Automobility in Manchester Fiction

Abstract

This article contributes to recent debates concerning automobility and ‘mobile, embodied practices’ (Cresswell & Merriman, 2011) by considering how various ‘driving events’ entail modes of perception that are of interest from an ontological perspective; that is, how drivers and passengers see the world through the windows of a moving car and how the driving ‘sensorium’ (Gilroy, 2001; Sheller, 2004) may be associated with emotional states (such as ‘escape’, ‘frustration’, ‘nostalgia’) that arguably characterize the everyday life of late modernity. In addition, the discussion speculates on what this altered perception means for how we see and conceptualize the contemporary urban landscape, concurring with Doel (1996) that such space has effectively become a ‘scrumpled geography’ that can no longer be accounted for in traditional cartographical terms. These reflections are explored through close readings of a selection of literary texts (principally, crime fiction novels) emanating from Greater Manchester (England) and thus the article also contributes to recent work (both cultural and sociological) on the re-imagining of this particular urban landscape in recent times (Haslam, 2000; Pearce et al., forthcoming).

Key Words:

• Automobility
• crime fiction
• Greater Manchester
• ontology of mobility
• perception
• rhythmanalysis
• urban landscapes

View correction statement:

Automobility in Manchester Fiction by L. Pearce published in Mobilities Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 93–113

Notes

1. ‘Moving Manchester: How migration has informed writing in Greater Manchester 1960-the present’ was an AHRC-funded project that ran from 2006–2010. As well as paper publications, the project also produced an e-catalogue and Writers Gallery both of which are available to the public and may be accessed through the following sites: www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/movingmanchester and www.transculturalwriting.com. The latter will become the project’s permanent archive from 2012. For readers less familiar with the UK, Greater Manchester is the third-largest conurbation in England after London and Birmingham with a population of 2.6 million with a significant non-white, migrant and diasporic presence (approximately 8–10%). As Europe’s oldest industrial city it has, since the collapse of the textile manufacturing industry in the 1950s and 1960s, also been seen to be home of some of the most deprived urban districts in the UK, the most notorious of which are Moss Side and Hulme (largely on account of their perceived ‘guns and gangs’ culture).

2. It is important to realize that disruptive and divisive potential of major arterial road to inner-city communities has long been recognized and, in some cases, taken into account by city planners and architects. Peter Merriman’s chapter on the American landscape architect, Lawrence Halprin, is a fascinating insight into the vision of a designer who saw ways of building roads differently (Merriman, 2011).

3. ‘Time-bomb’: the long term environmental consequences of automobility have been the subject of research across a range of disciplines for several decades, but it is only recently that academics have begun to speculate on the demise of the motor car per se and what a world ‘after the car’ will look like. See the final chapter of Dennis and Urry’s After the Car (2009) for discussion of the ‘scenarios’ that might arise.

4. In my essay ‘Women writers and the elusive urban sublime’ (Pearce, 2007), I consider the various forms that the sublime takes in writing about the urban environment. Sachs (1992) also discusses early, aesthetic responses to motoring in ways that may link with the concept of the sublime.

5. The various forms of empowerment associated with driving and car ownership has been widely debated in academic circles but it is noticeable that most of it inclines to the view of the car as a status symbol (Gilroy, 2001), a source of adrenalin-fuelled excitement (Featherstone, 2004) or as a ‘cocoon’ (Baudrillard, 1996) and protection from the outside world rather than an a unique means of transportation to remote and/or distant locations.

6. Although ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ have become a feature of all manner of cultural theoretical investigation in recent times, less work has been done on linking emotional states to specific national and historical contexts. One notable exception is Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005).

7. A significant distinction must be drawn between car drivers and car passengers, not least because of the recent research (Bull, 2001; Sheller, 2004) that shows us the complex sensory pleasures involved in the act of driving. However, the ‘active’/‘passive’ binary should not be over-stated since, as is revealed in the textual analysis, drivers may also enjoy the ‘passive’ pleasures of driving (‘being rocked and swinging’: Wollen & Kerr, 2002) and its associated cognitive states. See also Laurier’s chapter on ‘Pre-cognition and driving’ (2011) which uses the term ‘passengering’ (Laurier, 2011, p. 70) to describe the passenger’s role in the driving experience and to demonstrate that it is, on occasion, an extremely active one.

8. I am hoping to develop these ideas in a book on the phenomenology of driving which will draw upon a range of literary and cultural texts to further explore the issues introduced here.

9. Manchester crime fiction is the subject of one my chapters in our forthcoming project publication, Postcolonial Manchester (Pearce et al., forthcoming).

10. ‘Chronotope’: literally, ‘time-space’, this Bakhtinian concept is now widely used to describe locations in which time and space connect in a distinctive and inseparable way. See Pearce (1992, pp. 67–72) for a full discussion.

11. The history of ‘motor-tourism’ is, of course, an area of academic study in its own right. See, for example, Grieves (1999), Sachs (1992), Scharff (1991), Webster (1996).

12. My implication here, following Gombrich’s commentary on perception and illusion (1980, pp. 3–25), is that we can only ‘see’ what we already have a concept for.

13. The connections between the scopic practices of ‘the flaneur’ as conceived and developed by Walter Benjamin and his followers (Wilson, 1991; Parsons, 2000) are, of course, immense and will form part of my future study. For the moment, I would simply observe that on some occasions (for example ‘cruising’), the driving event would seem to come close to the conditions of flanerie while, at other times, very different cognitive responses come into play.

14. The ‘silence’ implicit in Sebald’s recollection of the early-modern city could, of course, result directly from the fact that he was sealed behind the glass and steel of the taxi.

15. ‘Synchronic moments-in-time’: see Terence Hawkes (1977, pp. 19–28) for a comparison of synchronic and diachronic temporality.

16. One of the aspects of driving that I am especially interested is its capacity for inducing meditative or transcendental states. This has already been touched upon in Nigel Thrift’s work (2000, 2005a, 2005b) in the context of a psychological investigation into whether driving can be said to draw upon ‘pre-’ or ‘non-cognitive’ as well as ‘cognitive’ thought; although I concur with Laurier’s (2011) argument that this is possibly a ‘false’ and unhelpful distinction, the ‘liberation’, while driving, of all manner of ‘lateral’ and non-instrumental thinking deserves further research.

17. ‘Driving Away From Home’ is the title of a 1980s single by the band ‘It’s Immaterial’ which name-checks several locations in Greater Manchester as the driver and his companion flee the city and head north.

18. ‘The Grange’ and ‘The Piper Mill Crew’ are Smith’s fictional names for the two Moss Side gangs, ‘Gooch’ and ‘Pepperhill’ (Haslam, 2000, p. 234).

19. ‘Chronotope of the motorway’ (see Pearce, 2000, p. 163). Peter Merriman has nevertheless challenged the notion of the motorway as both a ‘time-out’ and ‘non-place’ in his excellent article (2011).

20. My use of the past tense is in recognition that I, like Dennis & Urry (2009), believe that the days of universal car use are numbered and that world as we saw it during ‘the century of the car’ will soon be a modality consigned to the past.