8 - Materials: Glass, Iron and Ghostly Fabric

Summary

‘Useful matter’ is the definition the materials scientist Christopher Hall proposes of the topic of this chapter. According to Hall, materials should, in the first instance, be taken to include obvious ‘engineering stuff’ such as steel, concrete, rubber, plastics, wood, glass and aluminium. But the term also extends to oil, gas, foodstuffs, agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, explosives and textiles, as well as ‘oddball things like ivory and invar, graphite, grease, porcelain, and paint’. All these substances have an evident use (Hall 2014: xiii). My concern here is with the representation of useful matter in modernist writing. What might the representation of useful matter tell us about the distinctiveness of literary modernism? What might literary modernism tell us about the distinctiveness of the uses to which particular materials were put in cultures undergoing widespread economic, social and technological transformation?

Useful matter has customarily been examined with the aid of the concept of ‘material culture’, which has over the last thirty years or so shaped a wide range of enquiries in the arts, humanities and social sciences. In archaeology and socio-cultural anthropology, where the concept first took hold, the focus has remained on the object or thing: that is to say, more often than not, on the artefact. People make things, things make people (Miller 2010: 42–78). Much the same could be said of highly informative studies of modernist material culture from Douglas Mao’s Solid Objects (1998) to Juli Highfill’s Modernism and its Merchandise (2014) and beyond. There, too, the artefact is key. But what about the materials out of which the things are made that make people? Hall rightly reminds us that, with some notable exceptions such as ceramics, manufacture has, for the most part, been a two-step process: making the material, making the artefact. A ship is made of steel, a garment of fabric: someone makes the steel or the fabric; someone else acquires it and makes a ship, or a garment. The two steps create a division of labour and skills, between ironmaster and shipwright, weaver and garment-maker (Hall 2014: 83). It is not self-evident how research into representations of that first step in the process of manufacture might further the enduring ambition of material cultural studies to ‘connect people and things’ (Deetz 1967: 138).