The Iron Whim and Carnival

In reading Darren Wershler-Henry’s The Iron Whim, I couldn’t help but continuously think back to the first chapter in which he describes the destruction of a typewriter by throwing it out of a car window. He makes the point that in the destruction of an object (once it is trash) one can fully understand the meaning of that object as a cultural object. Essentially, he means to look at all the parts, rather than the whole. The collection of anecdotes that is in this book is a continuation on this theme. Wershler-Henry investigates each little snippet of a story about typewriters or writing machines and then the reader can make a whole meaning from that if they choose. I, for one, love this approach and don’t feel obliged to make a “whole meaning.” The interest in the details is enough for me and, to use a Foucaultian phrase that Wershler-Henry also employs, I would like to focus on the discourse. The freedom to ponder the little details is I think what the typewriter really is about. Each key is one letter, one little part of the whole. This means that one would have to throw a word out of a car at 90 miles per hour to understand the meaning of its construction and not just the meaning of the word in the language that it’s in. However, throwing a word out of a car is perhaps not as practical. The medium that the word is made in, for example: ink on paper, becomes the object that gets destroyed, not the word on it. This then leads to the question of how to destroy a word, which, to me, is answered by Steve McCaffery, in his work Carnival. There are two different panels, each from a different time period, that are essentially large canvasses covered in letters, sometimes whole words, that are constructed and destructed in progressions. However, the words are often arranged to form shapes, but, to me, look like the result of driving a car over the canvasses and throwing letters out onto it at 90 miles per hour. The strange shapes produced by the words are the work of the author and perhaps indicate at what time and in what succession McCaffery threw each word out. One of my favorite examples comes on the second panel when the word “flower” is written and then under it, the word “flow” appears and towards the bottom of the progression, simply an “f” and then the word “lower” slightly below it and to the right. Not only does one get a feeling for the word’s meaning in the language, there are other words with separate meanings within the word “flower” than can contribute to its construction and perhaps inform the reader of subtle nuances of meaning. More importantly, the reader notices the letters used to write the word and immediately begins to think of the actual manner in which those letters are produced: the typewriter, the whim of the writer.