The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (review)

In The Speed Handbook, Enda Duffy offers a history of the cultural meaning of speed during the formative years of the automobile revolution. Her argument is threefold: first, that "speed is the single new pleasure invented by modernity" (p. 3); second, that the emergence of the automobile as a mass phenomenon after 1900 placed this new pleasure at the disposal—more accurately, under the control—of individuals for the first time; and third, that a cultural history of the pleasure of individual automotive speed is best approached through an analysis of the high- and lowbrow art and literature of the period.

By the end of the nineteenth century, with the Scramble for Africa reaching its conclusion and the map of the world rapidly shedding the last of its unexplored voids, Westerners reluctantly confronted the fact that global geographic space is limited. Thus began a quest to intensify the experience of the space already mapped—a quest to move among the known spaces of the world at ever-more-rapid velocities. Under these circumstances, speed became an end in itself, reflected in the fast-paced detective novels of the era, the emerging fascination with thrill rides, and the rapid development of the mass-consumed automobile. Duffy takes the technological development of the automobile as a given and offers but a very brief description of the car and its creators, because to her the question of why the car was embraced so rapidly is of greater importance than how. And in her analysis, this occurred because of a groundswell of enthusiasm rooted in the turn-of-the-century culture of speed: ordinary people demanded speed and therefore quickly snapped up low-cost, mass-produced automobiles.

But when they sped along in their new cars, people quickly found that the view of the world through automobile windows required new ways of visually apprehending and mentally processing the objects whizzing by. Here Duffy's analysis is very similar to that of Wolfgang Schivelbusch in The Railway Journey (1977), in which he explained that the experience of viewing the rapidly passing world through the windows of a train in the mid-nineteenth century differed radically from prior ways of viewing the passing world at slower speeds (in carriages, on foot). Duffy cites Schivelbusch, and she builds on his work by making a useful distinction between the passive visual experience of speed in a train and the active visual experience of a driver guiding a car at speed. Duffy's text is at its best, however, when she focuses on representations of speed in fine art, literature, and film, including Sherlock Holmes, Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, the statue of Lenin at Finland Station in Saint Petersburg, numerous car-chase and carcrash scenes from early films, and countless others. In every case her examples are well-chosen and her analysis, assuming one is at least marginally conversant in the language of literary criticism and cultural studies, brilliant.

But in the end, this is apt to be a frustrating book for those for whom the "and" in Technology and Culture is paramount. Duffy's book makes an important contribution with its meticulous analysis of the early culture of speed. But it does so without saying much at all about the technologies involved—the cars themselves or, more important, the (generally quite poor) roads of the era—nor does it attempt to tackle the mutual shaping of technology and culture. Instead, in Duffy's text the car more or less appears, then becomes a mass phenomenon, and then contributes to a cultural revolution reflected in art and literature. Simply put, this is a book about culture, not technology—and certainly not about technology and culture.

And thus a somewhat tired metaphor applies with this book: the pendulum seems to have swung too far. My shelf has long been home to numerous excellent books on the business and technology of the early automobile age, and though I welcome the addition of...