Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway

Introduction: Subway Stories

[ 1 ] INtroduCtIoN sUbwAY storIes • • • • Stories about technology proliferate in contemporary culture. In online forums, in mass media, and in everyday conversation, Americans narrate their relation to the world through their machines: my smartphone makes me feel connected, perhaps too connected; my car offers freedom of movement and shields me from fellow commuters. Technologies do not inherently shape these new forms of sociability, though they do make some ways of relating easier than others. Instead, stories told about technologies model the new modes of interaction they bring about. Stories bestow cultural capital on some machines, allowing them to play a symbolic role in US culture that extends beyond the sphere of their producers and consumers . And when they are prevalent and powerful enough, stories about technology can orient its users to the world in new ways. In Underground Movements I focus on the stories told about the New York City subway in the first half of the twentieth century. In this period, a remarkable variety of writers took up the challenge of narrating a new technology that simultaneously reshaped the consciousness of its riders [ 2 ] INTRODUCTION and the metropolis through which they moved. The underground transit system plays an outsized role in experimental writing of the time that has come to be called modernist.1 These particular texts describe and evaluate the New York subway system as a representative space for exploring the difficulty of navigating the city, the commercialization of art, and the impact of immigration on local and national identity. They belong to a number of microgenres, specific forms of subway writing bound by their own aesthetic rules; these texts isolate different elements of the subway ride and use them to embody different aspects of urban life. Although the types of literature under discussion differ widely in tone, theme, and publishing venue, they all attempt to explain what difference the subway makes to particular riders. The infrastructure of the subway system has remained relatively unchanged since the New York City subway opened to the public in October 1904,2 and so has the infrastructure of the subway story.3 Then as now, these stories articulate a relationship to the city and to fellow city dwellers through their depiction of the subway ride. Whether nonfiction or fiction, poetry or drama, certain elements remain. The comfort level of the passenger suggests her familiarity with the city as a whole: Is she sure of her final destination or constantly watching the map? The commuters with whom the protagonist shares the train become a representative sample of the urban public. Do they leer and press against her, read newspapers in foreign languages, shut her out with headphones? Stories of crosstown movement explore cultural mobility as well, highlighting the aspirations of modern New Yorkers. In a city where change has been the only constant, the subway serves as a stable setting for writers who want to test the cosmopolitan mettle of urban types. With the exception of a few texts that appear in newspapers and business-oriented periodicals, these subway stories share publication venues that might be characterized as middle- to highbrow. That is to say, these technological stories aspire to both contemporary relevance and a certain degree of aesthetic complexity. Whereas Cotten Seiler examines the ways in which stories about American automobility construct a neoliberal individualist, I argue that these subway stories construct the passenger as a knowing urban subject, but one who is still part of the crowd. Although I pay closest attention to literature, I do not want to make an old-fashioned Myth and Symbol School–style argument that the writers I have chosen reveal some timeless truth about the American need [ 3 ] Subway Stories for mobility. Their writings demonstrate that technology stories are eminently local: they reckon with the various ways that technology reshapes the possibilities for urban dwellers, for example, when a subway line is built beneath one avenue instead of another. Reading these stories with an eye to local history is equally important for understanding the canonical writers I discuss as well as their lesser-known compatriots. Without knowledge of the Interborough Rapid Transit train’s path from Times Square to Brooklyn Heights, Hart Crane’s poem “The Tunnel” loses its everydayness; its setting becomes a merely mythic vehicle. Similarly, the American Yiddish playwright Osip Dymov maps the mental journey of a Jewish immigrant dreaming about assimilation onto the man’s physical journey from Manhattan...