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DOI 10.33234/ssr.11.1
A New Sound; a New Sensation: A Cultural and Literary Reconsideration of the Motorcar in Modernity
Paul Ryder
University of New South Wales
“And to think I never knew!” went on the Toad in a dreamy monotone. “…never even dreamed.”
(Kenneth Grahame – The Wind in the Willows)
In my 2013 article ‘The Motorcar and Desire’ (Southern Semiotic Review, Vol 2), I introduce a series of papers ‘seeking to retrieve the largely forgotten clatter, rumble, and roar of the internal combustion engine as it (quite literally) erupted onto the stage of the modern world (op. cit. n.p.).’ In pursuit of that objective, that foundational paper leverages the work of Victor Shklovsky (see ‘Art as Technique’, 1917) to show how processes of habitualisation have rendered us (more or less) deaf and blind to the manifold cultural significances of the automobile. In a definitively structuralist-semiotic mode, the paper also traverses the changing pattern of literary reception vis-à-vis the motorcar over the first quarter of the twentieth century: that is, while initially celebrated as an icon of freedom and conquest, the motorcar later came to be represented as a sign of confinement and destruction. Broadly, and echoing the trajectory of Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Life of the Automobile (1929), this is the direction of my long-promised series of papers—each of which is subtitled ‘A Cultural and Literary Reconsideration of the Motorcar in Modernity’. While Wolfgang Sachs (1984/1992) famously wrote of the automobile in terms of the history of our desires, the present paper (the second in the series) takes up and develops certain of Sachs’ ideas: specifically that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was not only the desire for the new that excited the imagination of drivers and would-be drivers, but the desire for escape and the desire for speed. Accordingly, I engage a range of semiotic engines to argue that, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the motorcar is received as a ‘relatum profundis’ of freedom. To put it another way, and as Roland Barthes (1964/1977) indirectly proposes, I argue that the motorcar fits into a ‘highway code’ and into a broader ‘car system’ in which its various attributes—including its architectural details—are received as signs of liberation (pp. 10; 29).