Whether riding on mail-coaches, hobby horses or trains, or even when engaging in the contemporary fad of fast-paced hiking known as "pedestrianism," these and other contemporary witnesses were in agreement that speed was more than just the mark of modern times. Speed was the distinctive drug of modernity, a stimulant and intensifier akin to those analyzed by Balzac in his Traité des Excitants modernes : tea, sugar, eau de vie, tobacco, and, especially, coffee (with whose accelerative effect on thought-processes and addictive properties Balzac was well acquainted). 65 Unlike the somber diligence and train passengers portrayed by artists such as Honoré Daumier and Adolph Menzel, these voyagers--all of whom, whether outside or not, ultimately imagine themselves as outside voyagers--report feeling neither cut off from one another nor from the landscape. On the contrary, they assert their closeness to the engine that drives them, the vehicle in which they travel, and the landscape which they traverse: a closeness that they dream of literalizing by taking the reins and sitting in the driver's seat like the amateur coachmen of the early nineteenth century enamored of driving "four in hand" just like the artists whom they venerated. 66 Precious testimony to this effect comes from Thomas De Quincey's The English Mail-Coach; an essay in which the author of Confessions of an Opium Eater recounts how "the anarchies of his subsequent dreams" were unleashed by his Oxford-London rides atop a mail-coach:
an agency which they accomplished, 1st, through velocity at that time unprecedented--for they first revealed the glory of motion; 2ndly, through grand effects for the eye between lamp-light and the darkness upon solitary roads; 3rdly, through animal beauty and power so often displayed in the class of horses selected for this mail service; 4thly, through the conscious presence of a central intellect that, in the midst of vast distance--of storms, of darkness, of danger-overruled all obstacles into one steady co-operation to a national result. 67
The god-like intellect that presides over the mail system's clockwork operation is a nation state that is now defined less by its policing of borders than by the coordination of traffic flows across a territory that is itself a source of sublime spectacles: spectacles of storm, darkness, and danger; "true" magic lantern shows that often assume the form of cataclysmic news reports. Access to the show is provided by the experience of speed itself: an addictive experience subsequently glossed with the Latin phrase magna vivimus ("we live bigger")--in De Quincey's own words, "[through velocity] we realise our grandeurs in act, and in the very experience of life." 68 I will return to this quotation in a moment, but wish to underscore a crucial point. This expanded sense of selfhood, this passage into a wakeful hallucinatory or visionary state in which "terror" fuses with "terrific beauty" 69 and the subject takes possession of the entire visual field, is triggered by an optical effect that recurs in nearly every early description of accelerated motion and underlies the design of thrill rides in nineteenth-century amusement parks as well as their cinematic shows: namely, a reversal of perspective such that it now appears as if it is the landscape that is in motion and not the traveler; or, rather, that the landscape is in motion for the traveler. The effect is a familiar one in reports of mail-coach travel. One author describes the astonishment of a time-traveler from the early eighteenth century who awakens one hundred years later only to find that there is no longer such as thing as a stagecoach stop: "[before he can utter the word "breakfast"] the waiter, the inn, and indeed [the town of] Hounslow itself (terraeque urbesque recedunt), disappeared in the twinkling of an eye. Never did such a succession of doors, windows, and window-shutters pass so quickly in his review before . . . " 70 Another commentator refers the effect to contemporary optical devices:
Tree and tower go swimmingly past, and whole fields of corn-sheaves seem of themselves to go hurrying to harvest-home. The world is a peristrephic panorama, and the turnpikes seem placed, not to impede motion, but to promote it. Village follows village quickly, even in a thinly-inhabited country, so rapid is the imperceptible progress of the sixteen hooves; and we drive through towns and cities from sun to sun. 71
There is no such thing as sober driving under the new regime of accelerated motion. Its rotatory panoramic effect, akin to the spinning horizon experienced by a drunk, is charted for the first time in literary texts such as Gérard de Nerval's Awakening in a Carriage (Le Rêveil en voiture [1831]) in which the moving vehicle already functions as a 360-degree camera:
This is what I saw: The trees along my route Merging as they fled, like an army in retreat; And beneath me, as if moved by swirling winds, The ground unrolled in waves of dust and cobblestone.
Clocktowers amidst green plains their hamlets led Back beneath plastered tile-roofed homes That trotted by as if they were flocks Of white sheep, stamped with red on their backs.
And drunken mountains wavered; and the river, A vast boa constrictor spread out across the landscape struck out, as if to seize them within its coil . . . Myself, I was on a mail-coach, freshly awake. 72
The landscape has come unmoored and wheels about as if driven by an immobile engine at its center. Its constituent elements remain familiar: trees that make up forests, clocktowers that summon peasants to humble abodes, flocks of sheep, towering mountains, serpentine rivers. But, no longer "fixable" within the viewing parameters of the picturesque or the sublime, these elements have come alive. The firm ground upon which they once stood has been dematerialized, reduced to a veil of dust, so they drift, intermingle, and merge (as in the sheep=homes=red dawn equation of the middle stanza) within the fold of a hallucinatory whole. Tightly sprung around the river's serpentine coil, this spectacle is that of a new kind of viewer: a seer who has sprouted wheels, a kinematic subject, a little god for whom the clock ticks out visionary rhythms, not external time. And what he awakens to is a vision of empire-in-the-round. Armies retreat before his movements, treated here as akin to conquests; the roadway rolls out an infinite red carpet; his half-sleep and half-wakefulness intoxicates the mountains; only his eye can seize the coil that seizes the landscape. The poem bears witness to Nerval on drugs. His drug of choice is speed. From Nerval's dawn coach ride to Paul de Kock's La Grande Ville in which railways are proclaimed "the true magic lantern of nature" to Otto Julius Bierbaum's Prinz Kuckuck whose flight on automotive wheels prepares him for "even greater ecstasies, triumphs, and freedoms" linking his life-rhythms to the four-cycle rhythms of the machine, to João do Rio, for whom "the auto paces [rithmiza] our vertiginous life, the lust for speed, the frenzy to attain goals, our sense of morality, esthetics, pleasure, economy, and love," generative powers are ascribed to this reversal in perspective which makes the landscape into the speeder. 73 "Generative" because the loss of a stable perceptual framework, enforced by the perception of danger, immediately gives rise to a subjectivity that, because imperiled, now claims to "live bigger" and to experience an expanded sensorium thanks to an intensified inter-agency with its vehicle and/or environment.
The galvanic cycle is De Quincey's privileged metaphor for this hyper-extended, aroused state, most vividly registered in the eyeball:
The vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first. But the intervening links that connected them, that spread the earthquake of battle into the eyeballs of the horse, were the heart of man and its electrical thrillings--kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife, and then propagating its own tumults by contagious shouts and gestures to the heart of his servant the horse. 74
For the moment, the circuit in question is a strictly animal one made up of vibrations or thrills whose regularity is not that of "blind insensate agencies" such as the locomotive (though this will soon change). Rather, the horses' heroic effort, expenditure, and fatigue, which is to say the passengers' heroic effort, expenditure, and fatigue, exemplifies a regularity that is invigorating because it is irregular, an experience of speed that defies tedium because it always contains the threat or promise of accident:
But now, on the new system of traveling, iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man's heart from the ministers of his locomotion . . . The galvanic cycle is broken up for ever; man's imperial nature no longer sends itself forward through the electrical sensibility of the horse; the inter-agencies are gone in the mode of communication between the horse and his master out of which grew so many aspects of sublimity under accidents of mists that hid, or sudden blazes that revealed, of mobs that agitated, or midnight solitudes that awed. Tidings fitted to convulse all nations must henceforwards travel by culinary process; and the trumpets that once announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking when heard screaming on the wind and proclaiming itself through the darkness to every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler. 75
From Longinus through Kant, the sublime was the aesthetic category of movement: "The sublime moves, the beautiful charms," reads the opening passage of Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. 76 Later, in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment he added that its representation in nature sets the mind in motion and that "this movement, especially in its inception, may be compared with a vibration, i.e. with a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by the same Object. The point of excess for the imagination . . . is like an abyss in which it fears to lose itself . . . " 77 Whether in Burke or in Kant, the abyss is laid open by rapid trigger mechanisms: convulsive motions, perceptions of danger or pain, violent shocks. But the stimulus must remain at a safe remove: "when danger or pain press too nearly" writes Burke, "they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience." 78 Already in the eighteenth century, there was uncertainty about where to draw the line between safety and peril, aesthetic play and physical terror, distance and proximity, planning and surprise. The line begins to vanish altogether once the viewer's platform is placed in rapid motion, as on De Quincey's mail-coach. The result is a sublimity that no longer leads beyond the passions to an awareness of human superiority over nature, as the later Kant would require. Rather, the new sublime of speed finds its fulfillment in spectacular accidents--fires, revolutions, hallucinatory landscapes, crashes, news events, panics--unruly events that, no matter how remote, remain so menacingly close that they can be measured on a scale of intensity but not delight. Aesthetic play has been recast as dangerous play and the prevalence of adjective over noun or noun over adjective declared unresolvable in the course of charting modernity's "punitive expedition into [humankind's] own nervous system." 79
De Quincey's contention that there exists an inexorable gap between steam engines and their animal counterparts will not endure, for the "thrill" side of later nineteenth-century transportation culture consistently set out to collapse the gap even as it acknowledged an essential difference. Animalizing mechanical locomotion and mechanizing animal locomotion, it placed technology within the circuit of human inter-agency in the form of body/machine hybrids, hybrids equipped with fiery eyeballs like Marinetti's auto/centaur. De Quincey's deeper point, however, will remain valid for succeeding generations: namely, that the experience of railway travel, just like travel on the inside of mail-coaches, is characterized less by the logic of thrill than by the logic of commodification. True, the train was the century's most prolific producer of kinematic effects like the following one, drawn from Benjamin Gastineau's 1861 travel novel, La Vie en chemin de fer:
Thanks to the rapid motion of the convoy, everything is transred, heightened, and poeticized. Dead gods are resuscitated, vulgar peasant girls idealized, stones become sculptures, trees discourse or weep, drunken clouds extend from zenith to nadir, forests pull on each others' their tresses in the midst of a furious t, the sun dances a minuet, and the moon wanders . . . All of nature becomes an agitated fairy theater, within which appear and parade fabulous divinities, heroes, monsters, battles, famines, triumphs, history's great spectacles . . . The brilliant palette of the railroad paints universal life in all its ridiculous and sublime manifestations, with all of its contrasts, its grandeur and misery, its grace and contorsions, its grimaces and smiles. 80
Seen through the machine ensemble as if through the viewing slot of a zoetrope, nature comes alive thanks to the steam engine's propulsion. 81 It assumes the form of an animated cartoon whose frenzied spirits dance about a viewer who, once restricted to eyeing frames or fragments, is now privy to a vision of the complete spectacle of life. Missing from the picture, however, is the perception of danger, eliminated by a battery of technologies that detach passenger from landscape, passenger from passenger, and passenger from engine: soundproofing, upholstery, sealed windows, enclosed compartments, suspension systems, smoothed out rail beds, specialization of function among railway cars. All are devices that foster a feeling of safety and its subjective correlative: a sensation of tedium that can be alleviated only by means of the reading, sleep or awkward conversation documented in period cartoons. All are devices that, in the eyes of the railway's harshest critics, contribute to reducing the sovereign traveler to the status of a mere package among packages: "[the railway] transmutes a man from a traveler into a living parcel" avers Ruskin among others. 82 Reified or not, the human masses conveyed by the locomotive are encouraged to doubt their speed. Rather than hearing, seeing, and feeling electrical thrillings, they are invited to relax to the soothing syncopation of muffled clickety-clacks. In the words of a contemporary railway engineer: "There's nothing frightening about speed when the traveler who benefits from it remains unaware of his velocity. With well-built machines, well-tested materials, and a good rail bed, the speed of 120 kilometers per hour ought to cause no alarm." 83 Naturalized, speed becomes the object of regulation, rationalization, and standardized measurement. Time is registered not as inner durée but according to the ticking of an external clock; space is dispatched like "metaphysical entity, stripped of all reality." 84
The promise/threat of accident, of course, does not vanish as a result. But whereas its overt presence structures the entire logic of a thrill-based culture of transportation, here it is repressed. Reliability and regularity become the norms of accelerated motion and any interruption of them assumes the form of a cataclysmic return. "Cataclysmic" on the psychic front, because of the overwhelming and unexpected nature of the stimulus; "cataclysmic" on the social front, because of the event's scale and spectacle value. The technical literature that developed around these catastrophes mixes paeans to safety with a sensationalist rhetoric of accident. It marks its distance from the culture of thrill by engineering systems of crash avoidance, charting traffic flows, and trumpeting an end to all accidents. It marks its proximity by trafficking in the most lurid details of "the dark martyrology . . . of famous catastrophes that bloody the map of today's railways." 85 A single instance of the latter will have to suffice for present purposes, that of a young man eviscerated and killed in the Versailles-Paris train wreck of 1842, described as follows by Georges Grison:
. . . a convulsive rictus wracked his face as if he were erupting in laughter. Strange to behold, there was something worthy of study by physiologists, something I am obliged to describe because we are making history here. Strange to behold! In this supreme instant that poor naked cadaver could have posed for a statue of Priapus or red in the phallophoriae of India. 86
The miracle of penile tumescence overcoming death confirms that we have left behind the universe of "living parcels" and quantifiable traffic flows, and rejoined the lineage of thrill seekers extending from the electrified De Quincey to the shark-riding Marinetti to J. G. Ballard's drivers who crash to come. Brutally reattached to the soil, the dead body registers and preserves the train's momentum in its erectile tissues, yielding a spectacle that Grison, despite his subtitle's promise that he will instruct the reader on "what needs to be done," hopes will shock, seduce, and entertain.
The borderline separating pathogenic wound from regenerative thrill also proves permeable in studies of the malady known as "railway spine" and in their psychoanalytic heirs. Assuming that there is a difference only of degree in the traumas provoked by falls, work accidents, and crashes, the analytical framework that they adopt is the now familiar vibratory one: "Perhaps the one circumstance which more than any other gives a peculiar character to a railway accident is the thrill or jar, the ebranlement that is transmitted through everything subjected to it. It is this vibratory shock (which by some is compared to an electrical jolt) that causes a carriage to be shattered into splinters, and occasions the sharp tremulous movement that runs through every fiber of its occupants." 87 Though the emphasis here, as in Freudian analysis, will be on injury and its resulting blockages, the step from shock to sexual shudder remains small. 88 Telling evidence to this effect may be found in the domain of nineteenth-century graphic production where Schivelbusch and others have found ample documentation of the new traumas engendered by mechanized transportation. 89 Third-class passengers crammed like cattle into open cars, bored glances exchanged among strangers forced to share the same compartment, stampeding passengers in every station, signal men reduced to the status of road signs: these are but a few of the characteristic components of an iconography of tedium, discomfort, and reification that appears unrelentingly critical in its attitude towards new transportation technologies.
The same is often said about the abundance of cartoons that portray train crashes and boiler explosions. 90 Yet a less intentionality-driven reading attends far better to the specificity of the caricaturist's art: a rapid mass medium conjoining the real and the fantastic, trafficking in laughs, surprises, and up-to-the-minute commentary, framed by the latest news--a medium always already implicated, like its cinematic successor, in a rhetoric of collision. It is hardly gore or horror, for instance, that prevail in Hugh Hughes's The Pleasures of the Rail-Road ( 10), Robert Seymour's Going it by Steam ( 11), or in any number of anonymous cartoons published in Punch ( 12), but rather an outburst of technical flourish, glee, and inventiveness. All are works--and many more by the likes of Daumier, Cham, and Cruikshank could be cited--in which crash victims seem to have become every bit as much circus acrobats or vaudeville entertainers as sufferers from physical or psychic injuries. Leaving behind the confines of their conveyance, their bodies fracture and multiply, sail through the air, merge into fields of wood, copper, iron, smoke, and steam as if, having entered a new realm of bliss, they find themselves free from the constraints of biology, space or time; unperturbed by history, memory, and class identity; released from the iron-clad laws of industrial development. The explosion itself res as the uncorking of a bottle of champagne, an aerial choreography, or the sudden transformation of a once-static boiler into a sprinting and unhinged metallic man. All of which hints that beneath the thin veil of tragedy and trauma, there lurks a vision of the crash as a distinctively modern form of spectacle and subject formation. A form of spectacle and subject formation of the sort more fully codified in early trick films such as Cecil Hepworth's How it Feels to be Run Over , whose illusory collision between auto and audience links seeing cars to seeing stars; and Explosion of a Motorcar which culminates in a shower of arms, legs, heads, and auto parts. In these instances, as throughout the early cinema, fleshly and metallic bodies are subject to dismemberments, shocks, and explosions whose effects are gleefully displayed and quickly overcome. They crash on screen and crash the screen as if to impress the viability of a volatile new mode of being upon the audience.
If the cataclysmic return of accident was required in order to bring ordinary passenger trains back within the orbit of thrill, albeit under the negative guise of trauma, such is not the case with the wide range of alternative trains and transportation [Begin Page 29] devices devised by engineers for the purpose of making "doubts impossible on the question of our speed." Among the earliest were the trains de plaisir designed for country outings, whose displeasures were a favorite target of Daumier's visual wit. Windows were omitted from this class of vehicles, compartments were broken down, and the impériale was restored for passengers hungry for even stronger emotions: all with the aim of limiting the mediation provided by the machine ensemble and re-establishing an enriched sensorium.
Pleasure trains found a non-utilitarian counterpart in the switchback railways that hurtled human cargoes down mountainsides like those of Pennsylvania's Mount Pisgah starting in 1872, which is to say in the first experiments with what soon thereafter came to be known as "roller coasters." 91 Initially referred to as "scenic railways," the latter's history can be traced back to seventeenth-century Russian ice-slides and eighteenth-century Folies du Jour found in places like Paris's Parc Monceau. It enters its mature phase in the last third of the nineteenth century, when designers like Thompson transformed the rides into high-speed kinematic machines combining tunnels and curves with rapid shifts between outside environments (usually sublime mountainscapes) and inside environments in the form of scrolling panels, panoramas, and tableaux depicting grottoes, ancient Egyptian landscapes, Biblical episodes, and disaster scenes with moving parts 92 ( 13). These sorts of radically disjunctive temporal and spatial effects had already been anticipated by the design of steam-powered carousels. 93 A steam tractor/ organ complex, first at the carousel's periphery, then at its center, had been pumping out power, music, and motion for nearly a half century ( 14). It stood still while driving the rotation of a platform alternately supporting horses, trains, cars or bicycles whose smooth or undulatory motion was exaggerated by a counter-rotating hub bearing representations of landscapes and beveled mirrors. Sometimes encased within buildings studded with gas or electric lights, these life-sized kaleidoscopes left their traces in the design of a wide array of later vertigo rides going by names like "The Mystic Screw," "The Scenic Spiral Wheel," and "The Cyclone Bowl." Stripping away all the optical and theatrical trickery, these limited their workings to what may be viewed as the core operation of all amusement park rides, however different they may appear: the transformation of passengers into modern whirling dervishes who, once passed through a sort of spatialized centrifuge, could be expected to wander about as if drugged, trembling with fear and giddy with excitement.
Not surprisingly, the threat/promise of accident plays a determining role within the fold of turn-of-the-century magic kingdoms. Its presence was highlighted at the boundary line between the world of play and the world of work: on the painted flats, for instance, employed by Luna Parks to draw in audiences with promises of "An Automobile Dash for Death Down a Mountain at One Thousand Miles an Hour" or "A Journey from This World to the Next" in the form of "The Great Train Wreck" ( 15). Within the park walls, it was regularly evoked on the outer panels that crowned the first carousels, as well as on the facades of Bioscopes and Electric Theaters inviting spectators to experience illusory collisions between representation and reality such as those staged in Hepworth's and Edison's films. 94 The attractions themselves were, in turn, both designed and designated so as to place peril in the foreground as, for instance, the Covent Garden circus's 1904 Circle of Death, mimed by the various mystic cyclones, spirals, and screws ( 16). And every crossing of the line from play to terror, every thrill ride accident and calamity--not infrequent in the early years--was seized upon and sensationalized by newspapers in order to relay the electrical thrillings to the outside world.
Contemporary accounts suggest that, like the driver of Marinetti's Fiat, the thrill rider approached his experience of speed and fright as an emancipatory ebranlement to be repeated time and time again. He or she exults when the world is literally [Begin Page 33] turned upside-down, much like the flying passengers of Cham's scenic railway or, eighty years later, Rube Goldberg's coaster riders released from ordinary temporal, spatial, and psychosocial constraints. But what is the nature of the stimulus being sought? (See . 17, 18). Does it simply provide an opiate-like escape from workaday tedium? Is it simply a training exercise, a dress rehearsal for the nerve-wracking routines of modern everyday life? Or are its thrillings the revolutionary ones envisaged in Vladimir Tatlin's political montagne Russe, the proposed Monument to the Third International ? 95 ( See 19). Has the thrill-seeking passenger, in other words, merged into the revolutionary mob, the human double of Burke and Kant's infinite and, therefore, sublime ocean, the oceanic mass dipped in and out by modern heroic individuals, be they dandies and/or dictators? 96 Or has he become the sovereign dandy/dictator himself, animated by the illusion that the world is rushing by just for him: that it is his world, his spectacle, his hallucination to shape and/or to wreck? Whatever the answer, one thing is certain: a single dose of speed is never enough. Whether in the logic of amusement parks, modern transportation cultures, revolutionary movements, news media, or the cultural-political avant-gardes, thrill must follow thrill. Which means that accident must follow accident. De Quincey moves from mail-coaches to opiates; Marinetti from cars to airplanes to war; the thrill rider from attraction to attraction; the revolutionary dreams of permanent revolution.
The return of the specter of repetition brings my argument full circle, for you will recall that it was the locomotive's dulling regularity that accounted for De Quincey's dismissal of steam power as a "culinary process," rejected in favor of the mail-coach's electrical/animal surge. By the end of the century, the terms have altered but the stakes remain the same. The contrast is no longer between the circuits formed by insensate machines and sensate beings, but instead between two distinct but interlocking regimes of repetition, both of which couple bodies with machines and both of which presuppose accelerated motion as their norm. One, grounded in Enlightenment ideals, thinks of men and machines as machines à reprise [as duplication machines] and, like Goldberg's mild-mannered passengers decrying roadway irregularities on their way to an amusement park, it identifies modernity with the return of sameness: standardization, reliability, predictability, the leveling of differences. The other, anti-Enlightenment in spirit, thinks of men and machines as machines à surprise [as surprise machines] and, like Goldberg's thrill riders always eager for another "go around," identifies modernity instead with non-recursive modes of repetition: with novelty, danger, unpredictability, the multiplication of differences. A number of key features from the opening scene of the founding manifesto of Futurism fall more clearly into place within this setting. Its talk of death "pulling up alongside me at every curve"; its insistence that the motorcar is an individualized "panting beast with a torrid heart" whose steering wheel hangs over the driver "like the blade of a guillotine"; its hallucinogenic characterization of speed; and, most of all, its portrayal of the crash as the moment of the movement's birth: all of these features, like the accident in which they culminate, cannot be dismissed as atavistic carryovers from the pre-industrial era (. 20, 21). Rather, they aim to exorcise a specific threat: namely, that the triumph of modern technics will extend the rule of Enlightenment reason over all aspects of everyday life at the expense of the individual--both the human and the mechanical individual. This is why Futurism's counter-proposal, its "religion-morality of speed," is built around unstable techno-primitive hybrids like the modern Centaur: a detachable creature, neither railbound nor lawbound, composed of enemy twins--a human subject, called upon to metallize himself and to impose his distinctive vital impulses or scatti upon the always menacing machine, and an automotive/equine double, endowed with powers of agency and moral autonomy, within whose metallic chest thunders a motore a scatto no less explosive and unpredictable than the driver's racing heart. A direct heir to the cabriolets of the eighteenth century and real-world counterpart to amusement park thrill rides, the automobile is thus invoked as Futurism's birth vehicle not on the basis of its functionality, but because its design was unstandardized, its performance unreliable, and its movements governed by whim alone. Much faster than the earliest generation of airplanes, the equal of all but the fastest trains, it was a literal horseless carriage: a custom-built frame yoked to a motor whose rattling valve trains, combustion cycles, and electric thrillings were every bit as palpable and unruly as the animal engine driving De Quincey's mail coach.
Speed is the medium that ensures that the conjunction between human and mechanical individuals will engender not relaxation and tedium, but bigger living: quickened senses, aroused faculties, expanded powers of vision; acts of heroism, improvisation, and innovation; spectacular crashes and catastrophes; eruptions of laughter and glee. For this effect to be achieved, however, velocity must avoid becoming routinized. Only a constant increase in the stimulus it provides can avert the danger that danger itself will be driven out of the perceptual field. There is no escaping the resulting addiction loop or its aporias. Constant stimulus increases end up engendering resistance and/or the very tedium they were meant to ward off. This leaves the crash alone as a way out of the loop. But just as speed can become routine, so too the crash can become normalized. Even Vaughn, Ballard's prophet of a coming Autogeddon, is forced to admit that "one car crash looks just like another." 97 The threat can held at bay by varying every crash's details, like Mack Sennett's Lizzies of the Field with its protean pile ups or Meliès's The Impossible Voyage whose seriatim accidents couple cars to pedestrians to trains to zeppelins to spaceships to buildings within the framework of a joyous rampage wherein everything is destroyed yet no one is hurt. But fated eventually to become just another "normal accident," the crash's stimulatory effect must necessarily attenuate unless it leads, in turn, to a "true" and definitive accident: one that brings the cycle to a close through the driver's death. The only way to save the normal accident, that is, is to transform every accident into a dress rehearsal for a death collision, a premiere that is also a final performance.
"I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do." 98 The circuitous prose is that of Andy Warhol from the 1963 interview in which he explained the simultaneous genesis of his "Death in America" series and of his silk-screen paintings of Liz and Marilyn. 99 These images arose midstream amidst a crush of Pop icons extending from Jim Dine's 1959 Car Crash pastels to John Chamberlain's car compressions from the 1960s and 1970s. 100 But whereas Dine probes a realm of dark psychosexual wounds and Chamberlain endows twisted hoods and bumpers with a lyrical swagger, it is Warhol alone who brings the story of Crash to a provisional close. For his serial patterns of stars and cars replay my inquiry's central problematic of thrill and repetition in a more comprehensive and original manner. In the "Death in America" series, the ideal of doing like a machine translates into a non-recursive but repetitive system that sets off lurid images of intertwined cars and drivers against flat fields of orange, yellow, green, red, and white in such a way that they echo one another both internally and externally, but never without visual irregularities or accidents. The individual frames, exploring as they do a kind of no-man's land between photojournalistic sensationalism and the icy look of police crash-site photos, traffic freely in voyeuristic thrills. But the latter reach the viewer by means of a detour. The appeal of the subject matter is distanced by enhancing the silk-screened photo's black and white graininess, only to be reintroduced in the form of colored planes whose jarring ornamentalism creates a sense that the thrills have been flattened out and rendered cool.
Pop art's romance with the car crash came about within a postwar context in which the speeding motorcar had been naturalized much like the speeding train at the time of Futurism's birth. This naturalization was effected by similar means: through an array of technologies designed to isolate driver and passenger from the roadway, and the roadway, in turn, from the world, including softened suspensions; passenger compartments transformed into sealed cocoons equipped with autonomous sound and climate systems; rationalized superhighway networks. Cornerstone of the utopic, peril-free suburban universe regularly evoked in Warhol's photographs, the automobile retains a sublime and dangerous flip side that affiliates it with De Quincey's mail coach and Marinetti's killer shark. Still a prosthetic enhancement for modern "dreamers, artists, and men belonging to no social class" and an accelerator of auto-erotic tremors, the car is for Warhol a mechanical individual akin to the theme park ride. Itself a star, it is also a star-vehicle and star-maker. But never more so than when it collides with or for an audience. In each and every accident car and riders are cast, in Ballard's words, as "the principal actors at the climax of some grim drama in an unrehearsed theater of technology, involving crushed machines, the dead men destroyed in their collision, and hundreds of drivers waiting beside the stage with their headlamps blazing." 101 Is it any surprise, then, that Warhol could also produce celebratory icons of everything from carriages to cars? 102 Hardly (. 22, 23). But even when implementing the Futurist slogan that "a racing car . . . is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace" one senses that the unrehearsed theater of technology is now being viewed, as it were, from the far side of the culture of thrill. The primary location of the artist's ego and eye has shifted from the fiery thrillings of the impèriale to the icy fire of a more distant site, a site occupied by an omnipresent mechanical voyeur. The machine in question and the machine that Warhol most wishes to become is not the car, but rather the camera. The latter's automatism, its speed of image capture, the potentially unlimited reproducibility and manipulability of its output, render the camera the orchestrator of sequences of real and/or imaginary pile ups so vast and repetitious that they could easily fill any and every "museum of excitement and possibility." Which is to say that, for Warhol, the camera as engine of thrill leads inexorably to the camera as engine of monotony. Machines, he avers, are about "liking things" and liking things means being machine-like "because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again." 103 So the story of Crash ends neither with a bang nor with a whimper, but with an outcome that the founding manifesto of futurism could never have envisaged, not to mention embraced: the emergence of tedium itself as the greatest thrill of all.
Jeffrey T. Schnapp is Chairman of the Department of French and Italian at Stanford University, where he holds the Rosina Pierotti Chair in Italian Literature. The essay prototype of Crash will go into full-scale production as a book, due out in early 2000.
1. This study is indebted to numerous friends and colleagues, among whom I should like to single out Emily Jane Cohen, Ann Weinstone, and Silvana de Paula, whose insights have done much to shape these reflections, and the participants in two graduate seminars on the "Anthropology of Speed." Research on this project could not have been completed without the support of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, where I was fortunate enough to be in residence as an Ailsa Bruce Mellon Senior Fellow during the academic year 1996-1997. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
2. In the Italian original the text reads: "Finalmente, la mitologia e l'ideale mistico sono superati. Noi stiamo per assistere alla nascita del Centauro e presto vedremo volare i primi Angeli!" Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano de Maria (Milano: A. Mondadori, I Meridiani series 1983), 8; hereafter abbreviated TIF.
3. I have analyzed Marinetti's second body/machine hybrid at length in "Propeller Talk," 1.3 (September 1994): 153-178.
4. The Italian original reads: "col volto coperto della buona melma delle officine--impasto di scorie metalliche, di sudori inutili, di fuliggini celesti . . . " (TIF, 9-10); "Noi vogliamo cantare l'amor del pericolo . . . " ; "Noi vogliamo esaltare il movimento aggressivo, l'insonnia febrile, il passo di corsa, il salto mortale, lo schiaffo e il pugno" ; "Noi vogliamo glorificare la guerra--sola igiene del mondo ..." ; and "Noi vogliamo distruggere I musei, le biblioteche, le accademie d'ogni specie . . . " .
5. "Noi vogliamo inneggiare all'uomo che tiene il volante, la cui asta ideale attraversa la Terra, lanciata a corsa, essa pure, sul circuito della sua orbita." TIF, 10. Such claims had already been made for prior transportation technologies like train travel: ". . . un nouveau monde moral date de la création des chemins de fer; l'homme a changé de nature; il est devenu le protée de l'univers, le fiancé du mouvement, l'être émancipé, ailé et rayonnant! La vapeur créera une nouvelle humanité . . . " ("a new moral world begins with the invention of the railroads. Man's nature was altered, he became the Proteus of the universe, motion's betrothed, a free creature, wingéd and radiant! Steam power will give rise to a new humanity . . . "). Benjamin Gastineau, La Vie en chemin de fer (Paris: E. Dentu, 1861), 112.
6. The framework sketched out here overlaps to a degree with the important work recently done in the domain of art history by Jonathan Crary (Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century [Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1990]) and in the domain of early film history by Tom Gunning, author of an influential series of essays including "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectators, and the Avant-Garde," Wide Angle 8.3/4 (Fall 1986): 63-70, "Primitive Cinema--A Frame-up? Or the Trick's on Us," Cinema Journal 28.2 (Winter 1989): 3-12, and "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and The Incredulous Spectator," Art and Text 34 (Spring 1989): 31-45.
7. J. G. Ballard, Crash (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 7.
8. I am thinking here, among other things, of the writings of Paul Virilio, from Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (trans. Mark Polizzotti [New York: Semiotexte, 1986]) to The Art of the Motor (trans. Julie Rose, [Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995]) whose stimulating (though rarely rigorous) ruminations on velocity and modernity are undergirded by a recurring strain of technological determinism and naive apocalypticism.
9. On this subject see Claudia Salaris, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 1988), 91.
10. "Stamani poco prima di mezzogiorno, F. T. Marinetti percorreva in automobile Via Domodossola. Il proprietario stesso della vettura era allo sterzo, e con lui si trovava il meccanico Ettore Angelini, d'anni 23. Non si sa in qual modo, ma pare per la necessità di scansare un ciclista, l'automobile andò a finire in un fossato. Il Marinetti e il suo meccanico furono subito raccolti. Dallo stabilimento Isotta e Fraschini giunsero dei corridori, Trucco e Giovanzani, entrambi con automobili. Il primo condusse Marinetti alla sua abitazione: pare che egli se la sia cavata con lo spavento. Il meccanico invece fu dal Giovanzani accompagnato all'Istituto di Via Paolo Sarpi dove gli furono riscontrate contusioni leggere." The item was published in Corriere della Sera and is cited from Salaris, 69.
11. Thanks to a nearly acritical embrace of Benjamin's writings, American cultural studies have all too readily conferred upon Baudelaire's epoch an inaugural role vis à vis modernity that could just as easily be extended back to the prior century. For all his greatness, Baudelaire was, after all, often little more than a recycler of commonplaces, and his hallucinatory Paris is none other than that of Louis Sébastian Mercier's Tableau de Paris made up of "tableaux éloquents qui frappent l'oeil dans tous les coins des carrefours, et quelle galerie d'images, pleine de contrastes frappants pour qui sait voir et entendre!" ("eloquent tableaux that strike the eye at the corners of every crossroads, and what a gallery of images, replete with striking contrasts for he who knows how to look and listen!"). Cited from Tableau de Paris, ed. Michel Delon, Paris le jour, Paris la nuit (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1990), 31, italics mine. The catalogue of pre-nineteenth century representations of shock is a large one, but would include the violent collision described in Rousseau's second promenade ("Je ne sentis ni le coup ni la chute, ni rien de ce qui s'ensuivit jusqu'au moment où je revins à moi" ["I felt neither blow nor fall nor anything that occurred after until I came to"]) responsible for his rebirth ("Je naissais dans cet instant à la vie . . . " ["I was born to life in that instant . . . "), on which subject see Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964), 48-9. The notion of shock is commonplace in Delisle de Sales's Lettre de Brutus, sur les chars anciens et modernes (London, 1771) (hereafter abbreviated LBCAM), as, for instance, in his claim that cabriolets are dangerous to drivers and pedestrians alike because "at the very same instant a citizen hears the noise and recieves the blow that mutilates him: a mother loses her child before becoming aware that he is in danger" ("Un citoyen entend le bruit et reçoit au même instant le coup qui le mutile: une mère a perdu son fils avant de l'avoir sçu en danger").
12. William Camps, Railway Accidents or Collisions; Their Effects, Immediate and Remote, upon The Nervous System as Determined by Recognizable Symptoms (London: H. K. Lewis, 1871), 10.
13. (New York: Birmingham, 1882), 176-77.
14. See for instance the summing up in Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Washington Square Books, 1960), 286. On the evolution of Freud's account of trauma see J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1974), 465-69.
15. Ballard, 69.
16. "Quando mi sollevai--cencio sozzo e puzzolente--di sotto la macchina capovolta, io mi sentii attraversare il cuore, delizionsamente, dal ferro arroventato della gioia! . . . Credevano che fosse morto, il mio bel pescecane, ma una mia carezza bastò a rianimarlo, ed eccolo risuscitato, eccolo in corsa, di nuovo, sulle sue pinne possenti!" TIF, 9.
17. I take seriously the notion that conversion stories like Saul's transformation into Paul (recounted in Acts 9, 22, and 26) on the road to Damascus or Augustine's turn towards the holy book in bk. 8, ch. 12 of his Confessions may be viewed as "accidents" typologically linked to modern vehicular-accident myths. In both cases, the irruption of the divine is a traumatizing/thrilling event that, by definition, effects a violent and unexpected rending of ordinary human consciousness. Paul is blinded and falls to the ground; Augustine's countenance is immediately altered as he hears the supernatural summons to "take up and read," which, once obeyed by means of the random opening of the Bible, yields a sudden and instantaneous feeling of inner luminescence. What from the human perspective appears an aleatory event, is revealed in retrospect as the realization of a divine plan or "turning point" which, from the moment of the "accident" onward promises regular doses of the supernatural (i.e. rapturous thrills). The typological link between these two categories of "accidents" seems to me confirmed by the constant recurrence of martyrdom themes in the modern literature of accident from the coaching era to the present, particularly with reference to celebrity "martyrs of speed" like James Dean and Ayrton Senna.
18. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berg: Leamington Spa, 1986). The book first appeared as Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise, (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1977). While I am much endebted to Schivelbusch's study, mine departs from his in two key respects: a) I argue that most of the effects that Schivelbusch ascribes to the development of railway systems were already fully manifest under the regime of carriage transportation: the rationalization of roadways, the standardization and quantification of time and space, the acceleration of life, etc. In my view, trains mostly democratized and intensified the impact of these already codified developments. b) Schivelbusch's principal concern is with what I have referred to as the "commodification" side of the divide, while I am concerned instead with the formation of new models of individuality in relation to transportation technologies. He therefore emphasizes a mass conveyance, the train; while I emphasize smaller-scale conveyances such as coaches, cabriolets, and automobiles. It goes without saying, however, that trains could (and often did) serve as engines of thrill, just as carriages or automobiles could (and often did) provide experiences of trauma and alienation akin to those endured by many train travelers.
19. The passage is from Georgics 3.113-114: "Primus Erichthonius currus et quattor ausus iungere equos rapidusque rotis insistere victor." Virgil, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, 1, Loeb Classical Series (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 162.
20. In the Latin original, Ode 1, vv. 2-5 reads: "sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum/ collegisse iuvat metaque fervidis/ evitata rotis palmaque nobilis/ terrarum dominos evehit ad deos"; cited from The Odes and Epodes, Loeb Classical Series (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939). Along with similar passages from Sophocles, Pindar, and Virgil, this text was regularly invoked by the coaching writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, to defend the nobility of modern forms of thrill-seeking.
21. The World runnes on Wheeles or, Oddes betwixt Carts and Coaches appears in All the Workes of John Taylor The Water Poet, Being 63 in number collected into one volume by the Author , Scolar Press Fascimile (London: Scolar Press, 1973), 232-44.   Similar points are touched upon in Taylor's The Thief (where the phrase "upstart Helcart-Coaches" appears in verse 575) and A Prodigall Country Gallant and his new made Maddam, as well as in the Taylor-inspired Coach and Sedan (London: Robert Raworth for John Crowch, 1636). On Taylor see Bernard S. Capp, The World of John Taylor, the Water-Poet, 1578-1653 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995), 320-32.
22. Most were already favorite themes in seventeenth-century satires like those anthologized in P. L. Jacob's Paris Ridicule et Burlesque au Dix-Septième siècle (Paris: Adolphe Delhays, 1859). By the end of the next century they were standard fare in a vaudeville repertory that featured plays such as Le Collatéral ou La Diligence à Joigny [1799], Les Amans en poste [1804], Le Landaw, ou l'Hospitalité [1825], Les Inconvéniens de la Diligence ou Monsieur Bonnaventure [1826], and Les Trois Couchées, ou L'Amour en Poste [1830]).
23. William Bridges Adams, English Pleasure Carriages (London: C. Knight and Co., 1837), 198-9. Compare Edmund Burke's account of the sublimity of the horse: "The horse in the light of an useful beast, fit for the plough, the road, the draft, in every social useful light the horse has nothing of the sublime; but is it thus that we are affected with him, whose neck is cloathed with thunder, the glory of whose nostrils is terrible, who swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage, neither believeth that it is the sound of the trumpet? In this description the useful character of the horse entirely dissappears, and the terrible and the sublime blaze out together." A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 65-6.
24. "Le cheval au premier coup d'oeil ne paroît point un animal dangereux: les bandes dont son corps est gêné, les fers qu'on lui donne, le mord qu'on a imaginé pour rendre ses mouvements plus précis, et l'éperon dont on le frappe pour les rendre plus rapides: tout annonce en lui un automate organisé qui ne se meut que par la volonté de l'être intelligent qui le gouverne . . . " LCBAM, 139.
25. For reasons of narrative economy, I omit mention of the nearly one hundred other vehicle types that made up the coaching revolution. These included the briska, the coucou, the desobligeante, the drag, the gig, the landau, the milord, the sulky, the tilbury, the vis à vis, and the whisky. For a full catalogue see Joseph Jobé, Au Temps des cochers. Histoire Illustrée du voyage en voiture attelée du 15eme au 20eme siècle (Paris: Edita/Denoël, 1976), 200-5.
26. The link between coaches and libertinism goes back at least as far as Taylor the Water Poet, who argued that "the Cart is an open and transparant Engine, that any man may perceive the plaine honesty of it; there is no part of it within or without, but it is in the continuall view of all men: On the contrary, the Coach is a close hypocrite, for it hath a cover for any knavery, and curtaines to vaile or shadow any wickednes . . . " (The World Runnes on Wheeles, 240). To the coach's immorality on the "inside" correspond later concerns about its external immorality, like those expressed by Rousseau's Saint Preux: "Elle [Julie] ne doute pas que je n'exagère beaucoup sur les peintures scandaleuses dont on orne à grands frais ces voitures . . . comme s'il était plus beau de s'annoncer aux passants pour un homme de mauvaises moeurs que pour un homme de qualité! Ce qui l'a surtout révoltée a été d'apprendre que les femmes avaient introduit ou soutenu cet usage, et que leurs carrosses ne se distinguaient de ceux des hommes que par des tableaux un per plus lascifs." ("She doubts not that I exagerate a great deal with regard to the scandalous and costly paintings with which vehicles are decorated . . . as if it were preferable to proclaim to passerbys that one was a man of bad habits rather than a gentleman! What especially appalled her was to learn that women had initiated or embraced this practice and that their coaches were distinguishable from those of men thanks only to their even more lascivious decoration.") Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967), 401. Driving oneself, a practice increasingly enjoyed by affluent women as well as men during the second half of the eighteenth century, compounded the scandal, for it blurred the boundary between the sexes as well as that between the leisure and the working classes. Female drivers were frequently accused of having transformed themselves into "public women" (i.e. whores).
27. "Or, une voiture est le but où veut atteindre chaque homme dans le chemin scabreux de la fortune. Au premier pas heureux, il établit un cabriolet qu'il conduit lui-même; au second, vient le carrosse coupé; au troisième, carrosse pour monsieur; puis enfin, carrosse pour madame. Quand la fortune s'est arrondie, le fils a son cabriolet; le maître-d'hôtel va à la halle en cabriolet; bientôt le cuisinier aura le sien, et tous ces cabriolets, voitures infernales, livrées le matin à la veltaille impudente, roulent diaboliquement dans des rues sans trottoirs . . . " Louis Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (ch. 644: "Aller à pied"), in Paris le jour, Paris la nuit, 256.
28. "Le premier qui amena dans Paris la mode des cabriolets, fut sans doute un jeune seigneur accoutumé à confondre dans le même rang les gens du peuple et ses chevaux; s'occupant le matin de ses chiens de chasse, et le soir d'une femme vertueuse qu'il déchire, s'ennuyant par étiquette, et écrasant les hommes pour varier son ennui . . . Bientôt ce luxe épidémique se communiqua à tous les ordres de l'État: un Drapier de la rue Saint-Denys, un Commis de la rue d'Enfer, et un Danseur de la rue Saint Niçaise, voulurent avoir des cabriolets. It étoit si commode d'entretenir une voiture sans entretenir des laquais! Il étoit si noble de se fair soi-même cocher! Il étoit si agréable de se donner à la même heure en spectacle à l'arcenal, à la place Vendôme, et à la barriere de Vaugirard!" LBCAM, 144-46. I have omitted a passage in which Delisle adds that the blasé aristocrat, in recognition of women's idolatry of warlike temperaments, promises to "drive a vehicle through Paris with the same courage as those heroes [Alcibiades, etc.] drove their chariots across the battlefield" ("je conduirai une voiture dans Paris avec autant d'audace que ces héros conduisoient un char sur le champ de bataille" [144]).
29. On the draisienne and its subsequent development into the bicycle see Keizo Kobayashi, Histoire du Vélocipède de Drais à Michaux 1817-1870 (Tokyo: Bicycle Culture Center, 1991), esp. 15-81, and, despite its errors, Louis Baudry de Saunier's L'Histoire générale de la vélocipédie (Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1891). There was a great deal of confusion over labeling and the terms vélocifère and célérifère referred originally to a new category of relatively fast stage-coaches, but were then transferred to the draisienne. The label Laufmaschine, on the other hand, was employed by Drais in the original prospectus for his invention. Véloceman was a label coined later in the century to denote bicyclists. On Drais's biography see Michael Rauck, Karl Freiherr Drais von Sauerbronn. Erfinder und Unternehmer (1785-1851) (Weisbaden: F. Steiner, 1985).
30. "Des hommes accoutumés à exécuter à l'instant qu'ils projettent, et à ne point mettre d'intervalle entre le désir et la jouissance, se sont accoutumés à traverser Paris avec la même rapidité que la poste parourt les grands chemins du royaume: comme si le bonheur consistoit à franchir les espaces: comme s'il importoit beaucoup à l'homme blasé qui s'ennuyoit à la porte Sainte-Honoré d'aller s'ennuyer à la porte Saint-Antoine! Parmi ces personnes blasés, il y en a de si malheureusement organisées, que leur barbarie s'augmente à proportion des obstacles qu'on oppose pour la briser: mettez ces frénétiques dans la plaine de Sablons, la lenteur de leur voiture répondra à l'inertie de leur âme; mais faites-leur traverser les rues de Paris, ils ordonneront à leurs cochers de voler." ("Men accustomed to getting what they desire right away and unwilling to tolerate any lag time between wish and fulfillment, have made a habit of crossing Paris at the same speed that the mails traverse the nation's major thoroughfares. As if happiness consisted in conquering space! As if it makes a wit of difference for a blasé individual who is already bored at the porte Saint-Honoré to be bored also at the porte Saint-Antoine! Among such blasé persons, there are some so organically deficient that their barbarism increases as a function of the obstacles it encounters along its path. Place these frenzied spirits on the plain of Sablons and the slow pace of their vehicle will correspond to their soul's inertia. Place them in the streets of Paris and they will order their coachmen to fly." LBCAM, 139-40.
31. "J'ai été renversé trois fois sur le pavé à différentes époques, et sur le point d'être roué tout vif. J'ai donc un peu le droit d'accuser le luxe barbare des voitures." Ch. 39 ("Gare! Gare!), Tableau de Paris, in Paris le jour, Paris la nuit, 45-6. In this same chapter, Mercier embellishes upon the story of Rousseau's accident at Ménilmontant.
32. The accident in question, recalled in the second chapter of Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, occurred on October 24, 1776 in the outskirts of Paris and was reported by contemporary newspapers, some of which asserted that Rousseau had passed away.
33. "Un esprit de vertige et d'ivresse semble s'être emparé de ces funestes lieux." Cited in Christophe Studeny, L'Invention de la vitesse. France, XVIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 67.
34. ". . . la plupart courent avec une rapidité effrayante d'où il résulte journellement des accidents funestes." Quoted in Studeny, L'Invention de la vitesse, 70.
35. The full passage reads: "As if in a dream he found himself, somehow, seated in the driver's seat; as if in a dream, he pulled the lever and swung the car round the yard and out through the archway; and, as if in a dream, all sense of right and wrong, all fear of obvious consequences, seemed temporarily suspended. He increased his pace, and as the car devoured the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open country, he was only conscious that he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night." Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (New York: Heritage Press, 1944), originally published in 1908.
36. The words are Pierre Nougaret's from his Aventures Parisiennes avant et depuis la Révolution : "Je lui dénonce encore les charretiers, les voituriers qui, au milieu d'une foule nombreuse, frappent leur chevaux avec des fouets extrêmement longs en sorte que le visage des passants est souvent cicatrisé d'une manière effrayante." Quoted in Studeny, L'Invention de la vitesse, 67. Cf. Delisle de Sales: "Je suis aussi frappé de l'impunité avec laquelle les cochers distribuent, sous le moindre prétexte, des coups de fouet aux personnes qui sont à pied: ils ont l'adresse de faire de cet instrument d'esclave une arme aussi redoutable que l'epée; et si par hazard leurs coups tombent sur un honnête homme, il voit avec désespoir qu'il ne peut plus se venger qu'en assassinant le malheureux qui l'a mutilé. ("I am struck by the impunity with which coachmen use any pretext to administer lashes to persons who are standing [around]. Their skills are such that they have transformed this slave's instrument into a weapon as potent as a saber. And if their blows accidentally strike an honest man, he despairs at the fact that his only means of revenge is to assassinate his unfortunate mutilator," LBCAM, 205.)
37. "Et celui qui, sans passion, sans besoin, ouvre toute à coup les portes de sa demeure, s'élance, comme un furieux, sur mille de ses semblables, et pousse sur eux, de toutes ses forces, un char rapide et deux animaux vigoureux, celui qui presse l'homme fuyant devant lui, qui l'atteint, le renverse, le foule aux pieds et l'écrase, comment l'appellerez-vous?" Cited in Studeny, L'Invention de la vitesse, 70.
38. "Et elle [la police] souffre que de jeunes insensés se rendent journellement, par leurs cabriolets, assassins de leurs concitoyens." Cited from "Voitures, carrosses, chevaux dans les rues, chiens," in Le Thesmographe, vol. 3 of Oeuvres, ed. Henri Bachelin (Geneva: Slatkin Reprints, 1978), 142.
39. De l'aurigie, ou Méthode pour choisir, dresser et conduire les chevaux de carosse, de cabriolet et de chaise; suivie d'un nobiliare équestre, ou Notice sur les races précieuses de Chevaux Étrangers, leur éxterieur, qualités, tempérament, régime, et sur les diverses soins qu'ils reçoivent (Paris: Dondey-Dupré, 1819), 272. As its author indicates, this work was the first to systematically deal with the distinctive art of driving horse-pulled carriages.
40. These res are reported in Studeny, L'Invention de la vitesse, 67.
41. These res are cited from Gordon S. Cantle, A Collection of Essays on Horse-Drawn Carriages and Carriage Parts, Carriage Museum of America (York: Image Print, 1993), 38.
42. John Loudon McAdam, Remarks on the Present System of Road Making; with Observations, Deduced from Practice and Experience, With a View to a Revision of the Existing Laws, and the Introduction of Improvements in the Method of Making, Repairing, and Preserving Roads (7th ed.; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1823), 37.
43. Adams, English Pleasure Carriages, 117.
44. William Bridges Adams, Roads and Rails and Their Sequences, Physical and Moral (London: Chapman & Hall, 1862), 158. The author adds: "Let such a man pronounce whether any or all of such vehicles are equal in pain-giving roughness to the footplate of a locomotive. An omnibus driver may work fourteen hours a day, for he is seated on springs, but the locomotive driver would fall down from sheer exhaustion long before he had stood that length of time, even while putting his own natural springs to work by standing on his toes . . . "
45. Quoted in Cantle, "The Curvature of Springs," A Collection of Essays, 49.
46. On road building in history see Maxwell G. Lay, Ways of the World. A History of the World's Roads and of the Vehicles that Used Them (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992); John Walter Gregory, The Story of the Road, from the Beginning to the Present Day (2nd rev. ed.; London: A. and C. Black, 1938); Pierre Fustier, La Route: Voies antiques, chemins anciens, chaussées modernes (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1968); Geoffrey Hindley, A History of Roads (London: P. Davies, 1971); and Hermann Schreiber, Merchants, Pilgrims, and Highwaymen. A History of Roads through the Ages (New York: Putnam, 1962).
47. On this period one may consult, among other sources, John R.Copeland, Roads and Their Traffic 1750-1850, (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1968) and Philip S. Bagwell, The Transport Revolution from 1770 (London: Batsford, 1974).
48. The first of these titles was also assigned to McAdam's rival, Thomas Telford (as in Alistair Penfold's catalogue Thomas Telford, Colossus of Roads [Telford: Telford Development Corp., 1981]). That this allusion to the legendary massive bronze statue of Helios in Rhodes should prove so popular, indicates the widespread perception that modern road building practices had now definitively exceeded the achievements of the ancients.
49. On McAdam's biography see W. J. Reader, McAdam: The McAdam Family and the Turnpike Roads, 1798-1861(London: Heinemann, 1980); and Roy Devereux, The Colossus of Roads. A Life of John McAdam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936).
McAdam's principal writings are contained in Remarks on the Present System of Road Making and in A Practical Essay on the Scientific Repair and Preservation of Public Roads. Presented to the Board of Agriculture. Printed and Distributed by Order of the Board (London: B. McMilland, 1819).
50. Adams, English Pleasure Carriages, 130. The macadam's smoothness remained its most startling feature for contemporaries as attested to in the following poems, cited in Devereux's The Colossus of Roads,(143-4): "Where never gleam of gas must dare / 'Gainst ancient darkness to revolt, / Nor smooth Macadam hopes to spare / The Dowagers one single jolt!" (from Moore's Summer Fête); "a gondolier / On smooth Macadam seas" (from Thomas Hood's Sonnet to Tom Woodgate); "Thou hast smoothed alas! the path to the Old Bailey" (from Thomas Hood's Ode to Mr. McAdam).
51. Nimrod (Charles James Apperley), The Chace, The Turf, and The Road (London: John Murray, 1837), 67.
52. The average sustained velocity of mail-coaches was somewhere around 15 kilometers per hour according to Lay, Ways of the World, 77. But on the best roads, with quick changeovers, and fresh horses they were capable of performances of the caliber of the Shrewsbury Wonder, which managed to average 27 kilometers per hour over an entire stage . Their peak speeds on smooth surfaces and downhill grades were, in any event, in excess of 30 kilometers per hour.
53. On Palmer and his reforms see Brian Austen, British Mail-Coach Services 1784-1850 (New York and London: Garland, 1986), 13-122; Edmund Vale, The Mail-Coach Men of the Late Eighteenth Century (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1967), 1-59; and Charles R. Clear, John Palmer (of Bath), Mail-Coach Pioneer (London: Blanford Press, 1955).
54. Driving "four in hand" involved holding the reins to all four horses directly from the driver's box (without recourse to a postilion riding one of the lead horses), a dangerous and exacting task that made coachmen the envy of many aristocrats: "The men who drove the crack mails were famous, and revered as a pop singer is today. The young bloods copied their favorites as much as they could by learning the jargon of the road and wearing appropriate clothes, the many-caped greatcoat and the low-crowned hat. One young gentleman had his teeth filed so that he could whistle through them in the approved fashion; many braved the worst weather conditions in order to be in the honored place by the driver." Jean Holdsworth, Mango. The Life and Times of Squire John Mytton of Halston, 1796-1834 (London: Dennis Dobson, 1972), 36-7.
55. Leslie Gardiner, Stage-Coach to John O'Groats (London: Hollis and Carter, 1961), 179.
56. Quoted in Gardiner, Stage-Coach to John O'Groats, 179.
57. Thomas De Quincey, "The English Mail Coach," in The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, 10, ed. David Masson, (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1890), 273. The forward-most seat, shared with the coachman, was considered the most dangerous of all: "I need scarcely to remind travellers that the most dangerous place about a coach is the box, inasmuch as, should she upset, they are less likely to avoid some part of her falling on them. The hinder seat, or gammon board is the most secure in the event of an upset . . . " Quoted from Apperley, My Horses and Other Essays, ed. E. D. Cumming (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1928), 183.
58. "La diligence a trois compartiments comme l'état. L'aristrocracie est dans le coupé; la bourgeoisie est dans l'intérieur; le peuple est dans la rotonde. Sur l'impériale, au-dessus de tous, sont les rêveurs, les artistes, les gens déclassés." From En voyage. Alpes et Pyrénées, cited in Studeny, L'Invention de la vitesse, 150.
59. The original reads: "C'est une horrible chose qu'une nuit en malle-poste . . . on n'est plus dans une voiture, on est dans un tourbillon. Il semble que la malle soit entrée en fureur." Quoted in Studeny, L'Invention de la vitesse, 183.
60. "L'ivresse d'abord de se sentir mouvoir et lancer indolemment d'un essor rapide à l'encontre de la destinée; l'orgueil naïf d'être regardé, envié, le long des villages, sur le devant des maisons, par ceux qui demeurent." Quoted from Studeny, L'Invention de la vitesse, 191.
61. ". . . si vous saviez combien j'aspire à m'emparer de la nature par une longue course rapide, à travers l'Europe, comme mon âme a soif de l'immense, de l'infini, de la nature en masse, non pas en détail, jugée dans ses grand cadres, tantôt humide de pluie, tantôt riche de soleil, en franchissant les espaces, et voyant des pays au lieu de voir des villages." Quoted in Studeny, L'Invention de la vitesse, 192.
62. Quoted in Julie Wosk, Breaking Frame, 31. On trains and the fantastic see Francisco Foot Hardman, Trem fantasma, A modernidade na selva, (Sâo Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1991).
63. Quoted in Wosk, Breaking Frame, 31.
64. ". . . passer les campagnes, les arbres, les fermes, les villages, effrayée de cette vitesse, se sentant prise dans une vie nouvelle, emportée dans un monde qui n'était plus le sien, celui de sa tranquille jeunesse et de sa vie monotone." Quoted from Studeny, L'Invention de la vitesse, 234.
65. Honoré de Balzac, Traité des Excitants modernes, ed. Jean-Jacques Brochier (Paris: Le Castor Astral, 1992). Balzac's account of the hyperstimulation provided by coffee is identical to the standard accounts of rapid travel's effects: ". . . tout s'agite: les idées s'ébranlent comme les bataillons de la grande armée sur le terrain d'une bataille, et la bataille a lieu. Les souvenirs arrivent au pas de charge, enseignes deployées; la cavalerie légère des comparaisons se développe par un magnifique galop; l'artillerie de la logique accourt avec son train et ses gargousses; les traits d'esprit arrivent en tirailleurs; les res se dressent; le papier se couvre d'encre, car la veille commence et finit par des torrents d'eau noire, comme la bataille par sa poudre noire." (". . . everything becomes agitated: ideas are set in motion like batallions on the battlefield and the battle begins. Memories charge forward, with their standards deployed. The light cavalry of comparison fans out galopping magnificently. Logic's artillery rushes out with its train and canon-cartridges. Strokes of wit arrive in extended order. res rise up. The paper is covered with ink, for the vigil begins and ends with torrential downpours of black water, just like the battle with its black powder." [44])
66. Such was the lust for high-speed driving that, during the first decades of the nineteenth century, many a gentleman renounced his aristocratic lineage in order to drive stage- and mail-coaches, cases in point being Sir Vincent Cotton, the sporting artist John Herring, and Apperley, before his transformation into Nimrod the Sportswriter. On the efforts of De Quincey and his peers to "purchase occasional opportunities of driving" see "The English Mail Coach," in The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, 10, 275-80.
67. "The English Mail Coach," 271-2. Much of the material contained in this seminal essay was reprised by De Quincey in his Autobiography from 1785 to 1803, The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, 1, ed. David Masson (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1889), 267-86.
68. The full passage compares coaching to railway travel: "The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity,--not, however, as a consciousness, but as fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence: as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from feeling it as a personal experience . . . But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. On this system the word was not magna loquimur, as upon railways, but vivimus. Yes, 'magna vivimus'; we do not make verbal ostentation of our grandeurs, we realise our grandeurs in act, and the very experience of life." "The English Mail Coach," 283-84.
69. The phrases arise with special reference to the political sublimity of the mail-coach system as as communications medium: ". . . that particular element in this whole combination which most impressed myself, and through which it is that to this very hour Mr. Palmer's mail-coach system tyrannises over my dreams by terror and terrific beauty, lay in the awful political mission which at that time it fulfilled. The mail-coach it was that distributed over the face of the land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo." "The English Mail Coach", 272.
70. Apperley, The Chace, The Turf, and The Road, 74. The tale extends from pp. 71-88 and shows the old man desperately seeking a vehicle that will carry him at a tolerably slow speed, but to no avail. He begins riding inside a stagecoach, the Comet, which he finds blindingly fast. He then switches over to riding on the gammon board [the rear outdoor seat] of The Regulator, a slower coach, but one he finds no less terrifying now that he is fully exposed to the elements. Finally, he ends up on the Quicksilver mail coach which a waiter had promised him was not "very fast," but rather "it just keeps time, and that's all" . Under the new regime of accelerated motion, however, "just keeping time" requires the most harrowing speeds of all.
71. Quoted from Gardiner, Stage-Coach to John O'Groats, 178.
72. "Voici ce que je vis:--les arbres sur ma route/Fuyaient mêlés, ainsi qu'une armée en déroute;/Et sous moi, comme ému par les vents soulevés,/Le sol roulait des flots de glèbe et de pavéès.//Des clochers conduisaient parmi les plaines vertes/Leurs hameaux aux maisons de plâtre, recouvertes/En tuiles, qui trottaient ainsi que des troupeaux/De moutons blancs, marqués en rouge sur le dos.//Et les monts enivrés chancelaient: la rivière/Comme un serpent boa, sur la vallée entire/ Étendu, s'élançait pour les entortiller . . . / J'étais en poste, moi, venant de m'éveiller!" Gérard de Nerval, "Le Réveil en voiture," from Odelettes, in Oeuvres complètes, 1, eds. Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 337. My reading of this text and analysis of kinematic effects are both endebted to Pichois's study Littérature et Progrès: Vitesse et Vision du Monde (Neuchatel: La Baconnière, 1973), particularly 11-33. Also useful on this overall topic is Jacques Nathan, La Littérature du métal, de la vitesse et du chèque de 1880 à 1930 (Paris: Didier, 1971).
73. The quotations from de Kock's La Grande ville. Nouveau Tableau de Paris comique, critique et philosophique and Bierbaum's Prinz Kuckuck, Leben, Taten, Meinungen und Höllenfahrt eines Wollüstlings. Mit der Kraft Automobilia, are taken from Pichois's Littérature et Progrès, where the full passages read: "voyager en chemin de fer ne fatigue pas; c'est un plaisir, un agréement . . . on se sent rouler avec une douceur inconcevable, ou plutôt on ne se sent pas rouler. On voit fuir devant soi les arbres, les maisons, les villages . . . tout cela passe! Passe . . . bien plus vite que dans une lanterne magique . . . et tout cela est véritable, vous n'êtes point le jouet de l'optique! . . . Le chemin de fer est le véritable lanterne magique de la nature!" ("to travel by train isn't tiring; it's a pleasure, it's agreeable . . . one rolls along so gently that it's as if one weren't rolling at all.  Races by . . . much faster than through a magic lantern . . . and everything is real since you are not being toyed with by optical tricks! . . . The train is the true magic lantern of nature." [18]); and "Il ne pensait à rien, n'éprouvait rien, hormis cette immense volupté de voler presque--sur des roues. Il fut saisi par l'ivresse du mouvement la plus sauvage, ce cadeau du jeune vingtième siècle à l'homme occidental, ces étrennes d'un temps qui veut le préparer à des extases, à des triomphes et à des libertés encore plus grands. C'était comme si son âme elle-même habitait ce moteur qui vivait en explosions. Il ressentait le grincement des larges roues pneumatiques, qui s'enfonçaient dans le sol comme pour prendre un élan, tel le mouvement élastique de ses propres semelles. Il sentait dans les quatre temps de la machine son propre rythme de vie . . ." ("He thought of nothing, felt nothing but the immense luxury of almost flying--on wheels. He was seized by the drunkedness of the most ferocious movement, a present to Western man bestowed by the still young twentieth century, the gift of an era that was preparing him for even greater ecstasies, triumphs, and freedoms. It was as if the engine living off of explosions resided in his very soul. He experienced the grinding of the large pneumatic tires, pressing into the ground as if to spring forward, like the soles of his own feet. He experienced the four-cycle rhythms of the machine as his own life rhythms . . ." [80]). In the Portuguese original, the extract from João do Rio reads: "O Automovel rithmiza a vida vertiginosa, a ancia das velocidades, o desvario de chegar ao fim, os nossos sentimentos de moral, de esthetica, de prazer, de economia, de amor." "A era do automovel," Vida Vertiginosa (Paris and Rio de Janeiro: H. Garnier, 1911), 4.
74. "The English Mail Coach," 284.
75. "The English Mail Coach," 284.
76. Trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 1.
77. Bk. II, pt. IA, sect. 27. ed. and trans. James Creed Meredith, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 107.
78. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 40.
79. Ballard, 193.
80. "Par l'action rapide du convoi, tout se transforme, se profile et se poétise. Les dieux morts ressuscitent, les grossières Marions s'idéalisent, la pierre fait statue, l'arbre pérore ou pleure, le nuage ivre va du zénith au nadir; les forêts se prennent aux cheveux dans une mêlée furieuse, le soleil danse le menuet, et la lune s'égare . . . La nature entière devient un théâtre féerique, mouvementé, sur lequel viennent poser et défiler les divinités fabuleuses, les héros, les monstres, les batailles, les famines, les triomphes, les grands spectacles de l'histoire . . . La brillante palette du chemin de fer peint la vie universelle dans toutes ses manifestations ridicules ou sublimes, avec tous ses contrastes, ses grandeurs et ses misères, ses grâces et ses contorsions, ses grimaces et ses sourires." La Vie en chemin de fer, 56-7.
81. The notion that the engine animates a dead nature is one of Gastineau's favorite commonplaces: "Avant la création des chemins de fer, la nature ne palpait plus; c'était une Belle-au-bois-dormant, une froide statue, un végétal, un polype; les cieux même paraissent immuables. Le chemin de fer a tout animé, tout mobilisé. Le ciel est devenu un infini agissant, la nature une beaté en action." ("Before the advent of trains, nature did not palpitate; it was a sleeping beaty, a cold statue, a vegetable, a polyp. Even the heavens seemed unchanging. The train animated everything, mobilized everything. The skies became an active infinity; nature a beauty in action.") La Vie en chemin de fer, 50.
Precisely the same principle governed early cinematic shows, which began with the display of a still frame that was gradually "brought to life" thanks to the projector/projectionist's mechanical sorcery.
82. Quoted in Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 54.
83. "La vitesse n'a rien d'effrayant, quand le voyageur qui en goûte les avantages matériels ne s'aperçoit pas qu'il va vite. Avec les machines bien construites, du matériel bien établi et une bonne voie, une vitesse de 120 kilomètres à l'heure ne doit causer aucune inquiétude." M. Banderali, La Vitesse des trains express et ses conséquences techniques (Paris, 1889); quoted from Studeny, L'Invention de la vitesse, 264.
84. "La vapeur a supprimé à la fois la distance et le danger . . . La distance n'est plus qu'un être de raison, l'espace qu'une entité métaphysique dépourvue de toute réalité." ("Steam power has eliminated both distance and danger . . . Distance has become little more than an abstraction, space a metaphysical entity, stripped of all reality.") Gastineau, La Vie en chemin de fer, 116.
85. "Entrons dans le détail de ce sombre martyrologue, rappelons quelques-unes de ces catastrophes tristement célèbres qui marquent de taches sanglantes la carte de nos chemins de fer." Georges Grison, Les Accidents de chemins de fer. Grandes Catastrophes. Versailles.--Puteaux.--Auteuil.--Gagny.--Rue d'Avron.--Clichy-Levallois.--Charenton.--Pontoise, etc., etc. Négligeances et fautes des compagnies.--Causes des accidents.--Moyens de les éviter.--Ce qu'on a fait; ce qui'il faudrait faire, (Paris: Tolmer, 1882), 22
86. "Un rictus convulsif contractait son visage, il semblait rire aux éclats. Chose étrange, singularité qui mérite d'être étudiée par les médecins physiologistes, mais qu'il faut dire ici, puisque nous faisons de l'histoire et la plus triste, la plus sanglante qui fût jamais; chose étrange! ce malheureux, ce cadavre nu, aurait pu poser, en ce supréme moment, pour la statue de Priape, et rer dans les Phallophories de l'Inde." Grison, Les Accidents de chemins de fer, 29.
87. Erichsen, On the Concussion of the Spine, 19.
88. On this topic see Emily Jane Cohen's discussion of the dandy's amorous response to urban shocks in "Mud into Gold: Baudelaire and the Alchemy of Public Hygiene," Romanic Review 87.2 : 239-55.
89. Aside from Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 70-88 and 113-23, see Julie Wosk, Breaking Frame. Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 30-66, who adds some quite valuable material and observations to Schivelbusch's account.
90. It is worth noting that the cartoon iconography of train crashes was largely anticipated by the widespread iconography of carriage accidents, developed by artists like Thomas Rowlandson (see, for example, Rowlandson's Drawings for The English Dance of Death, ed. by Robert R. Wark [San Marino, Ca.: Huntington Library, 1966]).
91. On roller coasters and amusement parks in history see Robert Cartmell's excellent The Incredible Scream Machine. A History of the Roller Coaster (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987); as well as David Braithwaite, Fairground Architecture (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1968) and William F. Mangels, The Outdoor Amusement Industry from the Earliest Times to the Present (New York: Vantage Press, 1952). Two American-based studies are Judith A. Adams, The American Amusement Park Industry. A History of Technology and Thrills (Boston: Twayne, 1991) and Gary Kyriazi, The Great American Amusement Parks, A Pictorial History (Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1976).
92. On this subject see Cartmell, The Incredible Scream Machine, 47-9. Similar devices were adopted in a wide array of other turn-of-the-century amusement park rides, such as the famous Hale's Tours and Scenes from the World, an attraction whose links to the early history of cinema were first examined by Raymond Fielding, "Hale's Tours: Ultrarealism in the Pre-1910 Motion Picture," in Film Before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 116-30. In the absence of adequate research into the optical effects characteristic of amusement parks going back into the eighteenth century, there has been a tendency to overplay the importance of rides such as Hales Tours in current early film scholarship.
93. On the carousel's design and history, see Frederick Fried, A Pictorial History of the Carousel (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co.; London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1964), as well as Geoff Weedon and Richard Ward, Fairground Art. The Art Forms of Travelling Fairs, Carousels and Carnival Midways (5th ed.; London: White Mouse/Abbeville, 1994).
94. On the links between amusement parks and early film see the earlier cited essays by Gunning, in particular "The Cinema of Attractions"; and, as applies specifically to the American cinema, Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, 1 in History of the American Cinema, ed. Charles Harpole (New York: Charles Scribner, 1990), esp. 55-89. Lynn Kirby's recent Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and the Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 19-73, interestingly explores the connections between trains, amusement parks, and the early cinema. Weedon and Ward's Fairground Art contains ample visual documentation of the structures used to house cinematographic shows.
95. The juxtaposition of the Tatlin monument and contemporary thrill rides is made in passing by Cartmell (The Incredible Scream Machine, 90).
96. On the dandy and dictator, see Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Staging Fascism. 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 97-112.
97. Ballard, 129.
98. G. R. Swenson, "[Interview with] Andy Warhol," Art News 62.7 (Nov. 1963): 26.
99. The bibliography on these images is vast, but my own reading has been especially shaped by Hal Foster, "Death in America," October 75 (Winter 1996): 37-59; and Thomas Crow, "Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol," in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 49-65. On the series as a whole, see the catalogue Andy Warhol, Death and Disasters, The Menil Collection (Houston: Houston Fine Art Press, 1988).
100. Dine was of course also the author of a seminal happening entitled "The Car Crash," staged at the Reuben Gallery in New York in early November, 1960. His lead was followed by Claes Oldenburg whose "Autobodys" happening, staged in December, 1963 in a Los Angeles parking lot, was also inspired by the recent memory of the Kennedy assassination. For documentation on both of these events, see Happenings, An Illustrated Anthology, ed. Michael Kirby (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1965), 184-203 and 262-88.
101. Crash, 22.
102. In 1986 Daimler-Benz AG commissioned Warhol to produce a body of drawings and acrylic silkscreen paintings in celebration of the centenary anniversary of the first Benz Patent motorcar. The results, based upon Mercedes' most famous vehicles, are contained in Werner Spies, Andy Warhol, Cars, Guggenheim Museum (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1988).
103. Swenson, "[Interview with] Andy Warhol," 26.
"There is nothing historical about this book except the state of mind," Stein tells us in the epilogue to her novel, Mrs. Reynolds, a book about life in wartime France, written during the years 1940-1943. 1 Stein's bellicose, quintessentially modernist declaration is worth our attention, as is the curious allegorical fiction to which it is appended, since her last novel and its epilogue place us precisely at a tangled interchange where concerns about identity, history, ethics, and politics converge in our century. Her assertion captures the simultaneous contraction and expansion of the modern subject: so tiny that its domain can be no bigger, of no more moment than a "state of mind"; so gigantic that it can push a world's war into the shadows as it commands an entire book about its "state." If we are conceiving the mind in its condition of maximum extension, we do not interpret the pivotal, ambiguous "except" as dismissive. Since nothing else is, who could imagine a book more thoroughly or appropriately saturated by history, or history more aptly situated in its properly subjective location? States on a map matter less than a mind's moods, its modes of being. But if, in looking from a different angle, we observe the mind in its contracted state, all that remains on the pages of Mrs. Reynolds are faint echoes of events occurring elsewhere--events that might matter but that cannot be told--"aethereal rumours." 2
I aim in this essay to trace the outlines of this variable place Stein names a "state of mind" and to ascertain whether we might measure its position in time, in history. Stein and her texts present us with peculiar and important difficulties when we attempt to make these measurements, and the reasons for those difficulties derive from her understanding of the self's relation to time. Like any number of modernists, she concerns herself centrally with the faculty of memory and the discipline of reading the world historically. She is obsessed by temporality. But today, when socio-historical contextualization of a work of art has come to seem an essential component of any discussion of that work, when "the time of and the time in the composition" is of enormous, even unprecedented consequence, Stein proves doggedly resistant to our customary gambits for such temporal framing. 3 She forces us to scrutinize the assumptions underwriting our historiographic practices. On the one hand, those practices are profoundly skeptical ones, as evidenced by the proliferation of studies that treat memory as the unavoidable, notoriously distorted and distorting lens through which we recall the past. On the other hand, our unsettling attention to memory is counterbalanced by a fascination with historical material, with actual things retrieved, with photographs and documents bearing witness to another time, with endless, telling details brought to light, with archives that promise wholesale recovery of the past. The general effect of this bifurcated historiographical practice often seems to be a confidence that, by both acknowledging the role of the recollecting subject in our accounts of the past and embracing the voluminous inventories that we have recovered from prior eras, we are closer than ever before to unprecedentedly accurate, psychologically nuanced positioning of texts, authors, and events in time. 4
Stein will not allow that confidence to persist unshaken, or the goal of recovery to stand unquestioned. I focus this essay on two of her texts--Mrs. Reynolds and "Phenomena of Nature"--both of which explore disjunctions among writing, interiority, events, and recalling and recounting the passing of time. Mrs. Reynolds poses questions about how we account for character and how we live in time, how we construe history. "Phenomena of Nature," together with the manuscript witnesses associated with that essay, provides us with a venue for considering the relations between time's passing and the act of writing itself. How are we to remember Stein's work? How should we recall it for readers at this century's end? How does she teach us to remember her? What obstacles does she deliberately place in the paths of our remembrances, and why does she desire that our attempts at recollection should prove difficult?
Over the past two decades, Stein's work, has been, taken from an earlier location in literary-historical narratives that sketched quiet salons where she and her charmed circle of artist friends experimented with form and style, and repositioned in new locations that give her much more prominence and prestige in today's academy: the consequential thoroughfares of modern politics, Western history, social reform, and sexual liberation. We must now attend closely to "the racial-ethnic-religious-national politics of both [Stein's] work and her life," Marianne DeKoven exhorts us, celebrating current critical practices that have enabled us "to see Stein's experimental writing as at once located in time, life, history, materiality," and lauding recent critics who have vastly expanded "the limits of the possibilities for representing that locatedness." 5 And yet, though Stein's former situation in the salon was cramped and her work devalued, she does not make her relocation entirely happily. Throughout her life she fervently embraced the local, but she resisted with equal fervor being "located" in most of the senses intended by DeKoven. While she dismantles and reinvents much of her Western linguistic inheritance and can therefore be construed, in aesthetic terms at least, as a revolutionary, no modernist more uncompromisingly asserts independence from and indifference to each of the politicized venues in which she currently finds herself. Stein energetically and ingeniously displaces both politics and history from a great deal of her work. As an ironic consequence, she stands at odds with her current audience at precisely the time when that audience is larger and more enthusiastic than it has been at any time since the mid-1930s. Perhaps we need to attend more fully to Stein's resistance to the kind of sociohistorical positioning that has become almost automatic in today's academy, and to consider how it might teach us to perform the task of assigning her a position in "place, time, life, history, materiality." I do so not by way of objecting to the intent that motivates the historical-materialist turn in English studies, but to argue that if we are to make this turn responsibly, honoring the shapes of the texts we are framing, we must make every effort to assess the meanings that our categories of understanding--"history," "politics," even "time" itself--might have held for the subjects of our scrutiny.
Wanda Van Dusen's "Portrait of a National Fetish: Gertrude Stein's 'Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain' ," provides an extended, recent instance of this impulse toward materialist positioning. Immediately, in the parenthesis included in the essay's title--""--Van Dusen promises to place us in a precise historical location: the moment, 19 January 1942, when Stein sent to Bennett Cerf, editor at Random House, her laudatory preface to the translated speeches of Philippe Henri Pétain, leader of France's pro-German Vichy government (1940-1944). Though students of Stein have known about the existence of this preface since Richard Bridgman provided a cogent description of it in Gertrude Stein in Pieces , Van Dusen gives us, in addition to her own ambitious and extensive analysis, the full text of Stein's preface itself, now published for the first time. 6 For Van Dusen, Stein's preface "rekindles the debate over the depth of conviction behind Stein's 'anti-patriarchal' experimental writing between 1906 and 1932 in light of evidence of her political conservatism." 7 Van Dusen builds her appraisal of Stein's politics around a number of simplistic assertions: between 1906 and 1932 Stein campaigned against "the patriarchy," but she stopped campaigning as her work grew more accessible; aesthetic experiment is "anti-patriarchal"; political beliefs and aesthetic practices correspond. Van Dusen is dismayed by Stein's preface not simply because it praises Pétain but because Stein fails to declare her own identity with sufficient openness, nor does she discuss "the gender, class, sexual, and racial composition of the 'new France,' and she thereby allows "the invisible face of a diverse population [to be] obscured by the unifying state mask of the Maréchal." 8 Stein is deceptive in her deliberate "evacuating [of her] gender, her lesbianism, and Jewishness--those cultural processes abjected by public discourse. Without these markers, the unified self presented by Stein can be safely subsumed in the dominant category of 'we' in France." 9 And when Stein approaches political discussion from her hiding place behind the dishonest pronoun "we," Van Dusen finds the shape of that discussion deplorable and familiar: "Stein's text reinscribes the mythical thinking of the Vichy political ideology, an archaism characteristic of fascism and Nazism and symptomatic of culture's anxiety in the face of socially disruptive modernization." 10
But it is the very familiarity of Stein's failings to Van Dusen--and the utter familiarity of the terms in which Van Dusen finds fault with Stein--that betray Van Dusen's by no means uncommon abridgment of time's passing. Inquiry into a different time and place and another's body of writing must register that difference and that distance if it is to be even remotely true to the nature of the faculty--memory--that allows us to experience time. 11 That registering must occur not only in historical research, but also in the details of diction, and in the development and application of categories of understanding. The political ruler Van Dusen applies to Stein is calibrated for 1996: "politics" is a practice that begins and ends with a forthright assertion of one's identity and involves a careful measuring of one's socioeconomic, racial, and sexual positions vis-à-vis the dominant sociopolitical order. The Stein Van Dusen dreams of finding when she looks in the direction of 1942 is someone she knows too well and too easily: an aesthetically radical Jewish lesbian who builds her equally radical political practice upon open declarations of her various identities--someone whose thinking about individuals and culture contains at its center the categories by which we are accustomed to measuring diversity: gender, class, race, sexual orientation. 12 When Stein turns in her portrait of Pétain to myth and prophecy, she falls by ready association into an archaism identical with the archaism characteristic of fascist ideology. When she invokes the "old prediction that when the enemy had gotten to Lyons the country that is France would be saved by an old man on a white horse and Pétain had always ridden a white horse," she mystifies political power in precisely the way that Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin did. 13 Here is a Stein whose identity should promise us a certain kind of laudable left-wing politics and whose failures to achieve that position we are consequently to recognize and lament. Van Dusen's tendency to assimilate prior time to our own is reflected not only in the general categories of understanding around which she builds her essay, but also in her prose, which is by no means unusually filled with jargon, but which is nevertheless redolent of the late 1990s--a rhetorical failure of memory that makes it difficult to glimpse a subject located in another time.
On the most basic but nevertheless crucial level, Van Dusen, energetically describing Stein's Introduction as "performing a redemptive fetishistic ritual that denies the existence of racism in the so-called free zone administered by Pétain," fails to pay sufficient attention to what can be known of French history. 14 She is more interested in the theoretical construct of "the fetish" than in what it might have been like to live in occupied France in the first two years of the war. Even before we turn to Pétain and Stein, we should understand that being a Jew in occupied France, rather than encouraging a public declaration of solidarity with marginalized populations or recriminations against France's puppet government, would have been more likely to encourage Stein in her longstanding preference for avoiding risky, public, political stands. 15 And Philippe Burrin's ambitious, extensive history of France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise (New York: New Press, 1993) makes it clear that Stein's admiration for Pétain, even as late as the winter of 1941, was more ordinary, more widespread, more emotionally comprehensible than Van Dusen's piece would have us believe. In the early 1940s, particularly after the British had preemptively shelled the French fleet at Mers el Kebir in Algeria in the summer of 1940, resistance, to the majority of the French, looked suicidal and promised little but further destruction. 16
At this juncture , the French were grateful to [Pétain] for having brought the ting to an end, for lending the defeated country his prestige and for offering them words of compassion. Pétain was the one fixed star on a collapsed horizon, the man who could restore the four cardinal points for them. 17
Even after most of France had turned fully against the Vichy government, in the autumn of 1942 (Stein mailed her preface to Cerf, we should recall, in January of 1942), "Pétain's aura was . . . not totally dissipated. As a public re, he continued to be respected to the bitter end by part of the population, which felt compassion for him and regarded him as a symbol of their suffering country." 18 Stein concludes her introduction with applause for Pétain that is culpably myopic but not anomalous, not simply a modernist invention or part of a disingenuous posturing to save her from deportation:
And so we in France having seen France governed . . . having seen every time that all being lost actually everything was being held together, I must say little by little the most critical and the most violent of us have come gradually to do what the Maréchal asks all French people to do, to have faith in him and in the fact that France will live. 19
These words reveal less about modernism or about the fetish than they do about a widespread set of attitudes in France in 1941. Stein assimilates and repeats ideas current at the time--ideas that fit comfortably with the conservative social politics that she had long been embracing prior to the war. Chief among the ironies arising from Van Dusen's essay is the fact that Stein's politics--and even this word, "politics," is importantly misleading, as we shall see--are, if anything, more openly, idiosyncratically, and radically disturbing than anything Van Dusen describes, and they are disturbing in ways profoundly different from the all-too-familiar ones that Van Dusen articulates.
Not only has Van Dusen forgotten important aspects of French history; she discusses Stein's politics without listening sufficiently to what Stein has to say on the subject, thereby losing a vitally important perspective in her eagerness to fit Stein into a contemporary constellation of ideas about fascism and modernism. Unlike the revelation of de Man's wartime writings, the publication of this "Preface" to Pétain's speeches will not surprise readers even cursorily familiar with Stein's opinions during the 1930s and 1940s. To the extent that Stein cared to express political convictions, by the mid-1930s she had clearly sided with French conservatives against those communists and constitutionalists who favored more risky, socially disruptive reforms. Bridgman quotes a letter, written in 1936, in which Stein notes that many of her French friends belong to the "Croix de feu"--a nationalistic and anti-parliamentary organization originally founded by veterans of the First World War. 20 Among her associates before and during the war are the British painter Francis Rose--an admirer of the Nazis and particular friend of Ernst Roehm, leader of Hitler's storm troopers (S. A.)--and Bernard Fäy, wartime director of the Bibliothèque Nationale and associate of Pétain. 21 There is every reason to believe that the influence of both men, particularly that of Fäy, helped preserve Stein's and Toklas's property and their physical safety throughout the war.
Further, though her allegiances could and often did place her among those whose commitments were narrowly and explicitly right-wing, Stein was by temperament and conviction "conservative" in the word's broadest sense: she was opposed to change. More particularly, she opposed the outer-directedness, the expenditure of energy that sociopolitical labor demands. In her more accessible writing of the 1930s and 1940s, she repeatedly proclaims that artistic and cultural innovation is best nurtured by a stable, essentially unchanging social matrix. She explains her living in France largely by the ease with which her outsider's status allows her to remain disconnected from French history and politics. "France was friendly and it let you alone, and so there it was and there you were," she muses in "An American and France," insisting that the country and the individual happily occupy quite distinct locations. 22 The First World War and the increasingly heated political debates of the late twenties and the thirties unfortunately brought these two "there"s closer together, "and so painting has become Spanish," but the chief glory of French government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was its willingness to stay scarcely visible, like an imperturbable old retainer, in the background of its citizens' private lives: "It is not what France gave you but what it did not take away from you that was important." 23 "They said in their revolution Egalité Fraternité Liberté," Stein recalls in Paris France, as the Germans roll across French countryside and through French towns, "but these qualities should be left to war and politics, they are not human." 24 She notes ruefully that "every century has had that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family," but she and her adopted countrymen know better: "although adolescence and intellectualism demand that he believes in a world not based upon a family unit, in his heart every Frenchman knows that that is all there is to it, a family and himself a father of a family." 25 There are potentially powerful ironies operating in this defense of the family (though the more one reads Stein's public and private writings, including her letters, the less these words reverberate with irony), but its conservative bent is consistently reinforced in Stein's writing. It is worth registering, after we have taken note of Stein's right-wing alliances and her allegiance to conservative modes of thought, that her "politics" are also fundamentally antipathetic to fascist ideology. She rejects without qualification the collective, the State as an entity worthy of attention. When a country makes claims of any sort on its citizens, and when those citizens respond by devoting themselves to politics in any of its antic guises, whatever springs from within, from the detached place where creation occurs, will suffer:
Alas the after-war has made France interested in you . . . [B]ut to us who know France the France that took nothing from you because it was there and had no need of you not of you but of what anything meant in being you that France took nothing from you and so it was where those doing anything from all that was inside them needed to be living. 26
Living, but not participating or campaigning, not trying to shape events or arrange them somehow into a design.
Stein's late work, her "politics," and her sense of history can only be understood if we approach those subjects by way of her extensive and complex considerations of the faculty of memory and the practice of forgetting. I take "memory" to designate the symbolic acts by which we constitute ourselves and position ourselves in time--a definition proposed by Michael Lambek, an anthropologist and theorist of memory who usefully reminds us that memory as a practice is in large part socially mediated and, therefore, a fundamentally moral act. "Rather than treat memory as a discrete thing, stored and retrieved," Lambek argues,
or as the biologically innate process of storage and retrieval waiting to be discovered by the experiments of the psychologist, . . . we [should] understand it as a culturally mediated expression of the temporal dimension of experience, in particular of social commitments and identifications. Remembering comprises contextually situated assertions of continuity on the part of subjects and claims about the significance of past experience. Such tacit assertions and claims, based as much on cumulative wisdom and moral vision as on individual interest, form a kind of moral practice. 27
Insofar as the "new" Stein has frequently been discussed in terms that evoke ethics: insofar as we are searching for a "political" or a socially engaged Stein, her extensive musings about memory take a new weight, matter more than they did when she was merely a baffling experimental writer, a gnomic philosopher. At stake in their interpretation is not only our assessment of Stein's engagements with Pétain, but also our understanding of how we are to discuss politics and modernism without simply slotting individual modernists into an already familiar historical narrative.
Approaching a study of the past through theories of memory, instead of convincing us that the past is more intimately and easily available, more present, emphasizes distances and removals. The complex, stitched-together tapestries that we make of remembered time are filled more with holes than cloth. We compose narratives of time past, but "the smoother the story, the more evident that it is the product of secondary reworking." These narratives themselves bear witness to forgetting, to time not merely past but lost: "It is precisely because I cannot remember in direct, unmediated fashion the experience of my childhood," Lambek writes,
that is, can no longer experience as a child, and because cannot remember directly the events that lead from the infant to the man, that I rely upon a narrative construction to realize this continuity. Individual memory, like the narration of the collective we call history, is never literal reproduction, but an artifice to render the continuity in change realistic. 28
Stein, one of our century's most skeptical and thorough students of memory, repeatedly poses a laconic question in her later work that suggests the abyss separating past from present, the failure of recollection to establish continuity: "What is the use of being a little boy if you are going to grow up to be a man?" 29 We habitually fill the present with stories of our childhoods, but those stories themselves, paradoxically in direct proportion to their completeness and coherence, testify to how far gone is the child as subject rather than narrative object.
Stein's conundrum about the radical disjunction between the little boy and the man encapsulates for her a set of questions about the unavoidable experiential chasm separating what she variously names "entity" from "identity"; "the human mind" from "human nature"; "being" from "becoming" or from "history." The man's past lies at an ontological remove from his present: "the boy and the man have nothing to do with each other," Stein declares in "What Are Master-Pieces?" "except in relation to memory and identity." 30 "Identity" is another name for the way we represent ourselves to ourselves and others (and the ways they choose to represent us as well). The word comprises the changing sum of portraits in the gallery named "Gertrude Stein," and when we talk about "human nature" we use the faculty of memory to generalize from the collection of rations. 31 The conscious self necessarily inhabits nothing more than a brief span of present time. That self remains fundamentally isolated from other consciousness and is only capable of recalling what it refers to as "the past" by means of the always-in-progress stories it tells itself. We inhabit the narrowest of rooms, though we often hypothesize mansions.
In an interview with Robert Haas and William Sutton in 1946, Stein recalls that in the 1930s, particularly following the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she "became more and more interested in the subject of narration." 32 "Subject" here can designate both the topic of how one tells a story as well as the "self" composed by narrative means. And yet Stein's convictions that "if it is inside then there is not there is no time and there is no identity" (GH,182), and that "genius . . . is the existing without any internal recognition of time" 33 commits her to a kind of writing that forecloses the possibilities both of "subject" and "narration" as we usually mean these words. She aspires to solve "the problem of time in telling a story of anybody" by writing without recourse to that internal timekeeper, the faculty of memory, and by dissolving the subject so that we read without trying to plot that subject's evolution or its end, without trying to string events together like fish on a line. 34 And she would do this using a medium that unfolds naturally, inevitably in time. Writing for the newspapers epitomizes work performed under the temporal constraints that she resists. Journalists "have to consider not the time in which to write but the time in which the newspaper is coming out. Three senses of time to struggle with, the time the event took place, the time they are writing, and the time it has to come out. Their sense of time cannot be but false." 35
When Stein works in her fundamentally non-referential vein, leaving clocks and calendars behind proves relatively easy. "So many words to use," she muses in The Geographical History of America, and then rebels against the instrumentality of the verb: "Oh do not say that words have a use" (GH, 190). But when she turns her attention to matters of historical record or to contemporary events--to politics and history, to character sketches of public res--she finds her escape more complicated. In Everybody's Autobiography, she describes The Geographical History of America as a meditation on the relations between matters of identity and the world's business: "And so I began to be more and more absorbed in the question of the feeling of past and present and future inside in one and naturally that led me later on the subject of history and newspapers to meditate more . . . on the subject of history and newspapers and politics." 36 From the mid-1930s to the end of her life, Stein writes about the atemporal "now" of the human mind and the myriad time-inflected snares in which that mind usually remains caught. The most intimate and fundamental of these snares we call "identity"; the largest and most grand is named "history." 1946, the year of her death, finds her still considering:
the essence of narration is this problem of time . . . [Y]ou have to denude yourself of time so that writing time does not exist. If time exists, your writing is ephemeral. You can have a historical time, but for you the time does not exist, and if you are writing about the present, the time element must cease to exist . . . [In Wars I Have Seen,] I described something momentous happening under my eyes and I was able to do it without a great sense of time. There should not be a sense of time, but an existence suspended in time. That is really where I am at the present moment. I am still largely meditating about this sense of time. 37
"The human mind never does anything," but the world stays busy, and it is around these different but necessarily related axes of stillness and motion that Mrs. Reynolds, Stein's last novel, revolves (CH, 133). By the time Stein composes this novel, she has developed fully her distinction between human mind and human nature; she has presented her case against memory and has described and practiced writing that does not rely on memory. She has been centrally occupied for almost a decade with "the problem of narration." Now, beginning in 1940 and continuing for the next two years, as France falls to the Germans, as the geopolitical map of the world changes from week to week, Stein writes a text that considers how life might be conducted by Steinian subjects: in part irrevocably and fundamentally disjunct from any past or future, balanced on the narrow, shifting sill of the present moment, but also unavoidably tangled in each day's unfolding events and utterly obsessed by time past and to come. The novel concerns itself with "the state of mind" of subjects who seem unable to assemble themselves internally and who consequently cannot find convincing rationales for judgments or actions in a world that makes endless demands for both. Stein does tie herself loosely but decidedly to time when, in her epilogue to Mrs. Reynolds, she describes her effort to present us with "the way anybody could feel these years"--"these years" being 1940-1943. But we should keep in mind her wry dictum concerning the misapprehensions necessarily attending the interpretive activity named "history": "Now history has really no relation to the human mind at all, because history is the state of confusion between anybody doing anything and anything happening" (GH, 133). 38 If one believes that our convictions of agency are the merest fantasies of power and that the stories we tell about time's passing are founded on those fantasies, how can one even begin to postulate an ethics? The world makes us take sides, if only because we chance to be born in one place and time rather than another, but what can it mean, how can it matter that we choose to resist or to collaborate, that we side with Pétain or Churchill and the Crown, Mussolini or Stalin or Hitler?
Those five great names never find a place on the pages of Mrs. Reynolds. The novel--the term is convenient, though inadequate, insofar as it implies plotted narrative--is a muddy and incomplete allegory, with a hodgepodge of characters milling around two men: Angel Harper and Joseph Lane. These two public res, Stein herself tells us, stand for Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. 39 They are "in the century," part of the century's public story, in a way that Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds are not. 40 Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds, anxious observers of history in progress, are lodged deep within daily circumstances and cannot be seen from any distance. Stein manages her novel's characters and its plot using the deliberately creaky apparatus of prophecy and allegory. Wobbling around the unfocused consciousness of Mrs. Reynolds, the chapters progress according to Angel Harper's rise to power as a dictator, his advancing age, and his certain death. This rise and fall have been foretold in prophesies by the Saints Odile and Godfrey, whose predictions Stein sets out at length in the opening pages of her book. From early in the novel, Mrs. Reynolds holds Angel Harper's death hopefully in sight; on the last page she turns to her sleepy husband and reminds him that she has not been wrong to believe in Saint Odile, "because Saint Odile had not been mistaken. Angel Harper was not fifty-five alive" (MR, 330).
At the core of this novel lies the irony that, in the absence of a firmly internalized sense of time and the stabilizing effects provided by a belief in memory, an obsession with temporal coordinates dominates the whole. In a surreal narrative facsimile of daily living without the faculty of memory, Mrs. Reynolds poses the problems Stein has been considering from primarily philosophical perspectives for more than a decade prior to its composition. In The Geographical History of America Stein can write "[t]he relation of human nature to the human mind makes everybody indifferent to remembering and forgetting to age and living to knowing that every one can die so that there may be room for all who are here now" (GH, 59). In Mrs. Reynolds she places her characters in this indifferent world and she locates that world, at least to some degree, in time, thereby revealing how vexed and unsettling are the relations between human mind and human nature, between the subject to itself and the subject in time. On virtually every page of this book, with a reiterative logic that makes sense only if one posits a storyteller plagued by a continuous state of amnesia, we listen to the narrative tell over a few notches on the stick that allows it to keep some record of its uncertain temporal place: Angel Harper's age, Mrs. Reynolds's age, the age of the century, the year as specified in prophecy.
Stein's preoccupations with narrative and memory, with the disjunctions between the subject's temporally unmoored existence and the object's embeddedness in time, give this odd book a shape that is often comically unsophisticated. Having told us that Mrs. Reynolds "was not really Mrs. Reynolds until she was twenty-three," the book labors to build a story and to draw a bead on its main character, using the progress toward twenty-three as temporary telos: "She was nineteen then and then she was twenty. She was not yet twenty-one" (MR, 17). Mrs. Reynolds stands only once for a moment before our eyes, early in the novel, held up for the scrutiny we are accustomed to give res in fiction:
Mrs. Reynolds liked to wear a beret, she was neither dark nor blonde, she was pretty with small features and very tall and quite heavy.
She knew that if you have any expression on your face your thoughts are different. Hers never were.
She said it again and again. (MR, 60)
"Pretty," "small," "tall," "heavy," not dark, not blonde--the first sentence provides us with almost nothing we can carry away, nothing to recall. Its measured phrases balance each other like statements on either side of an equals sign in algebra, canceling each other out. But then she perhaps pursues invisibility deliberately, given the danger of the times. The sudden shift from outside to inside, from her beret and her stature to what she knows, might prompt us to attribute motive and psychological depth to her lack of distinguishing features. The book, however, offers no sustained exploration of interiority that might warrant this reading. All its characters are propelled forward by the ticking of a clock, the pure passing of time, rather than by any recognizably internal drives.
In the absence of character development to keep us oriented in our reading, the narrative of Mrs. Reynolds searches constantly for interpretive shorthand, for ways to anchor perception, keys to the whirling world. Suppose hair and habits of grooming counted for something? "If blonde people brush their hair, and make it curl they are called Gabriel. If dark people brush their hair and it does not curl, they are called Angel Harper" (MR, 60). Like any number of similarly crazy forays into logic in this novel, this conditional assertion can be read as a grim parody of Nazi proclamations about race, but what is most disturbing about this paragraph is that its confident illogic is ubiquitous in this book. Mrs. Reynolds, or any of the other res passing through these pages, is just as likely to propose this kind of equation as is Angel Harper or the narrative itself. Rather than being a moment of merely political satire, this passage speaks to a pervasive, ontological problem, a bewilderment so profound that politics, history, ethics, narrative--all that humans build--seems equally flimsy, equally founded on illusory connections, equally beside the point.
The preeminent ground for studying the odd contours of Steinian history is the character of Angel Harper himself. Given our knowledge of his referent in real life--and his connection to Adolph Hitler was noted by the novel's earliest reviewers--his name presents us with immediate difficulties. Sounding like a cross between a re from Hardy and, with the unconcealed pun in his last name, from Bunyan, "Angel Harper" constitutes one of Stein's most audacious experiments with the possibility of disconnecting words and things, language and history. To change "Adolph" to "Angel" is not simply to make a semantic equation but, as we experience a dissonance in the rechristening, to expose our presuppositions about how names should fit the world. That is, Stein presents "Adolph" and "Angel," without commentary, as different, though similar, collections of letters. Our desire for a semantic order that corresponds to an ethical one causes us to read the substitution as a grotesque and deliberate mismatching, an affront to our deepest sense of order. But then, nothing adds up with Angel Harper. Stein introduces him in the second chapter of Mrs. Reynolds, and he is from the outset a character who cannot find a place for himself. In a parody of portents, Stein obliquely suggests that his birth was accompanied by signs but then quickly dismisses the relevance of her own suggestion: "The hoot-owl was hooting terrifically up the valley. Nobody knew just when or how Angel Harper was born. Not that it made any difference. It did not" (MR, 38). Whether it is the public's ignorance of the facts surrounding Angel Harper's birth or the owl's hooting that is the referent of the "it" in these last two sentences doesn't matter, since neither explains who this re is or why he developed as he did. When Stein focuses more intimately on the antagonist who comes to haunt Mrs. Reynolds, there seems to be nothing inside:
So he began, being born did not interest him and being dead could not happen to him and being married was never a possibility for him and being older as yet was not happening to him and being younger had never happened to him, so what was the matter. (MR, 38)
Perched precariously in the present on what William James calls the "saddle-back of time," alone and disconnected, Angel Harper amounts almost to nothing. 41 Scarcely anything is of consequence; there is hardly a subject available for description. Stein means "matter" in both these senses, offering an economical summary of her dwindling character as subject and object: "Sometimes nothing was the matter." And then, gathering up what little she can carry away from this early assessment, she takes stock of all we know: "His name was Angel Harper and sometimes nothing was the matter" (MR, 38-9).
Even to himself, with a memory that functions only intermittently and that does not respond to his bidding, Angel Harper is a cipher. Following a paragraph in which we learn that Mrs. Reynolds's brother was often unable to "remember what most people whom he knew looked like"--Angel Harper's failures of memory are by no means anomalous in this book--we watch Angel Harper try to pull himself together: