3 - Modernism and the body as machine

Summary

If several modernists present men transformed into animals or insects, even more depict them as having become machines. Even The Metamorphosis suggests a link between the two forms of transformation: Gregor's shell is described as panzerartig, like armor, and the donning of armor is a rudimentary form of mechanization of the body. This interest in the body as automaton had been manifest in the work of Hoffmann, but only with the advent of modernism does it become a widespread theme. In some cases the identity of man is fused completely with that of the machine: Eliot's Tiresias throbs waiting like a taxi, while the typist whose seduction he has witnessed “smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone” – her hand passing across her hair with the automatism of the record player's hand jerking across to land on the record's outer rim. In the works of other modernists man is either the ghost within the machine or exists in dual form, as both man and machine. In each case, the native softness of the human body is opposed to its potential hardness.

Broch's Joachim von Pasenow can be seen to exemplify the former alternative. Soft and vulnerable within the hard shell of his uniform, he is an emotional creature whose expressions of feeling are nevertheless firmly corseted by his other identity as social machine, cog in the Prussian Junker order.