The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  And clearly something did change—radically. In today’s world, China is not only the largest IT market on the planet, but also home to a script that is among the fastest and most successful within our era of electronic writing—despite being nonalphabetic. Even if we accept, then, that from the nineteenth century onward the “technological abyss” between alphabetic and nonalphabetic was real, the fact remains that something happened in this abyss that has entirely escaped our attention. Indeed, if this book can be said to have one primary argument, it is that we must venture into the technological abyss to recover something of great importance that took shape here while the world was not paying attention—something that cannot be captured through conventional, celebratory, impact-focused histories of technology. This expedition, however, requires us to dispense with the easy iconoclasm of the character abolitionists, and equally so with any implicit desire for all histories of technology to be histories of triumph. Our story will be composed of what can only be called a long cascade of short-lived experiments, prototypes, and failures, where even the most successful devices lived only brief lives before disappearing into obscurity. Indeed, many of our Chinese telegraph codes, character retrieval systems, and typewriters were little more than speculations, wild ideas about how Chinese script might survive and function in the age of alphabetic hegemony. Counterintuitively, however, it is precisely within these speculations, short-lived successes, and outright failures that we witness the intensity of China’s engagement with questions of technolinguistic modernity most clearly, and where both the material and semiotic foundations of the modern Chinese-language information infrastructure were slowly and unconsciously being laid. The history of modern Chinese information technology is not one that derives its importance and relevance from the magnitude of its immediate effect, but from the intensity and endurance of its engagement.

  Can We Hear the Chinese Typewriter?

  As we stand at the rim of the abyss, making final arrangements and provisions for our expedition down into its depths, a troubling question remains: When we finally encounter the myriad elements that populate this abyss—bizarre codes and speculative machines—will we be able to engage with them seriously, as anything other than pale imitations of their “real” counterparts elsewhere in the world? When we learn how many characters per minute a typical Chinese typist could manage in the 1930s, will our minds not immediately juxtapose this against the speeds we know to have been achieved by operators of Remingtons and Underwoods? When we see the chassis of a Chinese typewriter, will our aesthetic sensibilities not instinctively contrast it with the elegant, downright sensual design of the Lettera 22 by Olivetti? And when we first begin to listen to Chinese typewriters, will we be able to hear them through anything other than a soundtrack of modernity that, in our minds, is synonymous with the rat-a-tat cadence of the QWERTY keyboard? Our question is not Can the Chinese typewriter speak? but rather When it speaks, will we be able to hear it?

  In 1950, American modernist composer Leroy Anderson (1908–1975) debuted a frenetic piece called “The Typewriter” in which he transformed this Western business appliance into a musical instrument. A soloist—the symphony percussionist, most likely—took his place at the most downstage position, in front of the orchestra, seated before a mechanical typewriter. Nested in an accompanying melody, the typist-percussionist set off on a blazing, nearly unbroken run of staccato thirty-second notes, punctuated by artfully placed rests and, to great comic effect, strikes of the typewriter bell indicating that the end of the line had nearly been reached. The piece was played “allegro vivace,” or “bright tempo,” with its 160 beats per minute evoking Rimsky-Korsakoff’s “The Flight of the Bumblebee.” Slightly less known than his “Syncopated Clock,” Anderson’s 1950 work found its way into popular consciousness, and has remained an infrequent yet always warmly received part of the cultural repertoire (it was recently performed in Ludwigshafen, Germany, by the Strauss Festival Orchestra Vienna, as well as at the Melbourne Fringe Festival). Perhaps its single greatest promoter came from outside the world of symphony: comedian Jerry Lewis, who performed a mimed rendition in his 1963 film Who’s Minding the Store?

  Anderson’s mid-century piece is revealing, for it alerts us to the fuller spectrum of the alphabetic typewriter as an icon of twentieth-century modernity. The typewriter’s day job might have been as an inscription machine and a business appliance, but it also moonlighted as one of the auralities of mass modernity: a sixteenth- and thirty-second-note soundscape in which we have lived now for over a century, continuing to absorb its cadences in the age of computing to the point where it is a taken-for-granted feature of our world. This soundscape was a long time in the making, moreover. In 1928, two decades before Anderson, someone attempted to capture in language the awesome and awful sound of the King Arms Thompson machine gun. While some called it the “Tommy Gun,” riffing on its namesake, others dubbed it the “Chicago Typewriter”—the rat-a-tat of the typewriter likened to the rat-a-tat of bullets fired from a gun. This nickname inadvertently closed a historical circle, it bears noting, with the first mass-manufactured typewriters coming off the assembly line of the one-time Civil War–era weapons-maker Remington—a fact that prompted Friedrich Kittler to draw his famous analogy of the typewriter as a “discursive machine gun.” By the 1930s, it was no longer the typewriter that took its name from the machine gun, however, but the machine gun that took its name from the typewriter.32

  Aurality is only one part of the typewriter’s iconography. Within the history of film, the typewriter was promoted long ago from mere set piece to all-but-dues-paying cast member. Whether in His Girl Friday, The 400 Blows, The Shining, All the President’s Men, Jagged Edge, Barton Fink, Naked Lunch, Misery, Schindler’s List, The Lives of Others, or any number of other examples, the typewriter has become an agent of narrative, sometimes even the fulcrum around which entire scenes and stories revolve. One of the machine’s most audacious appearances was in the 1970 Bombay Talkie, in which one scene finds actors dancing on a gigantic typewriter as part of the film’s culminating musical number. Referring to the typewriter as a “fate machine,” the film expands upon this dramatic moniker by explaining that “typewriter keys represent the keys of life and we human beings dance on them. And then when we dance, as we press down the keys of the machine, the story that is written is the story of our fate.” The film’s famed Bollywood number, “Typewriter Tip Tip Tip,” captures this same sentiment with evocative onomatopoeia:

  A type writer goes tip tip tip tip

  It writes every story of life.33

  The Chinese typewriter we will meet in this book sounded nothing like Anderson’s virtuoso, and it did not go tip tip tip. Neither did it leave its mark on a single famous Chinese writer. You will find no Chinese coffee table books featuring the likes of Lu Xun, Zhang Ailing, or Mao Dun at their faithful Chinese machines, cigarettes drooping James Dean–style from their lower lips. Likewise, there are no museums dedicated to the Chinese typewriter (yet), and with a few exceptions, nothing on par with the global network of collectors and nostalgics that has formed around its alphabetic counterpart. In more ways than one, then, the Chinese typewriter might not strike us as much of a typewriter at all.

  As we set out to examine and understand this machine, and the broader history of modern Chinese information technology, the question that must constantly be invoked is thus: are we capable of doing so? To return to the metaphor of sound: if the Chinese typewriter cannot be heard except through Anderson’s score, the Tommy Gun, and the tip tip tip of Bollywood, is it in fact possible to hear this machine at all? This is the principal methodological challenge of this book.

  Depending upon the reader’s disposition, this book puts forward answers to this question that might seem either naively optimistic or crushingly pessimistic. I do think it is possible to write a history of the Chinese typewriter, and with it the broader history of Chinese technolinguistic modernity, but only to the extent that we abandon a
ny and all fantasies of hearing this machine “on its own terms.” No such aural space exists or has ever existed: no autonomous, unspoilt soundstage waiting to be reconstructed by the historian that, when rediscovered, will redeem the Chinese typewriter by returning it to its rightful place. The aurality of the Chinese typewriter was and has always been a compromised space, at all times somehow related to, completely ensphered within, and yet distinct from the global soundscape of the “real” typewriter of the West. In listening to the Chinese machine, we can never hope to isolate ourselves in the peace and quiet of an anechoic chamber, dwelling upon the fine texture of its sounds through high-fidelity speakers. The analytical space we occupy is more like a crowded café, music blaring throughout, in which we are straining to hear faint sounds. There exists no such thing as a “China-centered” history of the Chinese typewriter—nor of Chinese modernity.34

  Methodologically, the posture I adopt in this book can best be described as agonistic: a posture in which our ultimate goal is not to arrive at a singular, harmonic, conflict-free, and final description of the history in question, but one that makes ample space for, and even embraces, dissonances, contradictions, and even impossibilities that are understood to be productive, positive, and ultimately more faithful to the way human history actually takes shape. To hear the Chinese typewriter, I argue, it is necessary both to interrogate and deconstruct our own longstanding assumptions about technolinguistic modernity—a practice that by now comes naturally to the historian—and to eschew all expectations that the act of critical reflexivity has the power to liberate us from these assumptions. No matter how intently I have listened to the Chinese typewriter over the past decade, and no matter how intently I have sought to denaturalize the cadences of the Remington machine and the QWERTY keyboard that play on perpetual loop in the recesses of my mind, there has never been a point during that time when I could hear the Chinese typewriter all by itself.

  Chinese typewriters make sound, of course. They even have their own onomatopoetic counterpart to the tip tip tip of Bombay Talkie, and yet this counterpart cannot be found so easily, and is certainly not celebrated in popular culture. The sound of Chinese typewriters, as it was experienced by those who worked and lived with them, is instead buried in archival documents, where I found that the distinct rhythm and tonality of the Chinese machine was sometimes captured through the clip-clopping term gada gada gada (嘎哒嘎哒嘎哒). In this formulation, the ga refers to an initial sequence of movements entailing the depression of the typing lever, the resulting insertion of the metal slug into the type chamber, and the striking of the platen; while the da refers to a second sequence, entailing the type chamber falling back to its original position, and the ejection of the metal slug back into its original location on the tray bed matrix.

  Sound is not the same thing as aurality, however. Even when I heard the machine for myself, with its gada gada gada rhythm, it was Anderson’s typewriter that continued to set the sonic backdrop against which this sound was playing. Gada gada gada has its own rhythm, to be sure, but as for its velocity, my mind could not help but hear it as a half- or whole-note accompaniment to the thirty-second-note-clip of the real typewriter with its tip tip tip and rat-a-tat-tat.

  What I steadily came to realize over the course of this research was that the Andersonian score was not something that my historical actors or I had a “view of” or “feelings about”—expressions that suggest some kind of critical distance between the object and the person. More accurately, the technolinguistic consciousness of the modern age is Remington, and to engage the Chinese typewriter is at all times to do so inside the Remington field. To undertake our exploration critically and productively, then, requires engaging with the question of agonism introduced above, beginning with a basic observation: Within and of itself, the deconstruction of our assumptions and categories does not rid us of these assumptions or categories. To historicize and deconstruct something is merely to destabilize it momentarily, to open up brief and fleeting windows of time in which something—anything—might happen that would be impossible if a given concept were allowed to reside in numb, dumb slumber. But the act of deconstruction does not endure. At most, it serves to contribute a tiny pulse of energy to a collective and sometimes exhausting struggle to keep a given concept or configuration “in play” just one moment longer. In this act we perpetually exert ourselves to drag concepts back mere inches from the precipice toward which everything slides inexorably: the precipice that separates the realm of critical thought from the vast wasteland of the given. Pessimistic as this may sound, I consider this invigorating struggle to be what gives critical thought its primary meaning—and to be one of the most pointed answers I can give when, particularly in the present day, humanistic thought is placed beneath the interrogator’s lamp and demanded to justify its existence in our technophilic, anti-intellectual age. Furthermore, I would argue that to eschew or retreat from this agonistic process is to deplete historicism and deconstruction of their only real power. For the scholar who demonstrates the constructedness of a thing, and in any way pretends to have transcended or made unreal the thing thus deconstructed; the scholar who proclaims the decenteredness of his or her approach, and in any way pretends to have smudged this center from our maps; the scholar who dislodges a “master narrative” by multiplying or pluralizing it (modernity/modernities, enlightenment/enlightenments), and imagines that anything has happened other than a consolidation of the master narrative by other means; such acts amount to exiting the field of intellectual struggle altogether, abandoning one’s post, and leaving one’s comrades immersed in a struggle now made incrementally more difficult by being “one intellect down.” As we move forth to understand the history of the Chinese typewriter and Chinese information technology, we must adopt a critical relationship with our own “Remington selves,” to be sure, but at all times remind ourselves that the mere act of critical self-awareness cannot by itself free us from this heuristic and experiential framework. We are not Remington, and we are.

  A Word on Sources

  This book is based on an eclectic body of sources, compiled over the course of ten years. It encompasses oral histories, material objects, family histories, and archival texts from more than fifty archives, museums, private collections, and special collections in nearly twenty countries. The global scale and diversity of this archive merits attention in at least two ways. First, it speaks to the challenges and inequalities built into writing the history of modern Chinese information technology, especially in constituting the archives one requires to build our histories in the first place. While the history of the information age in the West enjoys countless museums and archival collections dedicated to the subject, nothing comparable is enjoyed by the historian of the information age in China, and arguably in the non-Western world more broadly. For that reason, I had no choice but to build an archive from the ground up, working in collections in China, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, Italy, Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. The history of the modern Chinese information infrastructure has to be pieced together from across a diverse, transnational, and all-but-overlooked cast of characters who fashioned an immense and complex repertoire of coordinated technolinguistic systems that by now govern the Chinese-character information environment in the form of indexes, lists, catalogs, dictionaries, braille, telegraphy, stenography, typesetting, typewriting, and computing.

  Second, the scale and diversity of this archive speak to the fundamentally transnational nature of the history in question. Although we will be discussing the “Chinese typewriter,” the term Chinese should not be taken as an adjective describing the nationality, mother tongue, or ethnicity of all our protagonists. Defying simple categorization, the actors in our story comprise a diverse and unusual cast of characters who hailed from all over the world, and yet endeavored to solve the puzzle of Chinese writing in the modern age. To tell the story of the Chinese typewriter requires us to travel,
not only to Shanghai, Beijing, Tongzhou, and elsewhere in China, but also to Bangkok, Cairo, New York, Tokyo, Paris, Porthcurno, Philadelphia, and Silicon Valley. As it turns out, by writing the history of the Chinese typewriter, one necessarily sets out upon a global history of the information age.