Machines for Living by Victoria Rosner

Machines for Living by Victoria Rosner

Author:Victoria Rosner [Rosner, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192583819
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-01-28T00:00:00+00:00


The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavours to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once (ll. 236–9)

Having finished eating out of tins, they move on to another canned experience, a rote form of lovemaking. Again we find caesuras that further accentuate the choppy, mechanical rhythms that characterize this less-than-personal encounter.

Eating and intercourse seem to be parallel experiences for the typist: both provoke sensory pleasure; both should express individual tastes; both feed natural appetites. But in the typist’s household, both are standardized practices. The standardization of human desires has, in both cases, the effect of banishing specificity, sensory experience, individual preference, and pleasure. The typist and her lover are machines performing work processes, not individuals seeking satisfaction. After he leaves, “Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: / ‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over’” (ll. 251–2). The latter line evokes the thoughts of a worker leaving his factory shift rather than a woman bidding goodbye to her lover. This line is also the only explicit speech of the typist’s in the poem and it is notable for its reliance on pronouns and contractions (“that’s,” “I’m,” “it’s”) and its lack of proper nouns or verbs other than “to be.” (By contrast, the previous long episode in The Waste Land, which takes place in a pub, is chiefly dialogue and uses nouns and verbs in character speech to establish specificity; e.g. “When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said” (l. 139).) The typist thinks in generic terms and uses contractions as a form of efficiency, apparently to get the process of thinking finished as quickly as possible. Like other lines in this episode, the line has an extra pause inserted into the middle that underlines the sense of mindless, mechanized process, the staccato jerk of an object moving along the line.

The typist continues her mechanical ways after the quick departure of her lover and the episode concludes with her in solitude:



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