"Innervation and the Technological Sensorium in Will Self's Umbrella"
Résumé
This paper draws on Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan’s conceptions of the technological sensorium to examine the relation between writing and technology in Will Self’s novel Umbrella. Inspired by historical cases of patients suffering from post-encephalitic syndrome, the novel follows the attempts of a psychiatrist to help a group of patients who caught encephalitis lethargica in the 1920s, and have remained prisoners of crippling paralysis and tics for fifty years. As a new drug begins to take effect on the patients, their movements acquire legibility for both doctor and reader, and their alienated bodies come to embody “the entire mechanical age”. Through this allegorical tale, Self explores humanity’s relation to technology as a pathology, in which a modified sensorium is a key symptom of technological existence. Yet the focalizers of Self’s narrative do not only incorporate technology into the fibres of their bodies; their vivid perceptions innervate the apparatus that surrounds them, drawing the reader into a living mechanical environment. I propose to examine this extension of the human sensorium in the light of Benjamin’s reflections on mimetic innervation, and to ask to what extent Self’s writing is in itself an attempt to create an innervated and innervating reader.