Writing in the 1950s, the
French cultural critic Roland Barthes argued that cars were “almost the exact
equivalent of Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era,
conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in
usage by a whole population which appropriates them purely as a magical
object”. Those of us who still congregate for the Top Gear liturgy on irregular
Sundays have noticed that church attendance has dwindled recently, but the car remains
an object that invites worship. As well as being loaded with the symbolic
baggage of money, status and sexual competitiveness, it is a pretext for grown
men (and occasionally women) to engage in the unembarrassed sharing of esoteric
knowledge and aesthetic delight. And yet like other religions, car worship increasingly
provokes anger and resentment from non-believers. In his epic anti-car poem
Autogeddon, Heathcote Williams described streets as “open sewers of the car
cult”. At Reclaim the Streets events in the 1990s, protestors carried mock road
signs with the slogans “Fuck The Car” and “Cars Come Too Fast”. One way or
another, people get worked up about cars.
The car is thus an object ripe
for cultural and historical analysis, and here are two books that attempt this
in very different ways. Steven Parissien’s The Life of the Automobile is a truly
global history of the motor car, from Benz to biofuels. It begins in earnest in
1891 with the French engineer Émile Levassor effectively inventing the modern
automobile by moving the engine to the front and adding a front-mounted
radiator, crankshaft, clutch pedal and gearstick. The book reminds us that Henry
Ford created not only the mass market in automobiles but also the market in car
accessories, for his Model T was so lacking in refinements that the Sears,
Roebuck catalogue included over 5000 items that could be attached to it. It was
Alfred P. Sloan, the President of General Motors, who introduced the notion of
planned obsolescence and of gradually trading up from entry-level Chevrolet to top-of-the-range
Cadillac. Parissien takes us through the golden age of the car in the 1950s and
1960s, when models like the Citroën DS, the 1959 Cadillac, the E-Type Jaguar
and James Bond’s beloved Aston Martin DB5 combined beauty and functionality. Then,
as the car came to be pilloried for causing congestion and pollution, the
automobile industry responded by forging new markets in southern Asia and China
and experimenting with alternative fuels and hybrids that mostly sought to eke
out the diminishing reserves of oil. But it also responded with the single-fingered
salute that is the gas-guzzling SUV, the global market for which continues to
grow, unbowed by either austerity or ecopolitics.
Parissien’s is mostly a
work of synthesis, culled from secondary sources, but some overarching themes
present themselves. You discover how much the car relied on world wars as mothers
of technological invention and opportunities for global branding. The Rolls-Royce
Silver Ghost, for instance, established itself as the epitome of luxury in the First
World War when it was used to chauffeur generals to the front, and T.E. Lawrence
granted it perfect product placement in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, describing it as
“more valuable than rubies”. During the Second World War, the first Volkswagen
Beetles were designed with a high clearance so they could be deployed on the
Russian front. Mainly an account of the car industry, Parissien’s book offers
some interesting sidelights in social history. We learn that Vermont was a
remote backwater until its Bureau of Publicity began marketing the state to pioneer
motorists for leaf-peeping in the fall and skiing in winter, and that in 1931
Barbara Cartland organised a race for MG Midgets at Brooklands to demonstrate the
skilfulness of women drivers.
Parissien’s heroes are
clearly the resourceful and lateral-thinking engineers, the usually unknown
artists who design these magical objects. A refreshing aspect of his book is
that, while he gives the high-end models their due, he seems equally charmed by
serviceable cars like Flaminio Bertoni’s Citroën 2CV, an “umbrella on four
wheels” launched in 1948 for France’s still largely rural population and designed
to be driven by a clog-wearing peasant across a ploughed field without breaking
the eggs on the back seat. Not all the industry’s efforts at make-do-and-mend were
so dependable and lovable. Parissien devotes much space to the tragic outcomes of
the British Leyland assembly line, like the Morris Marina, a “skip on wheels”
which arrived at showrooms with the paintwork already stippled with rust, and
the Austin Allegro, whose pointlessly futuristic square steering wheel did not prevent
it being nicknamed “the Flying Pig”. At least neither were as bad as the East
German Trabant, made from Duroplast, an unrecyclable phenolic resin
strengthened by Soviet cotton wool waste and compressed brown paper, which released
noxious fumes that made its assembly-line workers ill and killed quite a few of
them.
The Life of the Automobile leaves
you with the sense that the car is both an extraordinarily sophisticated object
– made from tens of thousands of component parts, capable of delivering its
occupants long distances in extreme comfort, and now fitted with stop-start
engines, voice-activated controls, automatic parking systems and radar
technology to read road markings – and a surprisingly primitive one. For its
basic technology, the internal combustion engine, is a nineteenth-century
invention and it remains, as the Japanese say, “a third-class machine”, needing
a highly-skilled human to work it properly. Parissien sees the automobile’s
contradictions already encapsulated near the start of its life in the
personality of Henry Ford - “daringly innovative, yet at the same time
intrinsically conservative; brashly aggressive, yet apprehensive and hesitant;
socially progressive, yet politically reactionary”.
Mark Wallington’s The Auto
Biography is more personal and idiosyncratic, his idea being to tell the story
of the last 60 years of British motoring through his own encounters with cars. The
book begins in 1953 with his father’s purchase of a Ford Popular, a “biscuit
tin on wheels” which can only run to a single windscreen wiper, to bring his
son back from the maternity ward. Wallington’s narrative arc runs from the
excitements of the early motorway age to the disenchantments of the present,
symbolised by his father turning road protestor when a bypass is built at the
back of his house. The book ends bathetically with the author’s purchase of a
charcoal-grey Ford Focus, “a car that specializes in not being noticed”, although
“perhaps it’s got a little more grey over the last two years”.
This convivial book is hard
to dislike and there are some nice vignettes. Wallington’s father, who plans
journeys along the virgin motorways of the 1950s and 1960s with the same meticulousness
he brought to his role as an RAF navigator in the war, warms his car’s spark
plugs in the oven on winter mornings, so that breakfast smells are “offset by
the piquant aroma of engine oil”. In her first trip on the M6, his mother buys
a postcard of it at a service station to send to her hairdresser. During the suffocating
summer of 1976, as long queues of hitchhikers form at Staples Corner at the
foot of the M1, the asphalt melts and “you could peel it off the side of the
roads”.
But as these details
suggest, this book does not veer wildly from the main routes, presenting us
with a series of stock figures from Tufty the road safety squirrel to Swampy
the tunnelling road protestor. It has that slight air of condescension you sometimes
find in popular histories of the recent past, in which our immediate ancestors
are seen as naïve or quaint for getting excited about phenomena like the
motorway service station or the Gravelly Hill Interchange that, from our more knowing
and enlightened present, are revealed as quite mundane.
Like modern cars, both
these books rumble along nicely but seem largely cocooned in their own comforting
microenvironment, cut off from the world beyond the dashboard. Neither of them seem
much concerned with what the excitements, passions and anxieties generated by the
car tell us about ourselves or the society we have become. The car still awaits
a social and cultural history that would explore how this miraculous and
mundane object, what J.G. Ballard called this “huge metallized dream”, has come
to penetrate so deeply into the routines and reveries of our waking lives.
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