Narratives of conquest and destruction : the automobile in the major fiction of E.M. Forster and F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1910-1925 : a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (original) (raw)
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M/C Journal, 2020
In my article, "A New Sound; a New Sensation: A Cultural and Literary Reconsideration of the Motorcar in Modernity" (Ryder), I propose that "a range of semiotic engines" may be mobilised "to argue that, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the motorcar is received as relatum profundis of freedom". In that 2019 article I further argue that, as Roland Barthes has indirectly proposed, the automobile fits into a "highway code" and into a broader "car system" in which its attributes—including its architectural details—are received as signs of liberation (Barthes Elements, 10, 29). While extending that argument, with near exclusive focus on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and with special reference to the hero’s Rolls Royce, I argue here that the automobile is offered as a sign of both conquest and destruction; as both dream machine and vehicle of nightmare. This is not to suggest that the motorcar was, prior to 192...
2013
Motorcars and Magic Highways examines the nexus between transportation and communication in the development of the automobile across the twentieth century. While early responses to the automobile emphasized its democratizing and liberating potential, the gradual integration of the automobile with communications technologies and networks over the twentieth century helped to organize and regulate automobile use in ways that would advance state and corporate interests. Where the telegraph had separated transportation and communication in the nineteenth century, the automobile's development reintegrates these functions through developments like the two-way radio, car phones, and community wireless networks. As I demonstrate through a cultural study of literature and film, these new communications technologies contributed to the standardization and regulation of American auto-mobility. Throughout this process, however, authors and filmmakers continued to turn to the automobile as a vehicle of social critique and resistance. Chapter one, "Off the Rails: Potentials of Automobility in Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis," establishes the transformative potential that early users saw in the automobile. I argue that Wharton's A Motor-Flight Through France (1908), for instance, offers the motorcar as a means of helping the leisure traveler develop a better sense of history and cultivating an aesthetic sensibility superior to that of the railroad passenger. Compared to the railway-a social force that standardized space and time and regulated mobility through fixed routes and schedules-all three writers believe the automobile makes the traveler more independent and provides a closer communion with the natural world. Chapter two contrasts the linear, rational thinkers who characterize literary detectives from Sherlock Holmes through the Golden Age of Detective fiction with the hardboiled heroes of Dashiell Hammett and his disciples. I argue that while the former align with a society organized around rail travel and the telegraph, the hardboiled detective novel reflects the public's shifting relationship with police and state power as a result of the rise of the automobile's new power to iii communicate through the two-way radio. Hardboiled detectives have an adverse relationship with often corrupt police departments who serve economic elites rather than the public interest. The success of these detectives depends not on mastery of arcane knowledge, but on physical strength and a mastery of geographic space, in contrast to the close confines of the English country house or the locked room. Finally, while the linear thinking and rational deduction of earlier detectives are aligned with the railway, hardboiled detective methods, which rely on gut instincts and agile, inductive reasoning capable of following disparate threads that appear and disappear suddenly, reflect the speed and independent mobility of the automobile. Chapter three continues the analysis of the communicative automobile and the unstable urban space it creates by examining film noir. I argue that the automobile is a significant yet relatively unexamined element in film noir: the editing, shot composition, and special effects used in automobile scenes in such films as Double Indemnity (1944) evoke an unstable urban landscape that the automobile transforms: constantly shifting, difficult to navigate, devoid of landmarks, and concealing threats and snares from seemingly every direction. At the same time, films noir also reveal that many of the potential advantages perceived in the early stages of the automobile now lie unfulfilled. Double Indemnity picks up the comparison of automobile and the railway that characterized Wharton's, Dreiser's, and Lewis's texts, but the flexibility and freedom identified in those early texts have now devolved into impulsiveness and criminality. While the early automobile offered escape from the structural control and surveillance of the railway, films such as The Killers (1946) and Out of the Past (1947) reveal that the transportation infrastructure growing up around the automobile has rendered such escape unlikely. Chapter four explores the public desire to communicate from the automobile to the outside world. The car radio made it possible for the state and corporations to broadcast to the automobile, but government regulations largely restricting the two-way radio to police departments and emergency services made it impossible to speak back. I demonstrate the anxiety of this violation of the autonomy of the automobile through close readings of Ralph Ellison, Hunter S. Thompson, and Allen Ginsberg. Furthermore, I argue that artists responded to this imbalance by incorporating electronic communications equipment and the automobile into their compositional process. Examining the production histories and offering close readings of Tom Wolfe,. Thompson, and Ginsberg, I demonstrate that such writers combined communication technology and the automobile to create new artistic forms, such as New Journalism, and to compose critiques of American militarism and consumer culture. Chapter five, "Solitary Bartlebies: Resistance to the Superhighway in Kerouac and Didion" examines Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays (1971) in the context of the rise of the superhighway and the birth of the Interstate Highway System. Through a history of the superhighway, I demonstrate that the prevailing ethic was one of maximizing individual and national productivity. Like Melville's Bartleby, whose refrain "I would prefer not to" confounds his employer, Kerouac's and Didion's protagonists refuse submission, expressing their resistance through the automobile. Kerouac's Sal Paradise rejects the superhighway and its productivity ethic, instead hitching across the nation's back roads in an effort to establish new forms of community. Maria Wyeth in Play It as It Lays, on the other hand, subverts the superhighway ethic by ritually circulating through the Los Angeles highway system aimlessly without destination. The final chapter, "Decline and Collapse on the Magic Highway," examines the development of and the artistic response to the intelligent traffic systems and fully communicative automobiles that characterize driving in the twenty-first century. Late twentiethcentury writers have associated this new stage of the automobile with decline and collapse. Don Delillo's Cosmopolis details the full and final convergence of communications technology and the automobile, along with its dangers and possibilities, featuring a fund manager who crashes the global economy from the backseat of his limousine while driving across New York City. In many ways, this final integration of communication and transportation closes off many of the possibilities early motorists saw in the automobile, strengthening the neo-conservative state by v enabling direct and indirect control of individual mobility and strengthening corporations by intensifying the relationship between mobility and commercial consumption.
Review: \u27Motoring West: Automobile Pioneers, 1900-1909\u27
2016
Motoring West is the first in a projected series that will examine the place of the motorcar in Trans-Mississippi America to 1940. Edited by Peter J. Blodgett, curator of manuscripts at the Huntington Library, the work brings together explanatory historical material that sets a critical and analytical context with a diverse collection of primary sources. The result is an interesting mix of readings that takes us well beyond Dayton Duncan’s Horatio’s Drive and the Ken Burns film sequel
A Cultural and Literary Reconsideration of the Motorcar in Modernity
Southern Semiotic Review, 2019
In my 2013 article ‘The Motorcar and Desire’ (Southern Semiotic Review, Vol 2), I introduce a series of papers ‘seeking to retrieve the largely forgotten clatter, rumble, and roar of the internal combustion engine as it (quite literally) erupted onto the stage of the modern world (op. cit. n.p.).’ In pursuit of that objective, that foundational paper leverages the work of Victor Shklovsky (see ‘Art as Technique’, 1917) to show how processes of habitualisation have rendered us (more or less) deaf and blind to the manifold cultural significances of the automobile. In a definitively structuralist-semiotic mode, the paper also traverses the changing pattern of literary reception vis-à-vis the motorcar over the first quarter of the twentieth century: that is, while initially celebrated as an icon of freedom and conquest, the motorcar later came to be represented as a sign of confinement and destruction. Broadly, and echoing the trajectory of Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Life of the Automobile (1...
1994
Introduction-Transportation and Literature introduction.htm[1/3/18, 2:17:27 PM] invents landscapes in complex ways. And then there is the unique contribution of literature-its penchant for finding new ways to use the English language to convey thoughts and feelings. We imagine our reader to be a person who has a professional or personal interest in the transportation environment, especially in its social context. To this end, we have tried to capture the experience that such a person would have in reading a literary work with his or her special interests and concerns. We are not writing chiefly for the literary scholar or the historian. Our imagined readers go to literature first for entertainment-to follow the plot and identify with the characters, and for the artists' creative visions of the world. They also read for excellent language and original metaphors which provide insight into people and the society. Our entries, then, put a high premium on allowing the artists' words to come through as much as possible. We are especially interested in showing how the perspective of literary study can shed light on a technical topic like transportation and on the public policy issues which surround it. This project should expand the ways that the professional looks at the role of transportation systems and the society which they serve. These windows into past and current attitudes can also give us insights into the future, not, of course, for the technical innovations, but for public perceptions and acceptance. Furthermore, we envision another audience, especially among the general public and policy makers, that should find our approach much more accessible than that of technical papers from the applied and social sciences. Put another way, this study suggests new ways to talk and write about what transportation means to society. Our initial goal was to survey widely-available, famous American literature carefully. We have thus included selections and authors found in anthologies, on high school and college reading lists, and in public libraries and bookstores. Literary scholars have debated extensively about what qualifies as literature, and what belongs in textbooks or in the "literature" section of the library or bookstore. This debate has frequently pointed out that the category changed radically toward the end of the nineteenth century. Before then, almost anything that was written with some care and that was still being read after its author's death was called literature-including all poems, plays, prose romances, and highly embellished histories and philosophical treatises (1). Since then, many social and economic forces, including the invention of English departments in American and European colleges, universities, and normal schools, the incredible number of books published each year and the need to market to readers' special interests, have narrowed the term. Within schools and colleges, literature departments had settled on a fairly limited number of readings which helped the faculty control admissions and certification. We, however, have consciously expanded the view to show the diversity of literature, to go beyond high-profile, anthologized works. Therefore, we have included samples of popular literature in several flavors-children's books, detective and Western novels, and romances, blues and ballads. The entries include relatively little "non-fiction," but even there the issue is murky. Frank Norris's novel The Octopus is, of course a fictional work, but Norris consciously includes extensive economic and political background on the California railway industry. On the other hand, Tom Wolfe's histories of the 1960s, such as Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby and Electric Kood-Aid Acid Test, with their stylistic ornamentation and embellishments, easily fit our definition. Other, more traditional histories are not part of the sample. Private writings which authors did not intend for publication-letters, journals, and diaries-are excluded, not because these are not literature, but because we focus on writing clearly made available to the public. This study concentrates on the movement of civilians and goods along more or less public pathways. It does not deal with what goes on within plant grounds, on a farm, or in the driveway. Nor does it include commercial vehicles which operate off the public pathways-tractors, combines, and crop-dusting airplanes. No military settings, either-no troop trains, battleships, or tanks. Coverage of American literature which focuses on travel on other continents is limited. Despite serious temptations, we did not cover science fiction stories which depict travel with purely imaginary machines. Speculative accounts of how rocket ships negotiate through the atmosphere of Venus are beyond the realistic or lyrical approaches of what we have included. Finally, we restricted ourselves to printed texts and have not tried to deal with movies, television, or radio; these continuous media present significant methodological difficulties. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses one phrase to get Phoebe Pyncheon off an omnibus. A moving picture or television shot would have to include horses, a street and (perhaps) a sidewalk, sides on the bus, all invented or reconstructed by a twentieth-century set designer, and it is not at all obvious what the writer or director sees as being significant among megabytes of video information. This chronology implies a succession, perhaps a "logical" succession, of transportation systems in what we would now call a "developing country," i.e., the United States from after the Civil War to the 1920s. Changes in transportation technology were relatively abrupt and not continuous, especially when viewed from a particular city or region. Once the Erie Canal was built, or the "thundering subway" in New York (Charles Norris, 1923) was completed, they made sudden and often dramatic changes in its region, often in the whole country. This harmless, perhaps playful sexuality contrasts with Stephen King's Christine (1983), which tells the story of the relationship between an awkward young man and a '57 Plymouth Fury, the "Christine" of the title. He fixes the beat-up car, and as its appearance improves, he begins to bloom. His acne clears up, and he goes out with an attractive girl. But his obsession with the car begins to alienate him from others, first his parents, and eventually the girl. His anger drives him closer to Christine, even though she/it is depicted as malevolent-a real bitch who has some sort of supernatural agency. But she's the perfect woman, • "She would never argue or complain.… She would never demand. You could enter her anytime and rest on her plush upholstery, rest in her warmth. She would never deny." This conception of the "perfect woman" obviously puts a high value on passivity, and certainly the feminization of cars has much to do with the desire for total control of the female. Christine turns out to be a demanding lover who works to destroy first anyone who crosses her owner, and then all those close to him who express worry about his obsession. Once completely isolated, she/it kills him as well when he has the temerity to rebel. Control and possession take a more unpalatable turn in Harry Crews's Car (1972), where the young man sets out to eat a '71 Maverick, half inch piece by half inch piece. His desire to swallow the car is told in sexual terms, and the car is clearly his love object. Ingestion has become his life's purpose, but it becomes a sexual act he literally can't stomach; after working his way through much of the front end, he is stopped by the pain. He ultimately shifts successfully to a human relationship. A final, technical note about how stories are put together. Writers often use passing mention of a trip to move characters on and off the "stage." As speeds and distances increased, the characters can credibly get further, quicker: • "Six months later he went to Hadleyburg, and arrived in a buggy at the house of the old cashier" (Mark Twain, "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg," 1899
‘Tire trouble’: Mules and Men and automobiles
Studies in Travel Writing, 2013
Cars were important to Zora Neale Hurston, whose extensive folklore-collecting trips in the US South in the 1920s and 1930s would have been impossible without them. The book in which she presented this research, , has often been praised for the way that it describes her own practice as a college-educated anthropological fieldworker as well as recording the vernacular culture of African Americans in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana. Accordingly, her Chevrolet figures prominently in her account, but its significance has been largely overlooked by critics. Those who have paid it attention tend to find in Hurston's references to her car signs of an ambivalent relation to the people she studied. She sometimes gave rides to her informants, and the car brought her closer to them but marked her distance from them as well. Drawing on related, recently published, material including her letters, folk-tale transcriptions, and a dramatic sketch entitled 'Filling Station', this essay tries to extend these reflections. If the way the car functions in Hurston's text tells us something about the social relations of her fieldwork, then her fieldwork uncovers a number of conflicting responses to the car, at a time when the automobile was securing its dominance as the main form of transport in all areas of the country. Celebrated for the freedom it offered from the indignities of segregation and male patronage, the car was an object of desire for both Hurston and her informants. But cars were not valued uncritically. The essay closes by examining one folk-tale in particular which points us towards the darkerdangerous, anti-socialside of automobility that Hurston's passion does not quite manage to conceal.
The Infernal Automobile: Car Culture in the Fiction of J.M.G. Le Clézio (by James Boucher)
This paper proposes an analysis of the culture of the automobile in J.M.G Le Clézio’s early fiction. Tracing the emergence of the automobile as icon and myth during the trente glorieuses of post-war France, cinematic representations of the car in Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle anchor a discussion of the unintended consequences of the ubiquity of the personal vehicle in French urban spaces. Le Clézio’s texts create a complex image of the automobile as anathema to the natural environment, social cohesiveness, and individual identity. Rather than being represented as liberating, the idealized culture of the car is problematized as providing neither mobility nor freedom. Keywords: eco-criticism, capitalism, car culture, pollution, consumerism, space.
The Infernal Automobile: Car Culture in the Fiction of J.M.G. Le Clézio
International journal of humanities and social sciences, 2016
This paper proposes an analysis of the culture of the automobile in J.M.G Le Clezio’s early fiction. Tracing the emergence of the automobile as icon and myth during the trente glorieuses of post-war France, cinematic representations of the car in Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle anchor a discussion of the unintended consequences of the ubiquity of the personal vehicle in French urban spaces. Le Clezio’s texts create a complex image of the automobile as anathema to the natural environment, social cohesiveness, and individual identity. Rather than being represented as liberating, the idealized culture of the car is problematized as providing neither mobility nor freedom.