What We Think About When We Think About Driving
Lynne Pearce, Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness
Edinburgh University Press, 256pp, £70.00, ISBN 9780748690848
reviewed by Elsa Court
The age of the car is coming to an end. Or at least, the driving era as we know it. As we count the benefits (urban, social, environmental) of switching to driverless cars in a not-too-distant future, one looks back on what we may be losing with the activity of driving a personal car. The mind, for example, has a life of its own when the body is at the wheel of a car. Drivers are conscious of the surrounding landscape of the road when they drive, but the activity of driving also delivers us to a special plane of thought, one which accommodates navigation and introspection simultaneously. This constitutes one of the defining cognitive conditions of the 20th century, which has featured prominently in representations of the modern subjectivity, notably in film and literature.
It is this cognitive state and condition that Lynne Pearce’s Drivetime identifies and theorises, at a time when the uncertainty around the future of the automobile poses the question: what will replace the unique cognitive space granted by driving time when driving is no longer a normal part of everyday life? Stressing the place of its subject in 20th-century history, Pearce’s book establishes a cultural study of driving phenomenology in the West from the 1930s to the Vietnam War, by way of the automobile’s post-World War II golden age. Her historical identification of the ‘motoring century’ is one which is aware of the relationship between transatlantic politics and our society’s unique ‘love affair’ with the car. Though the field she addresses is broadly interdisciplinary across the humanities and social sciences, Pearce chooses to approach the driving experience through pointed examples in literature across the period. Her reason for using literary texts as prime material to her four case studies on the driving experience — defined as ‘Searching,’ ‘Fleeing,’ ‘Cruising,’ and ‘Flying’ — is clear enough: unlike their many road-movie counter-parts, for example, written accounts provide internalised representations of the driving event, representations which are generally tuned in to the subjective experience of the driver or passenger.
As an academic, Pearce is aware of the rapidly expanding field of mobility studies in the UK. She recently joined the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at the University of Lancaster, which opened in 2003 — first, as she points out in her preface, to the sciences exclusively. As co-editor of the new Palgrave Macmillan (USA) series, Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Pearce’s work, which was always informed by literature, has recently taken to promoting the extension of the field of automobility studies to the cultural humanities, and the present book nods to this still recent break in social studies of auto mobility, as exemplified in the scholarship of Peter Merriman, Sara Upstone, and Gijs Mom. In her introductory chapter Pearce proceeds to characterise her own contribution to the field. This is a study focused on what she defines as ‘automotive consciousness,’ namely how and where the mind of the motorist wanders while driving a car – how, to be precise, the act of driving creates space for, as well as restrictions over, the capacity to transcend immediate experience and even enter ‘altered’ states of consciousness (meditative, contemplative but also rational, pragmatic and intellectual). While her secondary sources bring together the fields of sociology, psychology, geography and literary studies, Pearce is consistent in her approach and methodology which, like Merman, Upstone, Mom and other contemporary social scientists, uses cultural and literary texts as data sources to understand the shifting conditions of motoring in Britain and the United States throughout the 20th century.
One of the strengths of the book is how clearly it defines the prerogatives and limitations of such a method. Pearce writes, for instance: ‘I consider myself as a cultural theorist rather than a literary critic […]. This, then, is very emphatically not a book that employs the thematic of driving — or cars/motoring in general — in order to better understand the texts themselves, but one that draws upon literature as a means of contributing to and advancing recent debates in automobiles research.’ Each chapter surveys chunks of the relevant theory to the four identified stages of motoring evolution — from motoring technology history to Henry Bergson’s work on the benefits of daydreaming — before moving on to comparative studies of literary works which illustrate the case studies at hand. It feels, at times, as if too little context is brought to the literary sources which, as a result, seem arbitrarily assembled despite their common thematic ground. Pearce’s method still works, however, in that it delivers its promise to use literary texts as source material towards a theory of automotive consciousness, rather than illuminate the texts as cultural objects in the light of automobility as a theme.
The chronology of Pearce’s thematic chapters proposes that the 20th-century motorist has gone from an attitude of active engagement with the car and spontaneous exploration of the landscape (exemplified by the term ‘Searching,’ which defines the examples from the interwar period) to one of smooth and care-free exhilaration (‘Fleeing’ in the examples of the post-World War II era) to finally transcending the physical experience of driving itself (the example of ‘Flying’ in the postmodern era refers to attitudes of anticipation, forward projection and self-absorption which, when frustrated, lead to anxiety and what is commonly known as road-rage).
Pearce takes a comprehensive interest in this historical motorist who has manoeuvred toward an increasingly more abstract conception of the activity of driving but also of car-ownership, geographical knowledge, and a changing relationship to the skills involved in the functionality of driving. She notices, for instance, that while early-20th century motoring was perceived — and praised — as a sport, the continuous development of automobiles and driving facilities has since encouraged drivers to seek comfort and passivity over agency and autonomy. ‘We have lost touch,’ she writes, ‘with the functionality of driving,’ and this is partly because, as she points out, ‘we have gone backwards in automotive design — by manufacturing vehicles that are no longer repairable.’ From country roads and byways in the automobile expeditions of the 1930s, we move towards the highways of the postwar era, which characterise a dreamy, self-absorbed kind of contemplation that Pearce argues can be salutary and therapeutic, as Maria Wyeth’s ‘persistent need to cruise to the LA freeways’ in Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays shows. Pearce provides a case-study of the 1950s which exemplifies, through Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Patricia Highsmith’s Carol, instances of driving for escape or ‘switching-off.’ This chapter makes a crucial distinction between driving as means of escape (from social constraints, from a sense of self that is often at least symbolically dependent on stationary living) and the symbolic act of driving at great speed alone, with which it is often conflated in film and media.
The examples taken from On the Road and Carol serve to deconstruct Jean Baudrillard’s famous conflation of the road trip with speed and annihilation; one of Pearce’s most convincing arguments is that ultimately ‘it is the psychology and intent which we bring to a driving-event that will […] determine its existential status.’ Her literary approach, which focuses on subjective driving narratives, also makes room for a case of ‘auto-ethnography’ (understand self-ethnography through an account of Pearce’s personal road trip) which occurs at the junction between the first and second chapters. In this personal travelogue transition, Pearce draws on the memory of a 1999 drive from Lancaster to Cornwall to reflect on the evolution of driving conditions in Britain 16 years on, — that is, 15 years into the 21st century. In this lapse of time Pearce has contemplated the ‘fast-receding’ motoring century behind us, historicising, within its symbolic limits, the creations of a unique — almost already outmoded — space from which to apprehend both private emotions and the world without. Drivetime thus exemplifies the benefits of a phenomenological approach, by showing that there is value to individual experience being shared, told, signposted, and placed in historical perspective.
It is this cognitive state and condition that Lynne Pearce’s Drivetime identifies and theorises, at a time when the uncertainty around the future of the automobile poses the question: what will replace the unique cognitive space granted by driving time when driving is no longer a normal part of everyday life? Stressing the place of its subject in 20th-century history, Pearce’s book establishes a cultural study of driving phenomenology in the West from the 1930s to the Vietnam War, by way of the automobile’s post-World War II golden age. Her historical identification of the ‘motoring century’ is one which is aware of the relationship between transatlantic politics and our society’s unique ‘love affair’ with the car. Though the field she addresses is broadly interdisciplinary across the humanities and social sciences, Pearce chooses to approach the driving experience through pointed examples in literature across the period. Her reason for using literary texts as prime material to her four case studies on the driving experience — defined as ‘Searching,’ ‘Fleeing,’ ‘Cruising,’ and ‘Flying’ — is clear enough: unlike their many road-movie counter-parts, for example, written accounts provide internalised representations of the driving event, representations which are generally tuned in to the subjective experience of the driver or passenger.
As an academic, Pearce is aware of the rapidly expanding field of mobility studies in the UK. She recently joined the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at the University of Lancaster, which opened in 2003 — first, as she points out in her preface, to the sciences exclusively. As co-editor of the new Palgrave Macmillan (USA) series, Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Pearce’s work, which was always informed by literature, has recently taken to promoting the extension of the field of automobility studies to the cultural humanities, and the present book nods to this still recent break in social studies of auto mobility, as exemplified in the scholarship of Peter Merriman, Sara Upstone, and Gijs Mom. In her introductory chapter Pearce proceeds to characterise her own contribution to the field. This is a study focused on what she defines as ‘automotive consciousness,’ namely how and where the mind of the motorist wanders while driving a car – how, to be precise, the act of driving creates space for, as well as restrictions over, the capacity to transcend immediate experience and even enter ‘altered’ states of consciousness (meditative, contemplative but also rational, pragmatic and intellectual). While her secondary sources bring together the fields of sociology, psychology, geography and literary studies, Pearce is consistent in her approach and methodology which, like Merman, Upstone, Mom and other contemporary social scientists, uses cultural and literary texts as data sources to understand the shifting conditions of motoring in Britain and the United States throughout the 20th century.
One of the strengths of the book is how clearly it defines the prerogatives and limitations of such a method. Pearce writes, for instance: ‘I consider myself as a cultural theorist rather than a literary critic […]. This, then, is very emphatically not a book that employs the thematic of driving — or cars/motoring in general — in order to better understand the texts themselves, but one that draws upon literature as a means of contributing to and advancing recent debates in automobiles research.’ Each chapter surveys chunks of the relevant theory to the four identified stages of motoring evolution — from motoring technology history to Henry Bergson’s work on the benefits of daydreaming — before moving on to comparative studies of literary works which illustrate the case studies at hand. It feels, at times, as if too little context is brought to the literary sources which, as a result, seem arbitrarily assembled despite their common thematic ground. Pearce’s method still works, however, in that it delivers its promise to use literary texts as source material towards a theory of automotive consciousness, rather than illuminate the texts as cultural objects in the light of automobility as a theme.
The chronology of Pearce’s thematic chapters proposes that the 20th-century motorist has gone from an attitude of active engagement with the car and spontaneous exploration of the landscape (exemplified by the term ‘Searching,’ which defines the examples from the interwar period) to one of smooth and care-free exhilaration (‘Fleeing’ in the examples of the post-World War II era) to finally transcending the physical experience of driving itself (the example of ‘Flying’ in the postmodern era refers to attitudes of anticipation, forward projection and self-absorption which, when frustrated, lead to anxiety and what is commonly known as road-rage).
Pearce takes a comprehensive interest in this historical motorist who has manoeuvred toward an increasingly more abstract conception of the activity of driving but also of car-ownership, geographical knowledge, and a changing relationship to the skills involved in the functionality of driving. She notices, for instance, that while early-20th century motoring was perceived — and praised — as a sport, the continuous development of automobiles and driving facilities has since encouraged drivers to seek comfort and passivity over agency and autonomy. ‘We have lost touch,’ she writes, ‘with the functionality of driving,’ and this is partly because, as she points out, ‘we have gone backwards in automotive design — by manufacturing vehicles that are no longer repairable.’ From country roads and byways in the automobile expeditions of the 1930s, we move towards the highways of the postwar era, which characterise a dreamy, self-absorbed kind of contemplation that Pearce argues can be salutary and therapeutic, as Maria Wyeth’s ‘persistent need to cruise to the LA freeways’ in Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays shows. Pearce provides a case-study of the 1950s which exemplifies, through Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Patricia Highsmith’s Carol, instances of driving for escape or ‘switching-off.’ This chapter makes a crucial distinction between driving as means of escape (from social constraints, from a sense of self that is often at least symbolically dependent on stationary living) and the symbolic act of driving at great speed alone, with which it is often conflated in film and media.
The examples taken from On the Road and Carol serve to deconstruct Jean Baudrillard’s famous conflation of the road trip with speed and annihilation; one of Pearce’s most convincing arguments is that ultimately ‘it is the psychology and intent which we bring to a driving-event that will […] determine its existential status.’ Her literary approach, which focuses on subjective driving narratives, also makes room for a case of ‘auto-ethnography’ (understand self-ethnography through an account of Pearce’s personal road trip) which occurs at the junction between the first and second chapters. In this personal travelogue transition, Pearce draws on the memory of a 1999 drive from Lancaster to Cornwall to reflect on the evolution of driving conditions in Britain 16 years on, — that is, 15 years into the 21st century. In this lapse of time Pearce has contemplated the ‘fast-receding’ motoring century behind us, historicising, within its symbolic limits, the creations of a unique — almost already outmoded — space from which to apprehend both private emotions and the world without. Drivetime thus exemplifies the benefits of a phenomenological approach, by showing that there is value to individual experience being shared, told, signposted, and placed in historical perspective.