5 - Automobiles: The Modernist Gaze and Speed’s Visual Limit-field

Summary

‘ The rupture of metal and safety glass and the deliberate destruction of deliberately engineered artefacts, had left me lightheaded’ (Ballard 1985: 125). In literature, the swirling buildup of the first phase of appalled fascination at what the automobile had wrought converged on one notorious text, J. G. Ballard’s Crash. The automobile’s promise of the thrilling experience of unprecedented personal speed, and the pushing of its driver’s sensations to their limits, had made it a new kind of commodity: one which not only granted the usual pleasures of consumerism and status, but demanded new, extreme, use of one’s senses, and which induced, in that very use, pleasurable stress. For Ballard, at the end of this era, it was only at the moment of the crash that the full implications of this new model of what it meant to be human in interaction with technology could be mapped in fascinated horror. Before him, many artists had experimented with elucidating the joys of car speeds: from Marinetti’s pro-car oratorio in the 1909 ‘Futurist Manifesto’ to the car chases of the first Hollywood films and the Jaguar spills of James Bond; the admiration for drivers and driving in Proust’s La Recherche and the excitements of driving joyously delineated in Woolf’s Orlando; the windscreen painting of Manet and the speeding-car photos of Jacques-Henri Lartigue. They had all been willing to celebrate the car as commodity, but with an undercurrent of concern about what is unleashed in the driver-subject. The experimental strategies of the various modernisms were excellent for plumbing the limits and the possible new intensities – of attentiveness, endurance, adrenaline rush and stress – that this new technology incited in its users. Delineating these stresses in turn drove various modernisms to their own limits of representation. This chapter will first consider the two poles of consumer celebration and terror which greeted the arrival of the automobile; we will then examine representations of the first sense stressed by the experience of driving at speed, that of sight. Seeing at speed became a modernist topic and a spur to new kinds of modernist representations and genres, which in turn prompted engineers to develop still newer technologies of seeing. Capturing the speed gaze became the task of the moving image; it also fostered a telegraphic, cinematic turn in literature and art.