The letters make suffering the hallmark of modernist authorship. They use Conrad's gout, furthermore, as the primary register for measuring the value of the professional services that author performs. By giving evidence of his suffering, the letters authenticate Conrad's labor. They make clear that his writing is his property and, regardless of its circulation in the market, will remain identifiably his own. The letters solidify the re of Joseph Conrad, finally, and provide the terms for his canonization. Conrad is not the only modernist novelist to have been consecrated for his failing health. Woolf, Lawrence, Joyce, Forster, and Stein have all, at one time or another, had their respective achievements narrated as genius born of suffering. 9 In noting this larger pattern, I want to suggest that Conrad's letters contain a model for rethinking how modernism broke with its Victorian past. By observing Conrad as he negotiates his unstable, uncertain, and incomplete version of that break, we should be able to discover, moreover, why suffering was such a common ingredient in the making of the modernist author.
Even as a child, Conrad struggled with a variety of afflictions. By all accounts, he was never truly well. As he grew older, the one malady that began to overshadow all others was his gout, a metabolic condition characterized by an intensely painful inflammation of the joints. During one especially severe attack in 1891, Conrad's hands swelled so that his doctor was compelled to send him off to Geneva, Switzerland for a special "water-mountain cure." 10 This crisis occurred while he was hard at work on his first novel, Almayer's Folly. From this moment forward Conrad's letters associate writing fiction with attacks of gout. Gout accompanies inspiration--"Gout. Brought on by-by-by agitation, exasperation, botheration--You know; those things you laugh at and bite your thumbs at--O! Lord! And I write! I write! I write! I write! Certainly. Write quick" 11 --and is part and parcel of writer's block as well--"When I face that fatal manuscript it seems to me that I have forgotten how to think--worse! how to write . . . I knock around blindly . . . till I am positively, physically sick" (CL, 1, 296-97). It is the author's constant companion--"I got up and went down again some four distinct times since that time; having nevertheless managed to do some 13 thousand words--the last paper of the Mirror of the Sea vol." (CL, 3, 287)--and, ultimately, a metaphor for authorship itself--"a short story of about 5.000 words . . . like a fell disease got me under" (CL, 1, 298)--all of which leads Conrad to conclude, in a letter to John Galsworthy in April, 1906, that "perhaps . . . the hard, atrocious, agonizing days are simply part of my method of work, a decreed necessity of my production" (CL, 3, 327).
This description does not represent a simple attempt to naturalize writing. Rather, when Conrad depicts gout as the vital component of his writing method, he socializes his disease. He narrates his gout--an inherited illness no less--as an aspect of his working existence, as part of what might be called his professional persona. That is, he indicates the specialized quality of his labor through a representation of his personal suffering. Although this approach may seem surprising, Conrad's tactical connection of his work to his person is hardly unique. Magali Sarfatti Larson notes that professional work frequently appears "inextricably bound to the person and the personality of [its] producer." 12 Often enough, what makes professionals working in the same field stand out--what distinguishes one doctor from another, for example--is the personal flair they bring to the job. Personality names a service. It makes the service distinctive, rare, and valuable. Furthermore, it forestalls the alienation that characterizes nonprofessional labor, since it particularizes the professional's labor in a way unavailable to most workers. Holding alienation at bay is no small task, however. Because the service sector is intertwined with that of manufacturing, distinguishing professional labor from that of the assembly line is a tricky proposition. 13 In fact, "because they are personally involved in their work," as Marshall Berman notes, and because professionals effectively "sell themselves piecemeal," in Marx's apt turn of phrase, capitalism's demands seem to impinge on them in an especially intimate way. 14 The person and personality of the professional are affected by the market even as they also produce effects within it. As Conrad's gout makes apparent the specialized quality of his writing method, therefore, it also proves his membership in a professional class of uniquely situated market victims. The letters provide further evidence of the particular animosity the market has for Conrad when they show how it eagerly commodifies his work and offers him next to nothing in exchange. Even as the market robs him of his writing, however, Conrad manages to retain control over his writing method. Though his texts become commodified, his means of production remain his own.
"All societies turn on their concept of property," Harold Perkin argues, and professional society turns on a concept of property expressed in the performance of a professional service (RPS, 377). What professionals own most securely, according to Perkin, is their ability to perform specialized work. They possess this ability only so long as they continue to perform, however. Professional property is, in this sense, contingent, which puts it at odds with the more absolute property forms of inherited land or contracted labor (RPS, 377-79). For this reason, the idea of professional property emerged in England as part of an opposition to aristocratic and industrial economic thinking. In the last half of the nineteenth century, Perkin shows, incipient professionals organized themselves into career hierarchies and competed with the partisans of those older proprietary ideals. They attempted to shape an economic and class logic based on cultural capital rather than industrial and landed capital. Accountants and auctioneers, hospital administrators and sanitation engineers all sought to distinguish themselves from members of the working class proper--who supposedly lacked the education and training required to perform their specialized labor--as well as from the constituencies of the upper echelon of England's tripartite class system.
As it turns out, they were largely successful. By the turn of the century, the majority of Great Britain's economic growth came from services. From their home base in London and outposts around the world, service professionals reorganized English domestic and imperial politics, established a new welfare state bureaucracy, and reinvented English empire according to their guiding precepts of merit-based qualification and the value of cultural capital. 15 Their work heralded a sea change in the economic outlook of the country. As Britain's economic center shifted from the factory towns of Manchester and Birmingham to the southeast portion of England, the City of London became "more than ever, the switchboard for the world's international business transactions, so that its commercial and financial services alone earned almost enough to make up for [Britain's] large deficit in its balance of commodity trade." 16 The newly dominant professional class made managerial skill and insider knowledge the preeminent forms of capital in the world and, furthermore, made itself the only class qualified to evaluate holdings in this particular form of wealth.
In order to keep the value of services high, professionalism needed to induce an economics of scarcity. As Perkin reminds us, "that is why the organized professional bodies . . . operated 'strategies of closure' including control of entry, training and qualification, and sought a monopoly of the name and the practice" of their respective services (RPS, 378). In his letters, Conrad puts in play his own criteria of qualification by establishing an opposition between writing in general and his own specialized craft. As he does so, he shows that even a skill as increasingly common as writing can be made to appear scarce. Conrad elaborates on the qualifying criteria pertinent to this field of professionalized writing in a review of the work of Hugh Clifford, a friend, a decorated imperial officer, and the author of several well-received volumes of prose on life in the colonies.
In 1898, the editor of Academy, a literary weekly, contracted Conrad to review a book of Clifford's entitled Studies in Brown Humanity. Conrad agreed. In his review, he describes the volume's prose as full of "sympathy" for its characters, "Ûmat, the punkah-puller" and "the coolie, Lim Teng Wah." 17 Despite its obvious merits, however, Conrad urged readers not judge the book as art. In fact, "to apply artistic standards to this book would be a fundamental error in appreciation," he cautions, since "art veils part of the truth of life to make the rest appear more splendid, inspiring, or sinister. And this book is only truth, interesting and futile, truth unadorned, simple and straightforward." 18 Art reconres "the truth," according to Conrad, a definition that he expands on in his Preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'. "[I]t is only complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance," he argues in the Preface, "only through an unremitting, never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that . . . the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage." 19 The author privileged by Conrad in this description does not create texts so much as recreate them. He revises, rescues, and rewrites them. He makes them better. In a letter to his publisher, William Blackwood, Conrad provides an example of this service from his own oeuvre. "The favourable critics of that story [i.e., 'Youth'], Q[uiller-Couch] amongst others remarked with a sort of surprise 'This after all is a story for boys yet--' Exactly. Out of the material of a boys' story I've made Youth" (CL, 2, 417). The beauty of Conrad's specialized mode of rewriting is that it works with all sorts of texts. It can take adventure stories, as with "Youth," or, indeed, any kind of generic prose "worn thin . . . by ages of careless usage," and, by servicing it, make that writing into something new.
In the months following the Academy review, Conrad and Clifford began exchanging letters. Clifford paid Conrad a visit at his home in Kent. And, when his next book came out, Clifford mailed Conrad a copy. 20 Like the earlier Studies, Clifford's new volume, entitled In a Corner of Asia, focussed on the lives of his colonial subjects in Malaya. Conrad invokes that point of origin in the October 1899 letter he sent to acknowledge the book's receipt. There, he congratulates Clifford on his mastery of ethnographic detail and, once again, chides him for not writing art.
Of course the matter is admirable--the knowledge, the feeling, the sympathy; it is sure to win perfect and full recognition. It is all sterling metal; a thing of absolute value. There can be no question of it not only for those who know but even for those who approach the book with blank minds on the subject of the race you have, in more than one sense, made your own. And as to the manner--well! I know you are not a seeker after mere expression and I beg leave to offer only one remark. You do not leave enough to the imagination. (CL, 2, 200)
With the suggestion that Clifford has taken possession of the Malay "race," "in more than one sense," Conrad gestures toward the colonial apparatus that enabled Clifford's writing. He hints, further, that imperialism has smoothed the way for the consumption of Clifford's prose as well. Clifford's status as an authorized narrator of native life grants his writing a currency matched only by the universally recognizable pound sterling, according to Conrad. Despite these advantages, Conrad questions the ultimate authority of Clifford's text. In the last line of this passage, he chiasmatically reverses the logic of Clifford's proprietary claim to the "subject of the race [he has] made [his] own."
According to Conrad's reading, Clifford's text presumes that it has all of the facts under control and, further, that those facts refer to a world outside language. There is a crucial flaw in this reasoning, Conrad asserts. Writers who believe that their work refers to the real mistake the power of the word. They fail to realize that "the whole of the truth lies in the presentation" (CL, 2, 200). With this linguistic turn, Conrad reverses the implicit hierarchy he identifies in Clifford's privileging of subject "matter" over what Conrad ironically calls "mere expression" (CL, 2, 200). The real subject of writing, he avers, is writing. "The things 'as they are' exist in words," he observes, and "words should be handled with care, lest the picture, the image of truth abiding in facts should become distorted--or blurred" (CL, 2, 200). Without sufficient expertise in writing, truth fades, the subject blurs, and the author is left owning nothing at all, as his subject slips from his grasp. With this move, Conrad proposes a proprietary relationship that depends entirely on the writer's ability.
To ensure that Clifford understands the distinction, Conrad proposes to revise several lines from In a Corner of Asia. He selects a passage symptomatic of what he presents as Clifford's undertheorized use of language: "When the whole horror of his position forced itself with an agony of realization upon his frightened mind, Pa' Tûa for a space lost his reason" (CL, 2, 201). For Conrad, these lines exemplify Clifford's trust in the real. They provide an opportunity to show why such trust is necessarily misplaced. "In this sentence the reader is borne down by the full expression . . . The word frightened is fatal . . . [It] is totally inadequate to express the true state of that man's mind. No word is adequate," Conrad concludes (CL, 2, 201). In order to convey what Pa' Tûa feels, a more sophisticated, and more roundabout, technique must be used. First, Conrad counsels, excise the word "frightened." Second, refuse to interpret for the reader: "The imagination of the reader should be left free to arouse his feeling" (2: 201). The slippage of the word "his" in this sentence--Does "his feeling" refer to Pa' Tûa or to the reader?--reinforces Conrad's argument. The language appropriate to the task at hand should be evocative without strictly delimiting Pa' Tûa's fright. Conrad expects his reader to detect fear without being handed the word "frightened." Reading depends crucially on one's ability to interpret what a text leaves open or unsaid. 21
Here, then, are the results of Conrad's revision: "When the whole truth of his position forced itself upon his mind, Pa' Tûa for a space lost his reason" (CL, 2, 201). "This is truth," Conrad writes. "And look how finely it goes on with a perfectly legitimate effect," he continues:
When the whole truth of the horror of his position forced itself upon his mind, Pa' Tûa for a space lost his reason. He screamed aloud, and the hollow of the rocks took up his cries; the bats awoke in thousands and joined the band that rustled and squeaked above the man etc. etc. (CL, 2, 201)
By streamlining Clifford's prose, Conrad appears to have succeeded in making the text more productive. With the rustles and squeaks of those thousands of bats, Pa' Tûa's fright bursts from the page. This exercise in revision provides an object lesson in the efficacy of what Edward Said calls Conrad's "minimal but hauntingly reverberating phrases." 22 It is as well a prime example of Conrad's own unmistakable literary style. The newly improved version resonates with the sort of "oppressive mysteriousness" and inexactitude that so famously annoyed F. R. Leavis, and which makes Conrad's writing so easily identifiable. 23 By revising Clifford's lines, therefore, Conrad took possession of them. By servicing Clifford's text, he made that text his own and imprinted it with his own reproducible style.
When he unveils the contingent hold a writer has on his writing, Conrad reverses a century-old effort to legitimate aesthetic work by describing it in absolute terms. As Mark Rose shows, eighteenth century narratives of authorship frequently employed the vocabulary of landed capital in an attempt to elevate the value of literary labor. Rose directs us to the example of Joseph Addison, who said of one author, "his Brain, which was his Estate, had as regular and different Produce as other Men's land." 24 Litigants in nineteenth century debates over copyright revisited this aristocratic mode. One, William Dougal Christie, even imagined "a class of men holding hereditary estates, not in broad lands, but in books." 25 Victorian authors drew on this language to give their profession an "aura of gentility" as well as the moral authority to challenge the Taylorizing tendencies of commercial publishers. 26 Persistent antagonism between these two parties notwithstanding, authors and publishers both participated in the innovations that transformed novel production in the Victorian era. When the author and publisher Charles Dickens helped make serialization popular in the 1830s, he gave the novel even greater visibility than it had previously enjoyed and created a whole new set of conditions for novel writing. As Mary Poovey shows, part-issue publication red the author as just "one instance of [the] labor" required to put out a book. 27 Publishers attempted to force novelists to write on schedule, to compose their words in evenly distributed portions, and to plot their narratives so that each chapter's conclusion would also function as an advertisement for the next installment. 28 Dickens was the master of this form of writing. He also participated in that other central trend of Victorian literary production, the feminization of the novel. By acting as a spokesperson for the doctrine of separate spheres, Dickens underscored the novel's association with the stereotypically feminine terms of domesticity, sentiment, and feeling. 29 Somewhat ironically, then, Dickens's version of the novel forged a link between mass marketability and feminization, a link reinforced, as Andreas Huyssen observes, by the practitioners and critics of modernism. 30
As feminist critics ranging from Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar to Rita Felski and Anita Levy have shown, modernism was "motivated to a considerable extent by the will to observe and to know the female." 31 Modernists did not follow in the footsteps of the Victorians, however. They rewrote the feminine subject by primitivizing, aestheticizing, psychologizing, and otherwise subjecting her to an array of newly professionalized discourses. They detached the categories of sentiment and feeling from the feminine and made them the property of the professional. 32 For an example of this reclassifying process we need look no farther than Conrad's letter to Clifford, where Conrad makes the acts of arousing a reader's "feeling" and discerning "the true state" of a person's mind the appropriate labor of professional literary practice (CL, 2, 201).
In addition to usurping what had been the domain of popular writers, Conrad takes over the space of the domestic itself. Like Dickens before him, Conrad portrays himself as a guardian of the home. In contrast with Dickens, Conrad proves less than successful at this task. The conclusion of his letter to Clifford depicts Conrad struggling to produce writing that will allow him to secure his family's well-being. The market obliges him by purchasing his work, but it is clearly the market, and not the author, who sets the terms for this exchange.
[These lines are] the sort of thing I write twenty times a day and (with the fear of overtaking fate behind me) spend half my nights in taking out of my work--upon which depends the daily bread of the house: (literally--from day to day); not to mention (I dare hardly think of it) the future of my child, of those nearest and dearest to me, between whom and the bleakest want there is only my pen--as long as life lasts. And I can sell all I write--as much as I write! (CL, 2, 201)
As he subjects himself to the market's terms, Conrad also gives us the clear indication that, of all the aspects of his work, rewriting is what takes the most time and energy. To make this point, to establish the centrality of rewriting to his self-definition as an author, Conrad paradoxically must run the risk of failing as a domestic provider. Through its narrative of market dominance, his letter suggests that the Victorian duties of authorship--securing the values of the home over the values of the market, making generally available the deep-seated truths of human subjectivity--are far more difficult than the Victorians let on.
In his letter to Clifford, Conrad addresses the author of imperial adventure as well as the Victorian narrator of domestic romance. His anguished scene of writing sublates both of these versions of authorship. He dismisses the author of parlor fiction by appropriating the space of the home and by taking over the job of portraying the inner reaches of subjectivity. As for the adventure author, he can be glimpsed "between the lines" of Clifford's prose, "like the progress of a traveller in the jungle that may be traced by the sound of the parang chopping the swaying creepers, while the man himself is glimpsed, now and then, between the trees." 33 Conrad displaces this author by identifying the desk, rather than the jungle, as the appropriate setting for literary struggle. He does not simply displace this author, however, but instead appropriates the trappings of Clifford's adventure model and applies them to his own situation. He builds struggle and physical risk into the professional mode of authorial production. As we shall see, Conrad's writing is every bit as perilous as Clifford's labor amidst "the great flood" and the "menacing rocks" of the Malay peninsula. 34
If the author's job in Conrad's letters is to render a distinctive literary service, the reader's responsibility is to recognize the value of that service. Readers are investors in the letters, and the smart ones know to buy into an undervalued author while his price is still low. In the decade of the 1890s, Conrad certainly fit this bill. Neither he nor his publisher was satisfied with the sales of his early Malay novels. While his The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' did somewhat better than those, Conrad's limited marketability still stood out at a moment when the bookstores were flush with best-sellers. The market for fiction was booming in England at the close of the nineteenth century. Every year, more novels found publishers and more new novelists emerged on the scene. As one commentator observed, "Most moderately well-educated people nowadays are actual or potential authors. They have dabbled in literature for purposes of pleasure or profit, they have published a book, or they have written magazine or newspaper articles." 35 This was the moment when the term "best-seller" began to take on its contemporary meaning. The Book Monthly was one of several periodicals that tracked novel sales in Britain at the turn of the century, but the journal's editor, James Milne, seemed far from comfortable with this method of evaluating fiction. He took care to assure his readers that the Book Monthly's lists were "prepared by a high authority," and that they were therefore sanctioned by more than public opinion alone. 36
Conrad's letters also pondered the relationship between market value and literary taste. In a 1913 exchange with the publisher Blackwood's, for instance, Conrad sought to fix the relationship between aesthetic worth and the price of a novel. Blackwood's suggested that "the inclusion of Lord Jim in our 1/- Editions might be a successful undertaking," and might bring both publisher and author the profits that had eluded them when the novel was first published in 1900. 37 Conrad responded promptly to this proposition. In his answer, he noted that he too was concerned that the novel was increasingly difficult to find. He disagreed, however, that a new cheap edition would help Blackwood's target an appropriate readership for the text. "I have been hearing for some time now that the booksellers tell people Lord Jim is out of print," he observed, "[but] I would much prefer a new edition at 6/- leaving the Democracy of the bookstalls to cut its teeth on something softer" (LWB 193). Price, for Conrad, indicates quality. By elevating the cost of his books, he apparently hoped to signal their aesthetic value and snag art-conscious consumers. More than a promotional tool, price helps to identify a readership. By thinking taste and cost together, Conrad imagines the market less as one mass entity and more as an amalgamation of niches. The market for him is not a mysterious, amorphous thing guided by an invisible hand, then, but a knowable, and therefore manipulable organization of demographics, each with its own specific tastes. In this conception of the market, aesthetics and economics are not enemies. They are complementary diagnostic matrices for analyzing and predicting the behavior of these demographics. 38
This is a market theory uniquely suited for a literary field in which book readers were also book buyers, which had not always been the case, we should remember. During the nineteenth-century hegemony of the triple-decker and the lending library, readers rented. In the 1890s, however, the libraries decided that the triple-decker had outlived its usefulness, and they pressed publishers to begin printing novels exclusively in single-volume editions. With this move, the libraries sealed their own fate as well as that of three-volume publication. For, as technological innovation and marketing strategies made printing and distributing one-volume fictions more and more cost-effective for publishers, they began to bypass the libraries and sell to consumers through retail outlets instead. 39
Conrad presented a fuller version of his market theory in a letter he sent to Blackwood's in May of 1902, just after he arrived home from a meeting with William Blackwood, the head of the family business. At this meeting, Conrad had asked Blackwood to grant him a loan. Blackwood turned him down and made it clear in the process that publishing Conrad had so far proven "a loss to [his] firm" (CL, 2, 421). 40 Conrad responded by suggesting to Blackwood that he had missed the point. It mattered less, he said, how many books Blackwood sold than who he was selling them to. In his letter, Conrad produces the names of several influential--or soon to be influential--literary res who, he says, buy his fiction, res like W. H. Henley, the publisher of the New Review, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells. He tells Blackwood that his incipient readership is hardly limited to such sophisticated readers alone. It also includes the likes of "Yrgö Hirn of the Finland University," "Maurice Greiffenhagen a painter . . . the skipper of a Persian Gulf steamer who wrote to the papers of my 'Typhoon' . . . [and] a charming old lady in Winchester" (CL, 2, 416). This is an eclectic bunch to be sure, but what they all had in common was a certain willingness to invest in Conrad's work. More than this, they have all understood and recognized the revisionary service his work provided. They were able to see, for example, that in "Heart of Darkness" Conrad made "of that story something quite on another plane than an anecdote of a man who went mad in the Centre of Africa" (CL, 2, 417). They knew that his texts were different and that they were undervalued in the current market. Cultivating such a loyal readership takes patience, Conrad tells Blackwood. It takes time.
Time was a particularly sensitive subject between Conrad and Blackwood. In the correspondence that led up to their meeting, the author and publisher had engaged in a dispute about how long it was taking Conrad to finish his novels. William Blackwood was concerned that Conrad wrote so erratically and slowly that it was impossible to put him on any kind of publishing calendar. William's nephew George, a junior editor at the firm, reiterated this point and expressed his own concern about the narrative pacing of Conrad's fiction. George complained in particular about a story entitled, appropriately enough, "The End of the Tether," which his uncle planned to run serially and then publish with two other fictions under the title Youth. When, on May 20, Conrad submitted the first installment of "Tether," George was the assigned reader. After paging through the manuscript, he alerted Conrad that, "as far as [his reading] goes at present"--some fourteen-thousand words--"one can hardly say one has got into the story yet" at all. 41 If this were true, if fourteen-thousand words represented only the beginning of the narrative, then all of the publisher's production schedules were in danger. George was right to be worried. Conrad had a bad habit of starting such stories as "Jim: A Sketch" that turned out to be books. In this case, Lord Jim. 42
In his letter to William, Conrad grudgingly concedes George's point, saying that it was "in measure correct but, on a large view, beside the point" (CL, 2, 417). His narrative pacing and writing time did not detract but added to the value of his manuscript. "I am long in my development," he admits to William. "What of that?"
Is not Thackeray's penny worth of mediocre fact drowned in an ocean of twaddle? . . . And Sir Walter, himself, was not the writer of concise anecdotes I fancy. And G. Elliot [sic]--is she as swift as the present public (incapable of fixing its attention for five consecutive minutes) requires us to be at the cost of all honesty, of all truth, and even the most elementary conception of art? (CL, 2, 417-18)
Conrad scores "three hits" in this elaborate self-defense, as Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies point out in their editorial notes to the letters (CL, 2, 418). The Blackwood's company published all but one of George Eliot's novels, William Blackwood's father was a great friend of Thackeray's, and the heroic re of Sir Walter Scott loomed large over the literary and intellectual culture of Edinburgh, where Blackwood's publishing house was based. In addition to good aim, Conrad also evinces a gift at subtle displacement in this passage. He responds to a question about his production with an answer concerning the issue of his texts' consumption. He blames the literary market for his unimpressive sales. The novel-reading public has changed since the era of Scott and Eliot and Thackeray, Conrad contends. It has become more hurried, more demanding, one might even say more savvy in pursuing its needs.
The Victorian literary field Conrad describes could not be more different from the modern one in which he worked. It is a peaceful, homogeneous place and almost primitive in the closeness it maintained between producers and consumers. Eliot and Scott are perfectly in tune with their audience. Or, more precisely, their audience has not yet transformed into the exacting market that dominates at the turn of the century. By thus flattening the Victorian field, Conrad makes market competition into a modernist phenomenon. Because Blackwood relies on a pre-modern conception of the market, Conrad suggests, the publisher mistakenly treats the novels he sells as if they were Victorian texts. Modern texts are different. "I am modern," he announces, implying that work like his neither fits into a ready-made category, nor will find a readership right away. Victorian novel-production is the wrong analogy for his kind of work, then. As a more fitting comparison, he explains,
I would . . . recall Wagner the musician and Rodin the Sculptor who both had to starve a little in their day--and Whistler the painter who made Ruskin the critic foam at the mouth with scorn and indignation . . . They had to suffer for being 'new.' And I too hope to find my place in the rear of my betters . . . This is my creed. Time will show. (CL, 2, 418)
By designating Rodin and Whistler as his predecessors, Conrad finds a model for his modern literary market in the connoisseurial world of the visual arts and of music. 43 All producers there pass through a stage in their career when they are underrecognized and underappreciated, and this they must do if they are to gain a following. In order to succeed, paradoxically, they need to fail. They need to put themselves in a position to lure investors who understand that the risk involved in supporting an unpopular artist can lead to tremendous rewards. By borrowing this model of patron and artist, Conrad redefines the publishing business. Publishers should act, he suggests, as investment brokers. "[A] writer may be taken up as an investment," Conrad wrote to Alfred Knopf in 1913, and should be treated accordingly. "An investment must be attended to, it must be nursed--if one believes in it." 44 The publisher should cultivate his authors by marketing them to buyers who can afford a moderate degree of risk in return for capital gains down the line. 45 In the midst of this lesson in literary economics, Conrad gives Blackwood a tip about how to spot authors worthy of speculative investment. 46 They will exhibit a distinctive quality that one finds in all new artists: they will suffer.
In marked contrast to the notion of a fragmented and niched market, nineteenth century commentators tended to think of their reading public in broad-based national terms. Ian Duncan traces this conception to Sir Walter Scott: "The Waverly novels had done much to define that re of a unified public imagination--a society brought together in the act of reading the same book--as they charted an expanding . . . literary market." 47 This national audience generated a novelist who was, oddly enough, rarely portrayed writing. The early scene of literary production was often occluded, while the act of writing itself took on a supernatural, gothic air. A telling example of this mystification occurs in Lockhardt's Life of Scott, when the novelist at work appears to a stunned observer as a free-floating, unattached hand.
"I have been watching it--it fascinates my eye--it never stops--page after page is finished and thrown on the heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied--and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that.  "No, boys," said our host, "I well know what hand it is--'tis Walter Scott's." 48
This is a portrait eminently suitable for depicting the "mysteriousness" Marx attributes to the commodity form in general. 49 Like all of the marketable goods he describes, books tend to obscure the work that goes into them. 50 As they enter the realm of commodities and take on a life of their own, books leave their authors behind. The author remains in the background, fragmented--disembodied as Lockhardt portrays him--his connection to the text ambiguous at best. How different is this process of alienation from Conrad's portrayal of the tight bond between author and writing? Conrad's author is radically embodied, a fact which announces his participation in an economy that focuses on the writing rather than the book, on the service rather than the commodity.
By depicting suffering as an expression of artistry, Conrad imbues that suffering with value. He makes of it a badge that the author displays in order to prove that he or she is not simply disembodied, that he or she is not, that is, an ordinary commodity producer. Suffering identifies writers as professionals in search of investors. Suffering tells potential patrons that an artist is willing to sacrifice for art, that he or she is in it for the long term, and that the payoff will eventually come to the patient investor. Presented this way, suffering becomes cultural capital and begins to behave in the manner that capital has been theorized by Pierre Bourdieu. "[S]ymbolic capital is credit . . . in the broadest sense, a kind of advance, a credence" that investors give when they recognize and acknowledge the work of outstanding participants in a given field. 51 Cultural capital may seem merely cultural, Bourdieu allows, but it exerts economic effects. It is "denied capital," capital that has no overt economic value but nevertheless behaves in economic ways. 52 Cultural capital can be invested, it can be traded, and, most importantly, it can accumulate--"the exhibition of symbolic capital . . . is one of the mechanisms which make capital go to capital." 53 We have an opportunity to witness the operation of this mechanism in the letters where Conrad uses his suffering, and particularly that associated with his gout, to fend off the disembodying tendencies of commodification.
In the letters of the 1890s, which depict Conrad in the early stages of his writing, gout supplements the market value of his work. In these letters, we frequently see the author requesting and receiving advances on incomplete work. Soon after selling Blackwood the short story, "Youth," for example, Conrad thanks Blackwood for a £5 check "on account of the story (yet unfinished) entitled Jim: A Sketch" (CL, 2, 67). As he begins writing "Heart of Darkness," some six months later on, Conrad solicits Blackwood for more advance funding. He asks for and receives £40 (CL, 2, 145), then £60 more (CL, 2, 163), which, he writes "will probably overpay it as I do not think it will run to 40000 words" (CL, 2, 164). The letters are full of these sorts of calculations, as Conrad attempts to maintain a balance of "words v. sovereigns" (CL, 2, 237). 54 Despite all his effort, Conrad rarely ends up in the black.
In a December 1909 letter to his agent, J. B. Pinker, Conrad tries to rectify this situation by factoring in the hardship involved in his labor. He attempts, in other words, to give his suffering a monetary value. In 1907 Pinker and Conrad had taken steps to standardize the author's finances. They had agreed that Pinker would pay Conrad £600 each year, in return for which he would write eighty-thousand words. 55 Conrad was unable to keep to this schedule. Although he wrote more words in total than were expected of him, not enough were towards novels, the only type of writing Pinker was interested in. Conrad discovered, further, that £600 was not enough money to satisfy his needs. He required extra cash to pay his medical bills, among other expenses. So, in late 1909, he attempted to renegotiate the contract. He wrote to Pinker,
[I]n the last 23H months I've written 187,000 words (of which 130,000 in round numbers of Razumov [Under Western Eyes]). In the course of these 23H months as two honourable professional men can testify, from July last year to August of this I've had five severe attacks of gout . . . Thats twelve months: but as I often worked when far from fit--yes with temp at over 100º--when most men would be utterly unable to do anything--yes and creative work too--let us deduct only 8 months; which would leave 16 months of effective health and works out at the average of 11630 w. per month. (CL, 4, 302)
Conrad makes the case that he should be paid above and beyond what he has already received from Pinker for his work over the last two years. This is the only reason why he introduces his illness, he tells Pinker. "I am not a confounded hypoc[h]ondriac in search of sympathy. I didn't write of my health in a conventional way . . . I alluded to it because it has a direct bearing on the situation" (CL, 4, 303). His reasoning runs as follows: he has produced far more, first of all, than the eighty-thousand words a year Pinker had agreed to. If one factors in the time he was sick, Conrad shows Pinker, he has written at a rate that, had he been healthy, would have allowed him to produce even more. 11,630 words per month, over twenty-four months, works out to upwards of 279,000 words. Given this, Conrad implies, Pinker should not be denying him advances. He should, if anything, offer him a raise. If we use the numbers Conrad provides as our guide, Pinker should be paying twice again the amount he had already disbursed for the two years in question.
Conrad failed in this attempt to persuade Pinker to pay him for the time he was down with gout, and, given the circumstances, this is hardly surprising. Pinker had been waiting for Under Western Eyes for close to two years by the time Conrad wrote him the letter I have cited above. He was also frustrated by the fact that, with the end of the novel in sight, Conrad had put the book aside to start a completely different project, the short story "The Secret Sharer." As this displacement suggests, Conrad could write, though not the book he had promised to deliver. Like his attacks of gout, the act of redirecting his attention to "The Secret Sharer" allows Conrad to delay the completion, and subsequent publication of his novel. It is interesting to note, in light of this observation, that Conrad's gout tends to worsen as he is finishing books, as his work is about to leave his hands and enter the commodity market. He comments on bodily distress at the very moment when alienation, or to use the term made available by the hand of Walter Scott, disembodiment, is about to take hold.
The development economist Jagdish Bhagwati argues that a "disembodiment effect," like that Lockhardt documents, is a usual part of what happens when professional services "splinter," as he puts it, into the commodity market.
[T]he services, initially embodied in the person providing them (for example, Placido Domingo singing at the Metropolitan), and requiring the physical presence of the provider of the services at the time of use, are disembodied as a result of technical change and encapsulated into what we call goods (such as the invention which brings Placido Domingo via records--that is, goods--into our homes) . . . [This] goods-from-services splintering process, reflecting the disembodiment effect, generally leaves behind a residue of service activities which are technically unprogressive and generally labour intensive. 56
Because they find themselves on the labor-intensive side of the bargain, Bhagwati shows, many successful service providers become victims of their own good fortune. If their services are valuable enough to commodify and distribute to a wide audience, their share of the profits often goes down. Domingo gets rich from his CD sales, of course, but one suspects that his record company profits substantially more from the venture than he does. The discrepancy between the profits of service professionals and commodity producers may be even wider in a case like Conrad's, where the total amount of revenue involved is so much smaller. The letters reveal that Conrad has, relatively speaking, little trouble getting critical recognition for his writing, which helps him find publishers for his work. The problem is that book publication seems a difficult place to turn that recognition, that cultural capital, into economic capital, or monetary profit.
In order to address this problem, Conrad attempts to articulate a method for readers to use in consuming his work as a service, an alternate way for them to invest in the author and his work. To this end, he gives the readers of his letters access to his scene of writing and shows them the disembodiment effect as it occurs. He lets them experience the toll that turning his writing into commodities takes on his body. By thus reembodying his work, Conrad directs the attention of his readers to the mode of literary production itself. He defines a channel through which the cultural capital represented by their recognition of his work will flow. He hopes that economic capital will also follow. Nowhere does this theoretical answer to the disembodiment effect appear more clearly than in the letters surrounding the writing of his novel Nostromo. In the author's note to that text, Conrad describes the book as "the most anxiously mediated of [his] longer novels." 57 His letters give a rather less understated account of Nostromo's completion. They depict the final days of writing in all their gory detail, and give us a wonderfully evocative account of the moment when Conrad's writing splinters from its life as a service into its incarnation as a commodity.
There are two versions of the events leading up to Nostromo's completion. One appears in a series of short letters to the agent Pinker. These letters reproduce the familiar fits and starts of Conrad's work method. The first in the series, dated the 24th of August, includes a promise from Conrad that he will finish Nostromo in two days time. He asks for a £2 check in advance, because, he tells Pinker, "I haven't the price of railway fare in the house" (CL, 3, 156). Two days pass and Conrad writes again to say that he is not yet done. He has had a sore tooth, he claims, which "made him unfit to work," but he guarantees that copy will be in the mail the next morning, a Saturday (CL, 3, 156-57). Saturday comes and goes, as does Sunday, and the next letter Conrad sends is dated the 31st, which would be a Wednesday. In their editorial notes, Karl and Davies produce evidence to suggest that in fact the day was Tuesday, early, around four o'clock in the morning. Conrad explains, "I could not resist the temptation of a Sunday intervening and keep the MS to work at it a little more" (CL, 3, 157). "I may just as well thank you for this work being finished," he remarks rather pitifully, "for thanks are due to you undeniably. And if I don't say more it isn't that I grudge you the words but because I am tired--done up" (CL, 3, 158). These letters surely make Conrad into a victim of the book-production process. In finishing his novel, he expends the scant resources in his possession, his words and his health towards the dismal prospect of commodification. To make matters worse, when the proofs of Nostromo arrive, Conrad discovers that his publisher has treated his words in a decidedly slipshod manner: "I am disgusted with the slovenliness, meanness of the book's get up," Conrad complains to Pinker, "the horrid misprints, the crooked lines, the dropped punctuation marks. By Jove a fourth of the page slants!" (CL, 3, 171-72). Commodification is a losing proposition all around.
The other version of these same events appears in a letter Conrad sent to the novelist John Galsworthy. If the letters to Pinker provide an origin story for Nostromo the commodity, this letter represents a competing narrative in which Nostromo survives as a service. The letter to Galsworthy opens with Conrad's declaration that the novel is "finished! Finished on the 30th in Hope's house in Stanford in Essex, where I had to take off my brain that seemed to turn to water" (CL, 3, 159). With this, Conrad records the moment when splintering occurs and the disembodiment effect sets in. The paragraphs that follow build on this image of Conrad literally losing his head. They portray his body coming loose at the seams.
His brain is the first part to go. A decaying tooth is next. "On the 27th had to wire for dentist (couldn't leave the work) who came at 2 and dragged at the infernal thing which seemed rooted in my very soul. The horror came away at last, leaving however one root in the gum. Then he grubbed for that till I le[a]pt out of the chair" (CL, 3, 158). Conrad uses "horror," one of his more identifiable words and one half of what is easily his most famous line, to a darkly comedic effect. He invokes all the rhetorical force of the narrative often hailed as his masterpiece, "Heart of Darkness," to describe a sore tooth. It is as if Conrad were letting Galsworthy in on a joke. The stakes are high in the events he is describing--there is nothing so important in the letters as finishing a book--but Conrad wants to make sure Galsworthy knows that he, and not the commodity market, is in control.
Conrad continues to play with the gravity of his situation in the lines that follow, as he depicts himself settling down to write at his desk:
At 11.30 something happened--what it is I don't know. I was writing, and raised my eyes to look at the clock. The next thing I know I was sitting (not lying) sitting on the concrete outside the door. When I crawled in I found it was nearly one. I managed to get upstairs and said to Jessie: We must be off to-morrow. (CL, 3, 158)
The disembodiment effect is in its advanced stages. After Conrad loses consciousness, his body takes on a life of its own. It begins, much in the fashion of Scott's hand, to carry on all by itself. At the last moment, however, Conrad resists. He takes back his magically reanimated corpse and, upon regaining control, charges out of the house with his wife in tow.
A car arrives for them at ten o'clock on the morning after Conrad's out-of-body experience. Their destination, we learn, is the home of Conrad's friend G. F. W. Hope. Along the way, the tenuous quality of Conrad's control over his body gets the attention of his driver--"I sat by the man's side like a corpse . . . [H]e said to me You look ill sir; shall I stop?" At this point, the letter produces its most telling evocation of splintering. Just as Conrad threatens to collapse altogether, a stranger appears at the side of the road. Conrad's car strikes him and, suddenly, Conrad springs back to life.
In Chatham, street crowded, packed. Going dead slow knocked down a man--old chap, apparently a bricklayer. Crowd around cursing and howling. Helped him to my front seat and I standing on the step got him to the hospital in 10 minutes. No harm. Only shaken. Saw him all comfy in bed for the rest of the day. (CL, 3, 159)
It is as if Conrad hands off the effects of disembodiment to this startled old man. One moment near death, the next Conrad is hoisting himself up on the running board as his car careens through a hostile mob. After pausing at the hospital, the car speeds on and, in the evening, arrives at the house of Conrad's friend. By then, Conrad is well on his way to beating back Bhagwati's disembodiment effect and to gaining control over his self-representation in the literary market. He eats food and, for the first time in over a week, "tasted it too" (CL, 3, 159). He sleeps, goes to work, and finishes the novel. He sleeps again and then writes the letter to Galsworthy. "I had not the heart to write to you that same night," Conrad informs him (CL, 3, 159; emphasis added), suggesting the effects of splintering still linger and he has yet to regain control over his entire body. "Wasn't sure I would survive," he continues. "But I have survived extremely well . . . I am quite recovered and ready for work again" (CL, 3, 159). One last act remains, however, before Conrad is willing to declare the adventure a success. He awaits Galsworthy's recognition. "There is wanting to the finish of this undertaking the sanction of your presence and voice," he writes in conclusion. "Drop me a line. Come down if you can!" (CL, 3, 159).
In the letters that follow, Conrad rehearses the story of his disembodiment and subsequent reembodiment for the other members of his growing circle. He shares the tale with H. G. Wells, Edward Garnett, Ford Madox Ford, R. B. Cunningham Graham, and others, invoking for each of them his "half-delirious state," his "two blank hours . . . on the concrete," and his horrible tooth--"It broke!" he exclaims to Ford (CL, 3, 162-69). All respond to his pleas for recognition--"I receive magnificent letters," Conrad tells Pinker (CL, 3, 178). Their acknowledgement of his struggle brings to completion the process of reembodiment begun in the letter. Cunningham Graham's response in particular brings the pink back to Conrad's cheeks, as it were: "Your letter was indeed worth having and I blush deeply as I re-read it," Conrad tells him (CL, 3, 175). Conrad's renewed health signifies the recognition his work has received, which itself represents an accumulation of cultural capital that compensates for the capital loss represented by the decidedly mixed reviews Nostromo received in the popular press and for its sluggish sales as well. 58 Arnold Bennett, in a belated acknowledgement, dismisses the importance of such forums. "[P]eople are so blind, and so infernally obstinate in complaining because a book is not something that an author never intended it to be. Only other creative artists can understand a creative artist." After sharing this sentiment, Bennett reinforces Conrad's reembodiment: "if one could but convey to you the passionate comprehension which some of us have of your work, I think the effect on your health would be good." 59
As the years pass and the narrative of Conrad's letters progresses, the number of his correspondents grows, as does the number of readers qualified to assist in his reembodying project. Soon after Conrad's death, Gerard Jean-Aubrey published a two-volume biography that included hundreds of his letters. Collections from select correspondents, longtime friends like Edward Garnett and Richard Curle, soon followed. These made Conrad's scene of writing generally available and increased exponentially the number of readers whose recognition would lend cultural capital to his writing. Though the author himself had died, this recognition continued to enliven his work. His institutionalization in Karl's biography and in the major critical analyses of Guerard, Sherry, and Moser certified Conrad's method of accounting for suffering. Later criticism preserved Conrad's depiction of his mode of production, as one passage from Said's The World, the Text, and the Critic makes clear: "Loneliness, darkness, the necessity of writing, imprisonment: these are the pressures upon the writer as he writes, and there is scarcely any I have read who seems so profligate in his complaining." 60 Not so profligate as all that, I have shown, for with each complaint Conrad gave another reader the opportunity to invest in his work.
We can deduce that when Conrad backs away from his declaration that he is "extremely well" and returns again to a refrain of illness and depression, he does so in order to reproduce the means of his literary production. In Conrad's understanding of writing as a professional service, there can be no reembodiment without a prior disembodiment. This insight represents Conrad's major contribution to literary economics. With it, he alters the normative relationship between writing and commodification and makes intelligible his own particular mode of production. The debilitating, humiliating, and ultimately disembodying process of commodification necessarily comes first, he theorizes. Before he can perform the service of rewriting, or literary supplementation, there has to be a commodified, worn-out narrative for him to rewrite. Before his work can receive recognition from correspondents and critics, it must first be subjected to the rigors, the horrors even, of market-driven production. The commodity market has to kill the author before his consumers can resurrect him.
Herein lies the adventure of Conrad's professionalized writing practice. Conrad presents his writing as a voyage into the nether regions of pulp fiction. His salvage operations are journeys that imperil his reputation as a serious artist. Each time he tries to transform a text, he runs the risk of going native, of giving in to the lures of mass culture. Each time he rewrites a story, he gambles that he will be able to manage his object, that it will not ultimately manage him. Conrad describes this hazardous gambit in his Author's Note to Nostromo. "[M]y sojourn on the continent of Latin America," he recounts, "lasted for two years . . . [which included] many intervals of renewed hesitation, lest I should lose myself in the ever-enlarging vistas opening before me as I progressed deeper in my knowledge of the country." 61 Conrad wrote this note more than a decade after Nostromo's initial publication in a style that echoes the cover copy on the dust jacket of the novel's first edition. That cover proclaimed Nostromo "a moving tale of high adventure--of revolution, romance, hidden treasure, and a hero of the most vivid personality." 62 The Author's Note reproducing this rhetoric thus implies that the real hero of the tale is none other than the author himself.
Far from undermining this mythic narrative of authorship, Conrad's letters provided their readers with ample evidence of the physical and psychic costs that were part and parcel of the adventure of literary production. Conrad's gout, along with his other ailments, proved that writing was a very real struggle, even if the author did not truly travel to Latin America to complete his novel, even if the author did not even leave his house. Though his letters complemented the more public account of his literary labor, Conrad was emphatic that these two descriptions be kept distinct. He regularly denied requests from literary detectives interested in publicizing the details of his working life. "The Author's method of work should remain an intimate thing," he wrote to one reviewer in 1903. "I would just as soon think of laying bare coram populo my method of home life . . . as my method of work" (CL, 3, 12). By enforcing this injunction, Conrad guaranteed that both versions of his authorship would remain in play. He also helped to ensure that the version articulated by the letters would remain the property of his most privileged readers: the scholars and critics deeply invested in his work, his mode of authorship, and his modernism.
Through these means, the professional author represented by Conrad's letters keeps one foot planted in mass culture and the other resting in high art. The letters thus place Conrad astride the great divide. By managing his literary persona, moreover, they manage the terms for understanding his literature. The letters show us that in order for the difference of the modernist novel to emerge, Conrad's distinctive service of novel-writing had to become recognizable. Conrad's letters establish the specificity of that labor as they describe an author who, through his struggle to transform popular narratives, enacted the modernist rupture every time he set pen to paper. By bringing Conrad's mode of production to the attention of his correspondents, the letters provided a way for his readers to sanctify his efforts and assist in the creation of a market for his services. The letters thus show that breaking with the literary world of the Victorians in large part depended on the willingness of specialized readers to give credit to suffering. More even than his literary style, Conrad's gout provides us with special insight into the transformation of cultural production that marks the onset of English modernism.
John Marx teaches modernist and postcolonial fiction at Trinity College, Hartford. He is currently completing a book entitled Modernist Inventions of British Decline.
1. Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of Literary Doctrine 1908-1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2-3.
2. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 206.
3. Ibid.
4. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1993), 211-13.
5. Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 32.
6. See Geoffrey Galt Harpham, One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). On Conrad's self-fashioning, see Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966) and H. Porter Abbot, "Writing and Conversion: Conrad's Modernist Autobiography," The Yale Journal of Criticism 5.3 : 135-66.
7. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 107-09; 112-13. For an analysis of how Conrad uses the idea of rescue to structure the plots of his Malay novels, see Christopher GoGwilt, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). On Conrad and rewriting, see Chris Bongie Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) and Michael Fried, "Allayer's Face: On 'Impressionism' in Conrad, Crane, and Norris," Critical Inquiry 17 : 193-236.
8. Conrad's biographers reproduce this move when they describe Conrad writing. See, Karl Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1979), 527-28. Many of Conrad's early critics, Albert Guerard, for example, and Thomas Moser, similarly make Conrad's suffering a barometer of his aesthetic accomplishment. See Guerard's Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958)and Moser's Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957). The result is, as Watt observes, somewhat puzzling, see Watt, 25. In his recent biography, John Batchelor attempts to resolve this problem by bracketing Conrad's suffering from his writing, see The Life of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), 45.
9. For decades, arguments over the status of Woolf's work have turned on the status of her mental health. See, for example, Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, 1972), 2, 195; Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); and Bette London, "Guerrilla in Petticoats or Sans-Culotte? Virginia Woolf and the Future of Feminist Criticism" Diacritics 21.2-3 : 11-29. Readers of Lawrence often depict his 1916 collapse as the landmark event that inaugurated the era of his greatest work Women in Love, see Brenda Maddox, D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 221-22; Keith Sagar D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 152; and Kim Herzinger, D. H. Lawrence in His Time: 1908-1915 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1982), 101-02. For an analogous model of authorial suffering in the case of Forster, see: "Forster's Self-Erasure: Maurice and the Scene of Masculine Love," in Joseph Bristow, ed. Sexual Sameness: Textual Difference in Lesbian and Gay Writing (New York: Routledge, 1992), 64-90; and Richard Dellamora, "E. M. Forster at the End," in Peter F. Murphy, ed. Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 268-89. For Joyce, see Margot Norris Joyce's Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 6. And for Stein, see Patricia Meyer, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 243-44.
10. Karl, Joseph Conrad, 311.
11. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983-), 2, 176; hereafter abbreviated CL, followed by volume and page number.
12. Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 14.
13. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism (New York: Longman, 1993),1, 21. See also Lee, The British Economy Since 1700: A Macroeconomic Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 98; and Karl Marx Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), 272. Although he spends scant time with them, Adam Smith does treat service as a bit of a puzzle. They "perish," Smith writes, "in the very instant of their performance" (Cain and Hopkins, Imperialism, 1, 20). For Jadish Bhagwati's provocative theory of "splintering," see Wealth and Poverty, ed. Gene Grossman (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1985).
14. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1982), 117-18. Although reference to a culture of experts has become commonplace in modernist criticism, many commentators interpret the emergence of professionalism as one more contributor to modernist suffering. Rarely have modernists been described as actively shaping the meaning of professionalism. They are, more commonly, described as its victims. For exceptions to this rule, see Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (New York: Verso, 1996) and Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). On professionalism itself, see Barbara and John Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial Class," in Pat Walker, ed. Between Labor and Capital (Boston: South End Press, 1979). On English professionalism, see Harold Perkin's The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880 (New York: Routledge, 1989), hereafter abbreviated RPS.
15. See Perkin, RPS, 405; Cain and Hopkins, Imperialism, 1. 134-38; and Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press), 19-26; 29-30.
16. Cain and Hopkins, Imperialism, 1, 115.
17. "An Observer in Malaya," in Notes on Life and Letters (Garden City: Doubleday, 1923), 60-61.
18. Ibid., 60.
19. Preface, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897, reprint, New York: Penguin, 1989), xlix. On Conrad's theory of rewriting, see also his short essay on Henry James, "Henry James," in Notes, 13).
20. Despite, or perhaps because, Conrad so roundly chastised him for his unartistic writing, Clifford became a loyal supporter of Conrad's work. He helped to dramatically change Conrad's publishing fortunes by persuading the editor of the New York Herald to serialize Chance in 1909. The novel turned out to be Conrad's first popular success. Although Clifford appears to have granted Conrad the authority to rule on all aesthetic matters, he reserved the right to critique Conrad for inaccuracies in his ethnographic knowledge. In September 1898, Clifford published an unsigned review on the topic in the Singapore Free Press. He followed it up on his visit to Clifford's home in 1899. Conrad reports that Clifford told him "that as a matter of fact I didn't know anything about the Malays" (A Personal Record, [Garden City: Doubleday, 1934], viii).
21. Allon White shows that the sheer referentiality of Conrad's writing "solicits a hermeneutic approach" (The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism [Boston: Routledge, 1981], 109).
22. The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 96.
23. Tradition, 209.
24. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 40.
25. Chris R. Vanden Bossche, "The Value of Literature: Representations of Print Culture in the Copyright Debate of 1937-1842," Victorian Studies 38.1 : 60.
26. Vanden Bossche, "Value," 60. On late-Victorian copyright, see also N. N. Feltes, Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993) and Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel; 1875-1914 (London: Secker, 1989).
27. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 104. See also Vanden Bossche, "Value," 52-53.
28. Jennifer Wicke observes that Dickens's version of the author was tailor-made for a moment in literary history when advertising became the de facto "literature of capitalism" (Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], 20).
29. Poovey, Uneven, 125. See also Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 96.
30. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
31. Anita Levy, Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 131. See also Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land, 2, Sexchanges (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) and Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
32. See Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 7.
33. Conrad, "Observer," 59.
34. Ibid., 60.
35. Keating, Haunted, 31. See 30-35 for details of the upsurge in novel publishing between the 1880s and World War I.
36. Keating, Haunted, 440.
37. Letters to Wiliam Blackwood and David S. Meldrum, ed. William Blackburn (Durham: Duke University Press, 1958), 192. Hereafter abbreviated LWB.
38. I am indebted to Nicholas Daly, who, in an unpublished manuscript, introduced me to the idea of the modernist literary economy as a collection of market niches. Strychacz cites James's conception of the literary market "subdivided as a chess board, with each little square confessing only to its own kind of accessibility" (Strychacz, Modernism, 21).
39. Keating, Haunted, 25-27; 437-41.
40. Retrospectively, it seems a good thing for Conrad that Blackwood turned him down, since, as part of the convoluted deal he presented to the publisher, Conrad had volunteered to sell Blackwood copyright to both Youth and Lord Jim. History teaches us that Blackwood was wrong about Conrad's long-term marketability.
41. LWB, 148.
42. In the case of "Tether," at least, Blackwood ultimately got what he had contracted for. The narrative remained a story, albeit a long one.
43. This was hardly an unusual move. Christopher Butler provides ample evidence that modernist writing located its influences in any number of extra-literary locales (Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe 1900-1916 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994]). On connoisseurship and the art market, see Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
44. G. Jean-Aubrey, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters (Garden City: Doubleday, 1927), 2, 147.
45. Investment was not simply a metaphor. Karl documents the development of a profitable trade in Conrad manuscripts and literary ephemera that began with John Quinn's 1911 purchase of the manuscript drafts of Outcast of the Islands and several other early pieces (Conrad, 702). Lawrence Rainey shows that a logic of investment shaped the initial readership of Joyce's Ulysses, whose original book form was a small run, collector's edition ("Consuming Investments: Joyce's Ulysses," James Joyce Quarterly 33.4 [1996]: 533).
46. What Conrad may or may not have known is that Blackwood had once thought he had spotted such investment potential in Conrad's work. See LWB, 44, 29, and 156.
47. Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 178-79.
48. Duncan, Modern Romance, 184.
49. Marx Capital (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1, 164.
50. Capital, 1, 166-67.
51. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 120.
52. Bourdieu, Logic, 118. Perkin shows that cultural capital is "manifestly more tangible than corporate shareholdings, less destructible than buildings and machinery, and capable of self-renewal and improvement" (RPS, 379). Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich observe that these kinds of capital holdings give professionals an interest in preserving the terms of capital production as a whole, even if they take up positions designed to rework or dissolve specific forms of capitalization ("Professional," 12).
53. Bourdieu, Logic, 120.
54. Because his works so often mutated from story to novel, and because they were nearly always published serially as well as in book form, Conrad's accounting proved complicated. These complications can be seen in a "Draft of arrangements and payments for Lord Jim and Volume of Tales" that Conrad submitted to Blackwood's on May 22, 1900. CL, 2, 274.
55. Karl, Conrad, 623.
56. Bhagwati, Wealth, 93.
57. Conrad, Nostromo (1904, reprint, New York: Penguin, 1963), 29.
58. One review in particular reveals the general direction of Nostromo's critical reception: John Buchan, Review of Nostromo, in Conrad: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry (London: Routledge, 1973), 179.
59. Bennett to Joseph Conrad, London, 22 November 1912, in A Portrait in Letters: Correspondence to and about Joseph Conrad, ed. J. H. Stape and Owen Knowles (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 87.
60. Said, World, 93.
61. Conrad, Nostromo, 31.
62. Batchelor, Conrad, 131.
Today we live affirmatively in our automotive moments, moments in which the driver looms as king, as sovereign, as tyrant.
João do Rio,"A era do auotmovel," Vida vertiginosa
(Paris,
Rio de Janeiro: H. Garnier, 1911), 4.
At the wheel, many an American tends to transform himself into a god.
William Phelps Eno,, The Motor-Vehicle Driver: His
Nature and
Improvement (Saugatuck, CT: The Eno
Foundation for Highway Trafic
Patrol, 1949), 4.
Every culture has its founding myths, and a culture like our own, built upon the worship of technics and science, is no exception to the rule. 1 If many of its inaugural texts and artifacts proudly proclaim their resistance to the blandishments of mythology in the name of a brave new post-mythological world, others (perhaps with greater honesty and lucidity) identify this very stance as modernity's founding myth. For them, the dream of overcoming all prior mythologies constitutes a revolutionary myth. It promises access to a technicist Olympus through not only an overcoming of history, but also the advent of a heroic new humankind emancipated from the shackles of temporality. Such a text is the 1909 "Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism": a document which, for all its bombast and bathos, rightly deserves the key place that it was long ago assigned in accounts of the birth of cultural modernism. The manifesto opens with a clash between objects that is also an intergenerational clash. It pits copper mosque lamps perforated with stars against their own "electric hearts": light bulbs whose brilliance they constrain; light bulbs ting to break out. The copper mosque lamps stand in for a larger inventory of objects--plates, cabinets, oriental carpets--inherited by the manifesto's author, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, from his father. Objects that bear witness to the poet's upbringing in Alexandria, Egypt, but that, in so doing, crystallize everything that the manifesto subsequently identifies with the term passéism: ancestral indolence; the celebration of dead or moribund things; world-weariness; a taste for the precious, the arcane, and the exotic; repugnance for the present. This past-centered, contemplative paternal world, responsible for the decor of the poet's apartment on Milan's Via Senato, is about to be left behind by the manifesto's second paragraph. The catalyst for its abandonment is the flow of traffic. A passing trolley and a roaring automobile drive Marinetti and his young friends out into the streets, where, bathing in the stark, artificial glare of the new public sphere, they can proclaim the overcoming of "mythology" thanks to the appearance of two new modes of transportation: automobiles ("we are on the verge of experiencing the birth of the Centaur") and airplanes ("soon we will see the first Angels fly!"). 2
Mythology is overcome inasmuch as, in Marinetti's view and in that of his era, technology actualizes what was once only a poetic dream or a theological fiction. It gives rise to "living" machines that are also machines for living: machines that, because endowed with powers of agency, intuition, and moral autonomy, are capable of serving as prosthetic enhancements of human bodies and psyches. Two body/ machine complexes are mentioned in the passages just cited: the driver/automobile complex red by the Centaur and the pilot/airplane complex red by the Angel. The first structures the central episode of the 1909 manifesto: the automotive flight into the outskirts of the city culminating with a crash cast as the actual scene of Futurism's birth. 3 It is this drive and accident, and the transformative impact ascribed to it that constitute my springboard for the following reflections. Before the accident, Marinetti appears bound to a shadowy fin-de-siècle world of mosque lamps and oriental carpets; after his rebirth in the "good factory muck [with its] impasto of metallic shavings, useless sweats, and celestial shards," he emerges as the new metallic man with a pulsing light-bulb heart: the prophet of a gospel addressed to all the living men on the earth whose points include "singing the love of danger," "exalting aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the sprint, the mortal leap, the slap and the punch," the glorification of war as the "hygiene of the world," and the demolition of institutions of memory such as museums, libraries, and academies. 4 The new humanity forged through this initiation rite is literally and ratively in the global driver's seat: "the ideal lance-like projection of the steering wheel that he grasps in his hands," states point five, "crosses the Earth, in the course of its own speeding orbit." 5
Two questions stand at the core of the present inquiry: first, why the choice of a speeding automobile as the vehicle for this metamorphosis which I take as the emblem of the transformation of premodern into modern man; and second, why the emphasis upon traumatic birth (or why must a crash resolve the initial clash)? The answers that I provide are necessarily speculative but place Futurism's founding myth at the culminating point of an anthropology of speed and thrill that evolved over the course of two prior centuries: an "anthropology" inasmuch as it envisages accelerated motion not as a neutral physical event that leaves the traveler and the context traveled through unchanged. On the contrary, the transportation revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries precipitated fundamental perceptual and psychic changes in human subjects and in the fantasies that governed their modes of interconnection with landscapes traversed and viewed: changes that suggest a tight linkage between the history of transportation technologies and that of optical devices, from phantasmagoria to moving pictures, such that the story of moving vehicles is, from the start, the story of moving cameras; changes that so blur the distinction between the categories of realism and the hallucinatory or the fantastic that they demand a rethinking of the commonplace notion that modernism marks a revolt against naturalism. 6
The following essay represents little more than a test drive of a book-length argument that, in its full unfolding, will include full treatments of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's accident in the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire; of John Mytton, sporting gentleman and wanton seeker of accidents whether riding horses or driving gigs and phaetons, and of the film magicians Georges Meliès, R. W. Paul, and Mack Sennett, codifiers of crashes as a generative comic device. Here the itinerary has been reduced to a series of shortcuts running from Delisle de Sales's 1771 Lettre de Brutus sur les chars anciens et modernes; to Thomas De Quincey, whose hallucinatory experience of landscape atop a mail-coach prered his later opium-induced imaginings; to caricaturists such as George Cruikshank; to the Andy Warhol of the early 1960s whose silk-screened Car Crashes coincide with his first icons of Elizabeth Taylor; and to, finally, Vaughn, the hero of J. G. Ballard's novel Crash whose life of auto crashes culminates in "his only true accident": the automotive masterpiece for which he has been rehearsing his entire life--a crash landing atop the same movie actress (whose failure qualifies it all the more as his only true accident). 7 Five complementary hypotheses inform this drive: first, that a fundamental bifurcation occurs by the beginning of the nineteenth century between passenger-centered and driver-centered modes of transportation or, to state the matter otherwise, between modes of mass transit and individual transportation, whether in the experiences and fantasies to which they give rise or in the sorts of discourses that are elaborated in order to regulate and represent them; second, that once technology devised a sufficient buffer between the surface traveled, the force of propulsion, and the individual traveler, it became possible to envisage speed as a kind of drug, an intensifier, an excitant moderne; third, that the human subject of speed--typically the driver--whom I will refer to later as the kinematic subject, once reshaped by repeated experiences of this stimulant, finds himself caught in an addiction loop, threatened, on the one hand, by monotony, and, on the other, by the need for ever new stimuli in order to maintain the same level of intensity; fourth, that the crash becomes a necessary feature of this loop structure, at once vouching for its legitimacy (by crystallizing the very intensity for which it stands), serving as a regenerative device (by initiating a new cycle of hyperstimulation), and marking an absolute limit (death); and fifth, that every accident requires a viewer, or better, a voyeur to relay its stimulus out into the world. The accident, in short, will emerge as the locus of a form of trauma that, contrary to prevailing traumatocentric accounts of modernity, engenders neither psychic blockage nor new sure-fire forms of regimentation or alienation. Rather, in the works I am here examining, trauma thrills. The thrills in question may be cheap or expensive, private or public, humble or exalted, but, whatever their nature, they represent, I will argue, a distinctively modern redaction of the sublime. In the eighteenth century the sublime transported spirits enclosed in motionless bodies; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it spirits away bodies that are themselves transported. In both cases it plays a key role in engendering modern forms of individualism and in secularizing the supernatural and relocating it in the everyday. If the driver was a god or angel in pre-modern times, the gods or angels of the modern era will be found holding the reins or sitting behind the wheel, so identifying individuality with the possession of and mastery over wheels.
Accelerated motion emerged early on as one of modernity's heroic themes, but it was hardly an invention of the modern era. Hence the recurring emphasis in this essay on the prehistory of the modern anthropology of speed and thrill. Such a rear view mirror gaze is absent from most cultural histories of modern travel and transportation: histories that, troping the claims made by their objects of study, reduce speed's history to that of motorization and mechanization. 8 Omitted in the process is all but passing reference either to antiquity or to the coaching and horsemanship subcultures of the pre- or early motorized era. The latter sub-culture's rise to prominence during the second half of the eighteenth century took place in a context where there was acute sensitivity to questions of historical precedence. It unleashed a veritable querelle des anciens et des modernes, hinging upon comparisons between ancient and modern carriage designs, driving styles, racing practices, engineering techniques, and roadways; a querelle definitively resolved in favor of the moderns only in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Already a defining feature of the early history of industrialization, granted a place of honor in Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopedia, the coaching revolution is the rupture event in this essay's narrative. I argue that it, not the development of railways or motorcars, first set the terms for the entanglement of modern notions of subjecthood with experiences of accelerated motion. But the break in question is an incomplete one, haunted by the premodern and ancient past to such a degree that, to this day, totemic or mythological names like Aurora, Viper, Valkyrie, Jaguar, Fury, Electra, and Cobra still vie with technicist acronyms like 635csi and 900ss for primacy as names of motor vehicles.
In reestablishing the inaugural role performed by the pre-motorization phase of the cultural history of speed, I also call attention to ancient precedents that were regularly recalled in the course of their modern overcoming. I infer that the enduring nature of these processes of cultural-historical imitation and translation, points not only to the struggle to confer legitimacy upon unfamiliar (and therefore threatening and thrilling) new phenomena, but also to some fundamental continuities of an anthropological sort. A few features of rapid motion's association with pleasure, power, and joyous fear, that is, appear to qualify as transhistorical and transcultural facts. Since time immemorial children have felt the fascination of fast-moving objects; spun themselves dizzy and silly; achieved rapture by means of rocking, swinging, sliding, and running; simulated crashes and smash-ups. Such childhood intoxications may be vascular, muscular, perceptual or erotic in nature. Some appear to have greater purchase upon the masculine psyche, though most are common features as well of girlhood development. But, whatever their nature or gender contours, they readily translate into a wide array of adult pleasures and pursuits, from literal inebriation to athletic competition to military drills to genital couplings to mystical transports. The convergence contributes to an erotico-transcendental characterization of speed that seems to be nearly universal. Velocity is attributed to sovereign and supernatural agents (like monarchs, fairies, and angels, who can both move rapidly and immediately transform their words into actions in the physical world), to forces of nature (like thunderbolts and winds), and to the movements of the heavens. When and if mortals partake of it, velocity's effect is rapturous either in the calamitous sense illustrated by the myth of Phaeton, son of the Sun god and the Western tradition's first reckless teenage driver--or in the metamorphic sense illustrated by the story of Erichthonius, the mythical inventor of the chariot as prosthetic extension of self, deified as a constellation according to legend. And the vehicle by means of which rapture is accomplished becomes at once the image of a transred self, an object of desire in its own right, and the crystallization of desire's logic of excess. Every car is a vehicle of and for desire: an observation that applies every bit as much to the erotically ornamented, owner-driven cabriolets of eighteenth-century Paris as it does to J. G. Ballard's cars that crash to come.
"The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism" was published on the front page of Le ro on February 20, 1909, thanks to months of behind-the-scenes lobbying by a family friend and ro stockholder, Mohammed El Rashi Pasha. 9 The auto accident had transpired more than four months earlier: on October 15, 1908, to be exact, with Marinetti, aged 31, at the wheel of a four-cylinder Fiat sporting cabriolet, custom-manufactured for its owner (as was then the standard practice) ( 1). A contemporary newspaper report reads:
This morning, a bit before noon, F. T. Marinetti was heading down Via Domodossola in his car. The vehicle's owner was at the wheel accompanied by a 23 year-old mechanic, Ettore Angelini. Although the details of the incident remain sketchy, it appears that an evasive maneuver was required by the sudden appearance of a bicyclist, and resulted in the vehicle being flipped into a ditch. Marinetti and mechanic were immediately rescued by two race car drivers from the Isotta and Fraschini factory, Trucco and Giovanzani, each in his car. Marinetti was transported to his apartment by the former and seems to have received little more than a scare. The mechanic was taken by Giovanzani to the Institute on Via Paolo Sarpi, where he was treated for minor wounds. 10
Even before its literary reworking, the scene has all the trappings of a modern allegory of the sort that abound in the writings of Simmel or Benjamin. The poet proceeds down the boulevard of the industrial metropolis like a mechanically enhanced flâneur, observing everything and nothing. Distinguished amidst the flow of pedestrians and vehicles by the costly coach which surrounds him as if it were his modern coat of armor, he is literally and ratively in the driver's seat. Swiftly and unexpectedly another modern subject, of lesser rank, a cyclist, crosses his path. Shocked, he attempts an evasive action that is fated to fail because the rapidity of the apparition exceeds the pace of ratiocination. The result is a collision in which the poet's pose of singularity and sovereignty is unmasked as a tawdry illusion. Man and machine are ripped asunder; the thrill of speed gives way to terror and paralysis; the cyclist pedals on indifferently; the urban crowd bears witness to the unmasking; a newspaper places the event in circulation.
Shock was not a distinctive phenomenon of the nineteenth century, tied to the rise of motorized conveyances, contrary to what is usually assumed by modern cultural historians. Closely affiliated with classical and early modern psychologies of rapture and ecstasy, its codification as a secular experience was already fully underway during the preceding century (often within the framework of theorizations of the sublime). 11 What motorization did bring, however, was greater scale and a greater diffusion, and shock's consequent embrace as a major theme of the emerging sciences of psychophysiology and psychology. From its earliest appearance in studies of newly defined ailments such as "railway spine," where it was envisaged as a physical tearing of bodily fibers, through its reformulation in psychoanalysis as a violent rending of the psyche's stimulus shield, shock was universally characterized as a pathogen. So, the driver of our motorcar might be expected to present a range of symptoms of disease: either immediately "impaired or perverted motion, impaired or perverted sensation, impaired or perverted emotional, intellectual, or moral intelligence" 12 or delayed manifestations of hysteria that will subside only with time. In the words of John Eric Erichsen, the pioneering author of a 1882 study On the Concussion of the Spine, Nervous Shock and Other Obscure Injuries of the Nervous System: "It will be found that as the patient recovers from the immediate and primary depression of the shock, he, or more frequently she, becomes greatly agitated, nervous, or truly hysterical, often manifesting great excitement, and being soothed and pacified with difficulty." 13 To this account Freud would add a rative understanding of the wounding process that differentiates more clearly (though problematically) between the shocking event and its traumatic long-term consequences. Because of the overwhelming nature of the stimulus involved, the crash ought to precipitate the sort of psychic blockage associated with the terrors of trench warfare: a neurotic fixation upon the event and a constant, even obsessive rehearsal of its details, that hinders all further psychic development. 14 Similarly, if the driver were Walter Benjamin's dandy or Georg Simmel's metropolitan man, his response might well be expected to consist in some sort of reaction-formation to the lingering sense of horror and its paralyzing effect: the adoption, for instance, of an intensified pose of aloofness and indifference to protect the psychic stimulus shield against future injury, combined with a propensity to pre-emptively shock others in order not to be shocked back.
In the 1909 manifesto the pattern is otherwise. Marinetti returns to the crash site only once and, while he borrows from the physical/psychological profiles just retraced, he systematically inverts their meaning, recasting trauma as ecstasy, accident as adventure, death drive as joy ride. Here, as in Futurism's subsequent history, shocks, or, as they were often referred to in the scientific literature, thrills--registered epidermally and/or as psychic disturbances, are actively sought out: sought out on the highways; in the trenches; in galleries, theaters, and stadiums; in the streets. Irrespective of where they are found, shocks re as engines of bliss: as orgasm, rapturous play, release from the constraints of analytical reason, regression to states of infantile narcissism or pre-Oedipal boundarylessness. Rather than paralyzing or blocking, rather than needing to be parried by a defensively formed subject, they sunder bonds to the past and, in their place, forge new links: links between men, machines, and their environment; links that extend the individual's physical and mental reach. In the specific case of Futurism's founding myth, the crash and the scare that it engenders wed flesh to metal, thereby giving birth--or so the manifesto claims--to a metallized and multiplied humanity, immune to the threats posed by degeneration, fatigue, mortality, and an overburdened historical consciousness. The event marks a fresh start to be followed by a potentially infinite series of fresh starts. Like the crash-site photos in Ballard's novel that shape every new conjunction of chrome, plastic, fluid, and flesh into a "small museum of excitement and possibility," it stops the action only to unleash renewed surges of drives and desires. 15 There can be no real gap thus between the ecstatic instant in which, feeling "his heart deliciously pierced by the [vehicle's] red-hot iron of joy," Marinetti is simultaneously metallized and ejected, and the continuation of the Centaur's voyage towards ever new thrills: "They thought my beautiful shark was dead," concludes the manifesto, before proclaiming its eleven-point platform, "but a mere caress was enough to revive it, and see it now resuscitated, speeding away anew on its powerful fins!" 16 Shark and driver were merely playing dead; theirs was a petite mort. Quickly revived, welcomed into the eternally youthful fraternity of race car drivers with wheels, they rush off to crush new barriers and to crash new worlds. Accidents can happen along the road to Damascus or the Via Domodossola. And once they do, they tend to become turning points, taking on an air of irreversibility or necessity. 17
The above fable of death and rebirth might seem superfluous, given that the manifesto is about to proclaim the racing car as the paragon of modern beauty-in-motion, superior to the static beauty of the Victory of Samothrace. But the history of transportation systems suggests, on the contrary, that it describes one of modern individualism's key rites of passage. From the mid-eighteenth century onward there had developed two interconnected though separate cultures of transportation: one that is best designated as thrill-based; the other as commodity-based. The first is, characteristically, the province of drivers (and of passengers who are "driver-identified"). Akin to "cruising," it envisages the purpose of the journey as the journey itself, independent of the practical imperatives of getting from here to there. It views the space to be traversed as space to be consumed (whether as outer spectacle or inner durée) by a human subject who is conceived of as the author and administrator of his or her speed. The second, the near exclusive concern of passenger-centered studies like Wolfgang Schivelbusch's justly celebrated The Railway Journey, envisages the journey instead in instrumental terms: as movement within a network of departure and destination points between which extends only vacant, useless space-space to be collapsed. 18 Though both models require the sort of accelerated motion made available by technologies that detach traveler from vehicle and vehicle from context, the first strives to convert this detachment into new modes of reattachment, while the second does the opposite: it reinforces the process of detachment by isolating and enclosing human passengers as if they were packages.
The dichotomy is perhaps too sharply drawn, given that the thrills to which I allude may correctly be viewed as a subjective correlative of commodification and commodification as thrill's objective correlative. Any reduction of the one to the other, however, runs the risk of underestimating the disruptive potential of thrill and neglecting the genetic role it performs vis à vis modern forms of individualism. So let the distinction stand as a heuristic device. During the tens of centuries that human beings rode horses, velocity remained a cultural theme of mostly secondary significance. Either cosmic (as in the whirling of the celestial spheres) or comic (as an inversion of the gravitas expected of authority res), it was either otherworldly--the attribute of angels, demons or gods--or, if thisworldly, identified with the lower social orders: with messengers, couriers, entertainers, and thieves. Which isn't to imply that accelerated motion was unappreciated in pre-modern times. The contrary, of course, is true. Armies were praised and feared for the speed of their war chariots; athletes admired for their fleet-footedness; and professional charioteers vied for glory in Roman hippodromes much like contemporary race car drivers. Topics of this sort abound in ancient art and literature, from Pindar's fleet-footed warrior-athletes to Virgil's Erichthonius who "first dared to couple four steeds to the car, and to stand victorious over the flying wheels." 19 No more indicative example of this corpus could be found than the myth of Phaeton. Taunted about his uncertain origins, the son of the sun god seeks reassurance from Helios himself, who promises to grant his son's every wish. As proof of his divine ascendancy, Phaeton requests what has now become the absolute proof of passage into adulthood throughout the industrialized world: the keys to dad's car--in this case, the reins to the solar chariot. Phaeton's inability to maintain control of the vehicle's powerful horses, allegorized over many centuries as the passions, leads to a thrill ride and cosmic calamity among whose latter-day counterparts one may count the automotive deaths of teen-idols like James Dean.
Already in antiquity, to accede to speed was to attain god-like powers, as evidenced by a Horatian ode that was often cited by the amateur coachmen of the early nineteenth century, eager to justify their need for a speed-fix:
There are men for whom the sight of Olympic dust
on their racing cars brings delight,
masters of the earth raised up to the very god
by rounding the turning-post with whirling wheels and
by the palm of glory. 20
Velocity serves as an agent of individuation and conquest, much as will be the case in modern times, with the ground traversed being envisaged as the site upon which the god-like individual establishes his empire. But competition and fame were the aims of Horace's domini terrarum, not the pursuit of aesthetic experiences with initiatory implications and transformative psychosomatic consequences. In short, the driver was always already a potential god in ancient times; but it was modernity that democratized deification through driving, that somatized and secularized its terms, and that promoted its entry into the everyday life-world. Only in the modern era can the stories of Phaeton and Erichthonius become the stories of everyman's impeded or successful passage into adulthood.
Early modern carts, carriages, and coaches did little to alter the situation described above inasmuch as through the beginning of the eighteenth century, their nature was either practical--the transportation of cargo or passengers over modest distances--or processional--the display of aristocratic power and prestige. It was, of course, not impossible to employ them for purposes of accelerated travel and coaches' upsurge in popularity first within and then outside courtly circles by the turn of the seventeenth century induced panic in the likes of the waterman-poet John Taylor whose pamphlet The World Runnes on Wheeles casts them in the role of upstart Hell-carts 21 ( 2). But whatever the merits of these infernal conveyances with respect to Taylor's beloved ferry boats, coaches provided a far slower and more awkward means of locomotion than riding on horseback. The same goes for the diligences employed by Royal Messageries throughout Baroque and Enlightenment Europe. As late as 1790 these elephantine ancestors of modern buses and trains were designed to carry several dozen passengers riding high above the road in capacious cabins, suspended upon leather straps attached to axle-mounted metal perches or whip springs. Unreliable, vulnerable to highway robbers, dangerous despite their slowness, weighing up to five tons, sites of unexpected amorous and not-so-amorous encounters, they were famous for tipping over as well as for rocking their passengers into collective states of nausea. 22
So speed meant horses. But the mere experience of riding on horseback was not enough to establish a modern culture of velocity. Speed's rise as a cultural thematic, its move into an everyday realm of perceptibility, its adoption as sacrament of modern individualism, became possible only with the development of mechanical buffers between rider, horse, and roadway: buffers that enable new fantasies of attachment, first, between rider and engine, and, then, according to a more complex logic, between rider, engine, vehicle, and/or landscape. The event is charted in passages like the following (dating from 1837), which first become frequent around the turn of the nineteenth century:
The man who rides a horse, feels a pleasure when the creature responds willingly to his purposes; and when he responds unwillingly, he feels a pride in the exercise of his power to compel him to obedience. Even when a horse is vicious, there is a pleasurable excitement in riding him. The rider's nerves are strung, his senses are quickened; eye, hand, and ear are alike on the alert; the blood rushes through the veins, and every faculty is aroused. 23
Horses served as humankind's first kinetic prosthesis. From time immemorial, warriors and knights had been identified with their mounts. But the horse belonged to another order of being. It was a detachable, external marker of the hero's power: an object to be won and worn like armor, a diadem or a sword. By the end of the eighteenth century, the terms of the fantasy have altered. Man and animal now belong to precisely the same order of being. The homme de cheval and the cheval d'homme have both become expressions of a single life force that has organized all creatures as living machines (. 3, 4). In the words of Jean-Claude Izouard Delisle de Sales, the eighteenth century's most passionate critic of the new culture of speed: "At first glance, the horse seems everything but a dangerous beast: the bands that encircle his body, the irons attached to him, the bit that has been devised so as to render his movements more exact, and the spurs with which he is prodded to move more rapidly: all this bespeaks of a highly organized automaton who moves only according to the will of the intelligent being that governs him." 24 But a second glance confirms and contradicts the first. Just as woman and man are doubles and polar opposites, so it is with horse and rider. Their interaction breeds not only a battle for mastery, but also arousal, electricity, erotic friction: forces that are readily transferable to other sorts of machinery. Who is the true force of propulsion in the inset passage cited above, horse or rider? The answer is clearly "both." An early ancestor of the Futurist Centaur and contemporary sport motorcyclist, this neurologically tense, aroused human subject, in conflict with but confused with a neurologically tense, aroused mount whose nature he shares is the product of a revolution that began in the mid-eighteenth century with the development and popularization of lightweight two-wheel cabriolets and four-wheel phaetons, the predecessors of modern sports cars. 25 Propelled by teams of horses, associated with luxury, liberty, and license, these vehicles were driven along public thoroughfares by the owners themselves: an absolute novelty at the time and one that was widely perceived as a menace both to morality and to class and gender divisions. 26 Which is to say that driving became a "necessity" of modern life nearly two centuries before suburban youths began to pester their parents for the keys to the car. In his Tableau de Paris , thus, Louis Sébastian Mercier is only slightly exaggerating when he declares that:
. . . a car is the aspiration of every man setting out along the rocky road to success. With his first lucky break comes a cabriolet for him to drive; after his second, he buys a four-wheeled coupé; after his third, a four-wheeled carriage for monsieur; after that, a four-wheeled carriage for madame.
When his fortune has ripened, his son gets a cabriolet of his own; his steward a cabriolet; his butler goes to market in a cabriolet; soon the cook shall have one, and every single one of these infernal vehicles, placed in the hands of impudent servants, course diabolically through streets without sidewalks . . . 27
That such views were commonplace is confirmed in Delisle de Sales's Lettre de Brutus sur les chars anciens et modernes:
The cabriolet is king among the vehicles devised by our current appetite for destructive luxury, like the infernal machine is the king of artillery weapons.
Doubtless, the first person to import the fashion for cabriolets to Paris was a young lord accustomed to making no distinction in rank between horses and the common folk. Busying himself mornings with his hunting dogs and evenings with the virtuous woman he is ruining, always politely bored, he runs over men in order to spice up his ennui . . .
Soon the epidemic of luxury spread to every estate: a clothier from the Rue Saint-Denis, a clerk from the Rue d'Enfer, and a dancer from the Rue Saint-Niçaise all wanted cabriolets. How convenient it was to keep a car without having to keep a stable of lackeys! How noble to make oneself a coachman! And how pleasurable to make a show of oneself, all at the same time, at the Arsenal, the Place Vendôme, and the barrier of Vaugirard! 28
From the outset, the driver was a dandy who required the supplement of wheels. Wheels intimately associated with the rapidly spinning wheels of fashion that may assume the form of cabriolets and phaetons or of subsequent automates organisés like the "dandy horses" that were all the rage during the first decade of the nineteenth century (. 5, 6). Indeed, the Baron of Drais's invention, tellingly referred to by him as a Laufmaschine (running machine) and by others as a "walking accelerator," "pedestrian carriage" or "pedestrian hobby horse," played a key transitional role, on the one hand, by literally mechanizing the horse in the collective imaginary, and, on the other, by radicalizing the notion that the modern subject was, by definition, a subject in motion, a thrill seeker, a véloceman. 29 More than a century before Simmel's "metropolitan man" and a good half century before Benjamin's flâneur, (s)he was imagined in nearly identical terms: as a democratized double of the aristocratic homme blasé who is also necessarily a frénetique, an individual who, haunted by boredom, finds a source of solace and/or transcendence in the hyperstimulation provided by speed. 30
For the dandy-flâneur-driver garbed in his or her vehicle, wheels furnish a new mode of recreation and self-creation. Be they horseless or horse-pulled, their purpose remains the same: not so much purposive perambulation, as kinetic self-display. Wheels re as the locus of a new subjectivity and a new social identity. They mirror the driver's standing: his literal "hobby horse." But, in so doing, they reshape society along the lines suggested by Mercier and Delisle de Sales. New class distinctions arise: between drivers and pedestrians; between owner-drivers and driver-chauffeurs; between seekers of thrills and seekers of passage; between owners of coupés, phaetons, enclosed carriages, carts, and hackney cabs. Other distinctions blur as lords, clothiers, clerks, and dancers merge into the undifferentiated form of mass spectacle and collective rush known as traffic. The traffic jam was, from the beginning, the liturgical ritual of modern times by means of which a new kinematic humanity, a humanity with wheels, becomes one in its multiplicity.
The spread of this "epidemic" of mobile self-display, thanks to which individuality became identified with administration of one's own speed, terrified rural populations and transformed cities like Paris and London into nightmarish killing fields in the eyes of many observers. Mercier states that "he has earned the right to criticize the barbaric luxury that are today's coaches, having been knocked to the pavement on three different occasions and nearly run over alive." 31 Another victim was Rousseau, whose promeneur solitaire is little more than the compensatory antitype of two contemporary creatures: the urban pedestrian ting his way across the boulevard battlefront and the rural speed walker. 32 Like many of his peers, Louis Charles Fougeret de Monbron, writing in 1759, sees traffic in an apocalyptic light: "a spirit of vertigo and drunkenness seems to have overcome these funereal sites." 33 His views are echoed a half century later in an official report by the central offices of the canton of Paris ("[most men and women driving cabriolets] proceed at frightening speeds, yielding a daily crop of fatal accidents") and in graphic works such as George Cruikshank's The Comforts of a Cabriolet or the Advantages of Driving Hoodwinked, in which the mere crossing of a dog at a Hyde Park intersection is enough to precipitate a three-fold mangling of cabs, horses, passengers, and coachmen 34 ( 7). Critics were no less harsh in their judgments regarding drivers, whom they were quick to identify as avenging gods much like Mr. Toad in the Wind of the Willows, whose wild ride transforms him into "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." 35 In addition to noting their propensity to employ the streets as if they were a private hippodrome, several describe how "in the midst of mobs, chauffeurs and cart drivers strike their horses with such long whips that they often leave the faces of passerbys horribly scarred." 36 Such behaviors are seen as being in keeping with the infernal character of their favorite conveyance: the cabriolet. "And what would you call someone," asks the author of an anonymous 1789 pamphlet, "who coolly and gratuitously throws open the gates to his residence and rushes out like a madman in pursuit of a thousand peers and thrusts upon them the full force of a speeding carriage and two vigorous beasts? What would you call a man who chases after fleeing pedestrians, who strikes them, knocks them down, and crushes them underfoot?" 37 Restif de la Bretonne provides the answer: "thanks to their cabriolets, [they are] the everyday assassins of their fellow citizens." 38
Whether or not the effects of this revolution were as nightmarish as portrayed, the fact remains that in less than five decades the number of vehicles and drivers increased at rates approaching one-hundred fold. Tout le monde est cocher ("Everyone has become a driver"), the Chevalier d'H. could write in 1819, c'est la mode ("it's the fashion of the day"). 39 In 1658 there had been no more than 320 vehicles and by 1765 there were 20,000 in Paris alone. 40 res for England over the subsequent seventy-five year period continue this trend, with 18,000 carriages registered in 1775 and 106,000 in 1840. 41 With this multiplication came efforts to widen and straighten out streets, regulate traffic, differentiate sidewalks from roadways, standardize wheel sizes, devise forms of insurance coverage, and legislate liability in the case of accidents. Efforts that had the effect also of encouraging a further acceleration of motion. But from the standpoint of speed, the key threshold was crossed only at the turn of the nineteenth century with the development of two isolating technologies: first, Eliot's 1805 invention of the elliptical spring, which permitted carriages to be hung low on springs and lightened by eliminating the need for perches; and second, MacAdam's scientific approach to roadbuilding, according to which "a road ought to be considered" less as a building requiring a massive stone foundation, than "as a [lightweight] artificial flooring forming a strong, smooth, solid surface, at once capable of carrying great weight, and over which carriages may pass without meeting any impediment." 42
The history of "the elastic substances interposed between the wheels and the passengers or load, in order to intercept the concussion caused by the wheels revolving on an uneven surface" is little studied, relegated to periodicals read only by those nostalgic for coaching days and coaching ways. 43 But its impact upon both driver/passenger perceptions was second only to that of modern paving technologies. As already indicated, the earliest modern carriages relied upon rigid perches anchored to the four corners of a vehicle's lower chassis in order to protect the seating area against the jarring effect of roadway ruts. The coach's body was hung from these perches on longitudinal leather straps that were supplemented with "check" straps so as to limit lateral rocking as well as forward or backward loading. The result was a swaying movement punctuated by violent jolts. "Is there a man left alive," asks a later proponent of steel suspension systems, "who has ridden on the footboard of an aristocratic town coach or chariot without springs, and [not] had the calves of his legs shaken down over his ankles, or the lower part of the muscles thickened till the legs resembled bed-posts?" 44 This sort of pummeling was bad enough, but along with bruises came the terra firma equivalent of seasickness. In the words of Walter Scott: "the motion is as a ship rocking or beating against a heavy sea, straining all her timbers as she drives over the contending waves." 45
Only during the final decades of the eighteenth century did improvements in steel fabrication techniques make possible a new generation of suspension-system designs which included laminated cantilever springs (with a rigid mount at one end and a live mount at the other) and single or double sweep semi-elliptic "grasshopper springs." The revolution entered its mature phase in 1805 when Eliot obtained a patent for joining two semi-elliptics together in a single elliptical spring. Eliot's invention inspired a wide range of modified elliptic systems like the four-spring platform adopted on mail coaches, all of which absorbed jolts and enhanced traction to a hitherto unimaginable degree. Just like the truck and bus suspensions that are their descendants, these systems reduced kinematic drag and increased maneuverability and stability, while providing a smoothed out ride. Detaching driver and passenger from the brute physicality of the roadway, they pursued the elusive dream of a buffered reattachment. Their ideal was and still is the achievement of road feel.
Better known and better studied is the history of road building. 46 Ancient Roman accomplishments were legendary in this domain. So to a greater degree than in the case of carriage designs, there arose a technological querelle des anciens et des modernes whose outcome soon proved favorable to the moderns. Roman practice was characterized by massive constructions made up of as many as five strata, resulting in a costly, but robust sort of self-supporting lateral wall that held up well under the slow traffic for which it was designed. The growth of cities and expanded trade patterns fueled a revival of enthusiasm for Roman roadways during the seventeenth century, but their image of "incomparable grandeur and power" began to wane as new, scientific approaches promised more economical solutions. 47 Solutions that would eventually overturn the logic of prior road building for they no longer envisaged roadways as self-supporting artificial constructions akin to buildings or walls, but rather as smooth and impermeable membranes directly connected to and thinly applied over a natural support with the aim of shielding this natural foundation against water seepage and the effects of accelerated traffic.
The perceptual impact of the shift cannot be overstated. From the fortress-like emblems of human resistance to an always encroaching and hostile natural landscape that roadways once seemed, they evolved instead into imaginary prolongations of the natural/national landscapes to which they granted access. For all their artifice and technical refinement, in other words, roadways now attained an increasing "intimacy" with their natural support and surroundings in the collective imaginary: so much so that road feel became intertwined with contemporary conceptions of a feeling for landscape. And this intertwined road feel and feeling for landscape, in turn, became interwoven with traveler's national feelings. It gave rise, that is, to a new nationalist mythology that envisaged roadway networks--be they English turnpikes, German Autobahnen, Italian autostrade, or American freeways--as the arterial system of the nation's body and driving along them as a form of communion. By the turn of the century, the eighteenth-century literature of the sublime and the picturesque thus becomes ever more literally a road literature, with the romance of the road itself increasingly framing the experience of landscape.
The principal father of the modern roadway was John Loudon McAdam. Celebrated as the "Colossus of Roads" or as "McAdam the Magician" by cartoonists and journalists alike, McAdam had no engineering background 48 ( 8). But from 1804, when he became general surveyor for the Bristol Corporation, through the years of his reports to parliament (1810-1823) to the time of his death , he became Europe's leading advocate of a simple but radical notion: that roadways required no foundation at all. 49 Rather, a properly drained, prepared, and protected subsoil could support just about any load. The challenge, as McAdam saw it, was to insure drainage and stress-reduction by devising a strong and stiff roadway surface capable of acting as a coherent mass. This he accomplished by placing a first layer of broken stone atop a slightly cambered natural formation which was raised above the water table. A thin top coating of extremely fine angular broken stone was laid down over this base, so that the grinding action of passing wheels might rapidly compress it into the so-called "road metal" or water-bound cement that soon became known as macadam. So it was that the levels of carriage comfort, control, and speed provided by new suspension systems found their ideal complement in a paving technology whose basic principles have remained unaltered to the present day. (The sole decisive change between the era of McAdam the Magician and Norman Bel Geddes's magic motorways being the use of bituminous tar instead of water as a binding agent, so as to remedy the dust problems created by fast-moving rubber tires.) "Macadamisation in modern times," wrote William Bridges Adams in his 1837 English Pleasure Carriages, "has contrived to make streets and roads as level as bowling greens . . . " 50 A contemporary added: "Even at the present wonder-working period, few greater improvements have been made in any of the useful arts, than in those applied to the system of traveling by land. Projectors and projects have multiplied with our years; and the fairy-petted princes of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments were scarcely transported from place to place with more facility or despatch, than Englishmen are at the present moment. From Liverpool to Manchester, thirty-six miles, in an hour and a half!--surely Dedalus is come amongst us again. . . . " 51 Indeed, it was rolling smoothly out along the vast new network of alleys that the human subject of speed, the kinematic subject, would establish his empire. Thanks to Eliot and McAdam, the gods could come alive once again as contemporary Englishmen.
The absorption and removal of physical impediments, the enhancement of traction, the creation of roadway and railway networks as regular bodies sectioning irregular natural landscapes, all established not only the preconditions for accelerated travel, but also for the simultaneous emergence of a thrill-based culture of velocity and its commodity-based complement. By 1820, the two had come together in a single contrivance: the high-speed mail-coach or stage coach whose legacy was gradually taken over by trains during the ensuing decades. By 1900, with the invention of automobiles, they will have split off, with cars (motorcycles and airplanes) becoming engines of thrill and trains (buses and tramways) the conveyors of commodities. But let the mail-coach serve as an emblem of these two cultures in their inaugural moment inasmuch as it offers two concurrent yet distinct experiences of velocity: one from the outside, according to which the passenger, like the driver of a cabriolet or four-cylinder Fiat or a motorcyclist, is exposed to the elements and the engine, and can, therefore, easily envisage himself as the author of his velocity; another from the inside, where, like the passenger of the old diligences or his/her successor, the train traveler packed into a compartment, he is shielded from the natural environment and the engine, and passively submits himself to velocity.
Mail-coaches were frightfully fast by nineteenth-century standards, having reduced the crossing of the European continent from a matter of months to a matter of days and, in the process, become high-speed conduits for the diffusion of news. 52 John Palmer, the deviser of Britain's famously efficient national system, referred to his as "mail machines" and took it upon himself to standardize their design, to impose regular and rapid switches in horse trains, and to monitor their adherence to highly demanding schedules by equipping each vehicle with tamper-proof clocks 53 ( 9). One result was the professionalization of the once lowly coachman. Long regarded as an unreliable, lazy, and unkempt tippler, he was now transred into the much admired and emulated practitioner of a new high-speed art: driving "four in hand." 54 The maximum speeds sustained by Palmer's artists may seem unexceptional today, but it is worth underscoring the point that "the ten-mile-an-hour flyer of the 1830s carried people who had seen incredible accelerations in their lifetimes--a trebling and quadrupling of average speeds--and had never got over it." 55 One such person was William Hazlitt, who declared that "some persons think that the sublimest object in nature is a ship launched on the bosom of the ocean; but give me, for my private satisfaction, the mail-coaches that pour down Picadilly of an evening, tear up the pavement and devour the way before them to Land's End." 56 Low-slung and built atop so-called "patent boxes," English mail-coaches were so lightweight that they could accommodate only seven paying passengers--four "insiders" and up to three "outsiders"--which is to say that their superior speed and reliability translated into elevated ticket prices. This said, traditional class distinctions were maintained. As had been the case with diligences, seats on the inside were costly and reserved for what one observer called "a porcelain variety of the human race," while external seats were inexpensive, dangerous, and reserved for mere "delf-ware." 57 All of which goes to show that Victor Hugo's allegorization of diligences may be extended to mail coaches:
Like Society [l'État], a diligence has three compartments. The aristocracy occupies the coupé; the bourgeoisie occupies the interior; the popular classes occupy the rotunda in the back. But outside on the impériale, atop everyone else, ride dreamers, artists, and men belonging to no social class (les gens déclassés). 58
The driver's perch, "bench" or "box" had long been referred to in French as the banquette bâchée de l'impériale. Its transformation into a site of privilege of a socially transgressive, even revolutionary sort may be directly traced back to its use by eighteenth-century travelers as a platform for experiencing the picturesque and the sublime. So it is hardly surprising that, under a regime of accelerated motion, the impériale became the outdoor laboratory within which these aesthetic categories were reworked in the service of new kinematic forms of subjectivity.
Well before the advent of trains and automobiles, mail-coach passengers, especially occupants of the impériale, identified the experience of speed with dream-like states: flight, intoxication, rapture, horror, hallucination.  The mail-coach seems to have gone into a frenzy." 59 For others like Sainte-Beuve, drunken-driving or drunken-riding are the mail-coach norm: "first, there is the drunkenness of feeling oneself indolently moved and projected by a rapid impulse towards an encounter with destiny; then, there's the naive pride of being gazed at and envied, across entire villages, in front of homes, by those who have been left behind." 60 The link between rapid motion, individuation, and an expanded sense of selfhood matching expanded horizons is picked up by the young Balzac: " . . . if only you knew how strongly I aspire to seize hold of nature by means of a long high-speed race across Europe, how strongly my soul thirsts for that which is vast, infinite, for nature seized as a whole and not in its details, nature judged according to its grand framings, be they wet with rain or rich with sun, in the course of traversing spaces and seeing countries rather than villages." 61 Precisely the same language carries over into reports of early or first-time railway travel. For Thomas Carlyle, the train grants access to the fantastic: "The whirl through the confused darkness, on those steam wings, was one of the strangest things that I have ever experienced--hissing and dashing on, one knew not whither . . . Out of one vehicle into another, snorting and roaring we flew: the likest thing to a Faust's flight on the Devil's mantle." 62 The actress Fanny Kemble, likewise, imagines the train as a tame dragon who flies "panting along his iron pathway": "You cannot conceive what that sensation of cutting the air was . . . When I closed my eyes this sensation of flying was quite delightful, and strange beyond description." 63 Jeanne, the heroine of Maupassant's Une Vie, seeing "the countryside, trees, farms, villages speed by," recognizes in that hallucinatory flight, the catalyst of an inner transformation: " . . . terrified by the speed, rapt by a new life, [she is] transported into a world that is no longer hers, no longer that of her tranquil youth and monotonous existence." 64