakened to the life of the body. In 

this way the rapist both energizes the mother body and brings its 

proliferations under masculine control. With him Constance can "no 

longer force her own conclusion"; she can "do nothing" but "wait, 

wait, and moan in spirit as she felt him inside her withdrawing" 

(133). The desiring, lacking womb not only identifies him as 

sovereign individual but also allows him to "[fold] himself" in 

"darkness" against that "malevolent Thing outside." Rape thus 

defiantly inscribes masculine identity in the face of a seemingly 

autogenetic technology, but only under cover of darkness; the 

mindless and apocalyptic copulations of the machine grind on above 

him, in the light of day (or of the moon).



For Lawrence, then, the force implicit in industrialized 

production has become irreparably severed from the masculine 

subject; the violence of sovereign personality is only marginally 

redeemed through renegade action on that corporate body. In this 

Lawrence forecasts the ironic gesture of high postmodernism: the 

subject is presumed to be excluded from the technological forces 

which constitute him; in the name of play, the subject perseveres 

nonetheless in the violent reassertion of (masculinized) agency. 

One might think here of cyberpunk's cowboys and sundogs; Barth's 

computer generated goat-boy; Pynchon's rockets and coitions which 

so neatly conspire. Here I shall take up Nicholson Baker's The 

Fermata, a novel which provides a clear snapshot of the way 

postmodern "literary" rape figuratively (and, of course, 

ironically) carves a space for three-dimensional agency on the 

flat surfaces of technology. The Fermata is a fantastical novel 

about a male "temp" who has the ability to stop time on command, 

using these "fold times" as opportunities to gaze into and act 

upon the secret and private spaces of the female body. Not 

explicitly about technology per se, the novel is also about 

nothing else; it could only have been written in a scopophilic era 

of fast-forward, pause, and play buttons-when voyeurism entails 

the illusion of control.3



In many ways Arnold Strine exemplifies the postmodern subject to 

perfection. By profession a "temp"--a temporary, generic, and 

replaceable office worker of late capitalism--Arnold can most 

easily be defined as a small and unlikable pocket of alienation in 

a depthless world rushing at vertiginous speed. As with all of 

Baker's character's, Arnold savors this floating position in the 

sea of a proliferating commodity world; when he begins to feel 

mired in permanence or enduring human connection, he switches 

jobs. His marketable skill is transcription, transforming the 

anonymous spoken word into the anonymous written document. Thus an 

organic cog in the machine--a bit of flesh lodged between tape 

recorder and computer--it is this small and exchangeable part 

which nonetheless holds the power to stop the information machine 

and burrow into its softening interior. As with Lawrence, however, 

such renegade action is not directed against the actual forces of 

corporate technology but rather against the c-aestheticized female 

body. Arnold is aware of his options--the banks he could rob, the 

havoc he could cause on mainframes--but uses his power only to 

undress, gaze at, touch, and otherwise sexually intervene in the 

lives of different women.



Structurally, The Fermata is framed by the narrator's 

"relationship" with Joyce, his current supervisor. In the 

narrative "now" of the text, then, Arnold fondles his frozen boss 

(having already pulled her dress up over her waist, her nylons 

down around her ankles), sneaks into her apartment and into her 

consciousness, lets her in on his secret, and tells us the story 

of his life. In this self defense, which takes up the bulk of the 

text, the narrator's goal is to convince the reader that he is and 

has been nothing but "harmless." It becomes increasingly clear, 

however, that his scopophilic project entails actual power over 

the women he--in effect--rapes. He tells his audience in the 

beginning of his "autobiography" that watching the frozen bodies 

in the fermata is not enough in itself. The voyeuristic gaze draws 

ever closer to the frozen (or dead) female body, parting its 

coverings in order to stare ever more deeply into its orifices. He 

feels compelled to act on the observed body, so that he not only 

watches a woman bathe and masturbate, for example, but also 

ejaculates in her face, starting time again briefly so that she 

feels that something is amiss. We are assured in such scenes that 

all is well, all is harmless: actual penile penetration has not 

occurred. Invisibility validates, and Baker's narrator has used 

the invisible prosthesis of time control, ultimately a phallic 

power in that it opens a space on the female body for masculine 

signature.



The feminine object is thus not only stripped of subjectivity but 

of organic life itself. It is precisely this necrophilic aura that 

begins to make Arnold feel bereft of identity, and so he begins to 

insinuate himself more and more often into unknown women's 

consciousnesses. In one of his periods in the fold, for example, 

he follows a woman from the library to her bus, then inserts a 

vibrating butterfly into her vulva, "gradually increas[ing] its 

flutter level...over a series of six or seven time-perversions" 

until she has an orgasm, taking care to make eye contact with her 

at this point. He hands her the vibrator in an envelope when they 

reach her stop. The voyeur thus becomes the rapist in postmodern 

retreat, engaging in what would under normal circumstances be 

fantasy but with the aid of "technology" becomes here actual power 

over the (feminine) world.



A huge part of the novel is given over to the pornography that 

Arnold writes and slips obtrusively to women in fold time. In 

fact, Arnold writes (his pornography and his autobiography) in the 

fold as often as he plays with women's bodies; writing, like the 

raping games--like the fantastical fold technology itself--offers 

Arnold the illusion of a passive depth in







which his identity might become clear. Significantly, he then 

buries his stories--at one point literally--where a woman will 

find them, thus again replicating the three-dimensional depth of 

the foldout. He watches her read the buried treasure (or listen to 

it, in the case of taped pornography), and then follows her in 

order to determine the effect he has had, hoping, of course, to 

have aroused sexual interest. The evidence of his success--the 

trace of his presence--is sexual response, evidencing his potency, 

his penetrative power, his depthful restructuring of a slick 

technological world from which--as in Lawrence--deep human 

connection has been excluded. Unlike his temping jobs, then, 

Arnold's "work" is the invasion and transformation of the frozen 

body of woman through discourse; the open space and empty vessel--

that she is in his games enables him to think of himself not only 

as a subject with effect but as writing subject, the master of 

discourse who through the techne of scripture can liberate the 

feminine body into health. As with Mellors, Arnold's figurative 

rape not only validates masculine subjectivity but redeems the 

feminine technobody by writing on it, planting something in it, 

giving it "life": "the world is inert and statuesque until I touch 

it and make it live" (13).



In the end, as in Lawrence, the machine turns on its master, 

becoming the property of a female successor. Arnold remains 

confident that his powers will return to him, but this is dubious: 

the transference seems decisive. In short, his "technique" is 

sucked out of him with a penis pump, transferred to a dildo, and 

given to Joyce (Arnold's former boss and current lover). The 

migrant techno-laborer of late capitalism--the "temp"-thus 

achieves his final status as "Object-Woman," his body and 

consciousness both rendered vulnerable to the rape of the machine, 

to the gaze of some unnamed and unknown corporate other (Jardine 

75).4 Just before he loses his powers, in fact, Mold finds himself 

(enjoying being) a part of a scientific project to determine the 

effect of masturbation and/or writing on carpal tunnel syndrome. 

Mold is placed inside the "vaginal" core of a superconducting 

magnet, his penis is painted with reference points, and he is shot 

through with x-rays while his masturbation is observed by powerful 

women in white coats. The emotional drive of the scene is derived 

from the sense of control Arnold maintains, unaware of his 

ludicrously extreme vulnerability. He has moved full circle from 

voyeur to exhibitionist, and it is his body which is treated as 

object, shot through with the invisible bullets of twentieth 

century technology.



In her well known "Cyborg Manifesto," Donna Haraway suggests that, 

in spite of the "informatics of domination," "there are also great 

riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities 

inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism 

and machine" (174). For Haraway, the cyborg body defies identity 

predicated on domination; the "infidel heteroglossia" of "cyborg 

writing" enables a new and unstable vision of boundaries, 

autonomy, and individuation. The proposition is compelling. Yet it 

doesn't ring true for me. Kristeva argues that, unlike men, "women 

have nothing to laugh about when the symbolic order collapses." It 

seems to me that, indeed, there is little that is deeply humorous 

or enabling for women in the solvent presence of the machine in 

twentieth-century discourse. A new desperation inhabits 

representation, a scramble to become cyborg, to enhance the self 

with technological supplementation, and this hysterical desire 

plays itself out--once more--on the matter/matrix/virgin plain 

that is still perceived as feminine. The postmodern subject 

continues to be (or--just as aptly--continues to fail to be) 

established through gender violence even if generally disguised, 

ironized, and/or apologized for. In fact, one might go so far as 

to assert with Higgins and Silver that even in contemporary 

figuration, "rape and rapability are central" to the construction 

of gender identity and that "rape exists as a context" for 

subjectivity (3).