Queer Technology, Failure, and a Return to the Hand

Abstract

When Hart Crane incorporated technology into his long 1930 poem The Bridge, he was engaging with a debate within American modernist culture that had been going on for more than a decade. Many writers proclaimed the period between the two World Wars to be “the Machine Age,” and Crane was hardly alone in acknowledging that the increasing presence of machinery and other elements of apparent scientific progress in everyday life had to be reflected in visual and verbal art if these artists were to give a vital and realistic portrayal of the way people lived in the modern world. However, Crane’s engagement with the Machine and technology in The Bridge is unconventional, for rather than celebrate the Machine Age as so many of his contemporaries did, he describes situations in which technology fails. What is more, that failure is an essential element of his poetic and queer practices. Reading Crane’s failure as a deliberate aesthetic choice provides a necessary way to challenge a prevailing assumption about Crane, and particularly about The Bridge, that it and he were failures, an assumption which, as I have indicated elsewhere in the book, unhelpfully conflates his lifestyle (his alcoholism and queer sexuality) with a supposed breakdown in his work. If failure is read as a positive energy, however, it becomes a way of understanding how Crane develops a sense of a queer community, of reinvigorating language for his queer project, and also how that failure enables a return to older forms of technology and a rejection of the Machine.