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While Kipling’s 1902 story “Wireless” has often been thought to exemplify an already outmoded realist narration, this essay argues that the story is an early experiment with impressionism. Midway through, the narrator’s point of view suddenly becomes distorted and private. The story makes sense of this change through the figure of the wireless telegraph, which Kipling uses to imagine a dizzying excess of technological chatter—a serious concern in contemporary discourse about the wireless—that makes communication impossible and isolates the individual despite his permeability to the world. “Wireless” reveals impressionism to be a specifically post-telegraphic telecommunication discourse.

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Henry James often criticizes mass culture for having instrumentalized the novel by conditioning readers to reduce the text to its ending. Yet he also suggests that popular visual technologies—cinema and its predecessor, the magic lantern—are uniquely able to compensate for mass culture's end-driven tendencies by taking the viewing process out of the viewer's hands. While readers can read novels as they please, visual technologies function independently of the spectator. From them, James thought, twentieth-century novelists might derive formal strategies to solve the problem of instrumentalization. James's theories of technology and modernism recast familiar debates about the relationship among the early-twentieth-century novel, mass culture, and commodification. He neither posits the novel as a work of art that is exempt from economic pressures nor embraces the commodity as a model for a new aesthetic. Instead, he critically revises mass culture, using technology to nullify the hazards of commodification.