Ezra Pound’s Lost Mary: Literature’s Love Hate Relationship with Technology

By Luca Cavallo (Arts & Lit Editor)

Lately, there has been a rising debate about the sale of disposable vapes. A simple side of the argument is that the vapes are too harmful for the environment. Some people will purchase 3 to 4 vapes a week, and with that in mind, it is dreadful to imagine the wastage each month. There’s another side to the debate, however, which is even more unsettling. We don’t really know how harmful single use vapes are to our health; we are especially uncertain about their long-term effects. Elf Bar and Lost Mary BM600, arguably the most popular disposable vapes in Ireland, are manufactured by Shenzhen iMiracle Technology, a Chinese company. These products are banned in China. Flavoured, disposable vapes are prohibited, and so the company sells mainly to the West.

There is constant debate about the technology of vaping. Some will say that they are a good thing - that a fashionable, flavourful, and convenient alternative to tobacco can’t be anything if not better than cigarettes. Others will say that it is all too good to be true.

As I find myself listening to either side of the argument, I can’t help but think about the literature and art surrounding technology introduced 100 years ago. There were similar anxieties towards fascinating industrial and modernising feats, including radio, automobiles, motion pictures, and, of course, instant coffee.

There were some who considered modernisation to be the best thing since sliced bread, which was invented in 1927. The most notable group were the Italian Futurists. These were a number of artists, mainly painters, who wanted to push the advancement of modernity more than anything. They adored machinery and motors. Much of their artwork focused on capturing abstract motion and speed with severely constructed shapes, such as Carlo Carrà’s paintings Woman on the Balcony (1912) and Il cavaliere rosso o Cavallo e cavaliere (1913). A slower, but equally emphatic approach was Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Salutando (1911). There was also a lot of Futurist poetry, which was rather questionable. Take a look at this poem, focusing on sound, titled Zang Tumb Tumb.

Italian Futurism, with its obsession with modernity as a kind of “happy modernism”, was not regarded with much respect in wider Europe. Futurism had some influence in Britain, particularly in the Vorticist movement. These writers, including Ezra Pound, started the short-lived Futurist magazine Blast in 1914, a month before the First World War.

There was, however, a similarly Futurist view taken by Irish essayist William Kirkpatrick Magee, known better by his pseudonym, John Eglinton. Eglinton appeared in James Joyce’s Ulysses as a librarian in the National Library (he did indeed work there from 1904). Though a generation older than the Italians, Eglinton expressed interest in the importance of technology in the new century. Italian Futurism enjoyed machinery’s potential for chaotic advancement, whereas Eglinton saw it as a means of bringing cosmopolitan values to Ireland. Especially in discussion of the Irish Literary Revival, Eglinton saw machines and modernity as a way to inspire patriotism in Ireland by looking to the future, rather than relying on Irish folklore, mythology, and history. Technology was the key to achieving Eglinton’s ideal of “a patriotism which looks forward”.

As mentioned, the war essentially destroyed Blast magazine. A second issue, “War Number”, was released in July 1915, but the war was too much for Blast to live on. After the war, the vibrancy and positivity of modernism would not be the same. The post-war era, or rather, the inter-war period, inspired the most notable works of literary modernism. What had once been an adoration of advancing modernisation became an intense fear of it. We had seen what machinery could do to people. From 1919 onwards, machinery in modernist literature would become invasive and alien.

An obvious example of fearful modernism is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. It is my educated guess that Eliot would not touch a Lost Mary. While Zang Tumb Tumb attempts to replicate sound in poetry, The Waste Land actually accomplishes this feat. It does this so well that the Italian poem seems childish. Eliot’s poem is heavily inspired by the carnage wrecked on society since the war. Everything is in disarray, and the poem is a “heap of broken images”, or so Eliot says. With regard to the prominence of radio during and after the war, the poem becomes a muddled collection of conversations, songs, noises, laments, and cheers. The verse is often interrupted by outbursts of noise and song lyrics.

“Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your

head?”

But

O O O O that Shakespearean Rag—

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”

The entire poem replicates that inconsistent chatter of a radio as you turn the knob, looking for the right frequency. Sometimes it will stay on the same subject or channel, and offer a longer discussion. One notably large section is also the only part of the poem where there is an identifiable speaker, Tiresias. And Tiresias tells us of “the human engine… / Like a taxi throbbing waiting”. The blind prophet Tiresias describes only what they hear. And when they think of modern people, they think of technology. Everyone is in cars, so Tiresias can’t help but compare people to them. When the typist goes home for her tea, she remains “the typist”. Tiresias insinuates that her entire identity is tied to the machine she works on.

Eliot provided his own footnotes to The Waste Land (they explain NOTHING) and one critical piece of information he shares is that Tiresias is the “most important personage in the poem”, and what he “sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem”. With the only true speaker in the poem struggling to separate modern life from modern technology, it’s quite clear that Eliot was highly concerned about the outcome of our post-war reliance on machines.

Any discussion on technology in literature after The Waste Land delves into two strict halves: One half is distant respect and minor anxiety. An example of this is the opening scene of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). On Bond Street, the bang of a motor car slamming into the pavement is mistaken for “a pistol shot in the street outside”. The pedestrians revere such a car as one that must belong to the Royal Family, or “The Prime Minister”. The airplane that soars above the street awes the pedestrians, though we can only imagine how Woolf would have felt about a plane over London had she written Mrs Dalloway twenty years later.

The other half of the literature in discussion of technology is, unsurprisingly, dystopian. Take Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World, for example. Written just before the outbreak of Nazism in Germany, Brave New World is a novel more or less untainted by political fears, unlike its often-related counterpart, 1984. The panic in Huxley’s novel is mostly technological. We will all be born in tanks, and there won’t be any tradition or culture, and we’ll all take little drugs every few hours to keep us sedately content. It’s quite extreme, but Huxley’s fearful predictions are nonetheless a possibility on a smaller scale in today’s society. Of course, we have around a decade left to go before Brave New World’s centenary, and then we’ll see if Huxley was right. He may have predicted vaping, too. Highly convenient, with instant results. It sounds quite similar to, if not “better” than, the Soma drug introduced in Huxley’s dystopia.

There will always be an “old-fashioned way” of looking at things, especially technology. We are entirely surrounded by modernity now. But it is always helpful to take a look back at the views and opinions of those who lived during the birth of the modern age. Contemporary anxieties about technology can always be eased if you consider the sheer panic and over-excitement of the early 20th century. Though personally, I would like to see the look on an Italian Futurist and motor enthusiast's face if he saw the traffic at Dunkettle.