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8. Subway Fare: Toward a Poetics of Rapid Transit
- University of Illinois Press
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chapter 8 Subway Fare Toward a Poetics of Rapid Transit Wishful civic boosters of the early twentieth century discerned signs of financial utopia in the “symbiotic relation” between the skyscraper and the urban railway, which they saw as the source not only of the American city’s spectacular skyline but of “its constantly rising real estate values.”1 More than one early commentator imagined this symbiosis through an axis of unlimited spatial accessibility and freedom of movement, interchangeably horizontal and vertical. In this view, skyscrapers were understood as“street railways running perpendicularly,” turning the air into new capital just as expanding networks of rapid transit were modernizing the regions surrounding the city, creating the far-flung commuter metropolis.2 Others saw the relationship between these two quite differently, as a“vicious interbreeding” in which the expansion of transit systems, driven by the increasing density of the centralized skyscraper city, brought greater congestion and exacerbated the need for more tall buildings, which required yet more transportation infrastructure, and so on.3 But most saw these interdependent social forms as defining the character of twentieth-century urban modernity—not least the American poets who discovered rapid transit as they discovered the skyscraper, beginning with isolated poems soon after 1905, peaking in the mid-1910s, and continuing well into the next decade. Yet skyscraper verses and rapid-transit verses engaged the modern urban landscape in strikingly different fashion. In many respects, the latter subject was the more radical departure from existing poetic traditions. Skyscraper and skyline could be more readily imported into existing symbol-making practices, as modern urban versions of the monumental natural objects, the mountains or bodies of water, through which so many poems of the romantic sublime had posited divine immanence or a grand cosmic design. Great buildings, however overwhelming, were primarily experienced in Newcomb_How_text.indd 217 12/15/11 4:06 PM this symbolic sense, as discrete objects that could be observed from outside themselves. The skyline may have been “ever-changing,” in the lexicon of the era, but its changes could be charted from a distance, while individual buildings impressed observers as monolithic and otherworldly, virtually the only compelling symbols of the eternal that the modern city had to offer. In contrast, rapid transit was experienced not as an externalized symbolic object but as an immersive, unstable environment that was felt all around and even within the observing body. The designs of conveyances, the labyrinthine networks of tracks they moved on, and the liminal transfer points among them all worked to transform the modern urban subject’s experience of space, altering the relations between work-spaces and home-spaces, public and private experience, city and countryside, the observing consciousness and the surrounding objects of observation. In this rapid-transit environment , perceptual categories such as space and distance were fragmented into inversely related dyads: the city space one moved past or through and the containing space within which one was carried; the expanding distance one could traverse and the contracting distance between one’s own body and those of others.American rapid-transit verses often register this reconfiguration of spatial categories by emphasizing tensions between hurtling motion and enforced stasis, between unprecedented personal mobility and uncanny confinement in an enclosure traveling at the same speed as the passenger’s body while a landscape unspools cinematically outside the window, vividly accessible to the sight but uninhabitable by the body. The poetics that emerges from this rapid-transit environment emphasizes unpredictable and omnidirectional shifts in narrative and visual perspective. Few American verses about rapid transit sustain the sweeping panoramic views prevalent in the cityscape and skyscraper verses I discussed in earlier chapters. Nor do many attain the spectatorial detachment of Basil and Isabel March of William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), who, upon returning to New York, use the new elevated cars to explore the city’s changed spaces but also finally to preserve comfortable distance from its intrusive forces by translating them into the“harmonizing vision”of the picturesque .4 Instead, rapid-transit poems of the early twentieth century feature close-up encounters mingling people of different classes, races, and genders with unprecedented frequency, unfathomable swiftness, and sometimes uncontrollable force. In other words, the rapid-transit aesthetic is inevitably a social aesthetic. The observers of previous chapters, surveying skylines much as a painter or photographer ponders a landscape, give way to more active, mobile participants in what Marshall Berman calls “primal scenes” of modernity.5 These...