The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography

1955–1985

Elsa Court

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030367336
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography: 1955–1985 traces the origin of a postmodern iconography of mobile consumption equating roadside America with an authentic experience of the United States through the postwar road narrative, a narrative which, Elsa Court argues, has been shaped by and through white male émigré narratives of the American road, in both literature and visual culture. While stressing that these narratives are limited in their understanding of the processes of exclusion and unequal flux in experiences of modern automobility, the book works through four case studies in the American works of European-born authors Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Frank, Alfred Hitchcock, and Wim Wenders to unveil an early phenomenology of the postwar American highway, one that anticipates the works of late-twentieth-century spatial theorists Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Marc Augé and sketches a postmodern aesthetic of western mobility and consumptionthat has become synonymous with contemporary America.

© The Author(s) 2020

E. CourtThe American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and PhotographyStudies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36733-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: By the Way—The Roadside as Other Space

Elsa Court¹

(1)

Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

Elsa Court

End Abstract

1 America: A Picture from the Margins

Few modern writers, having set out on the road to explore “real” America, ever came home with the claim that they had found it in any concrete sense—let alone that they had found it in one place . Judging by most road narratives and travelogues published across the twentieth century, America is as wide a country as it is elusive an image. For Simone de Beauvoir, touring the United States in 1947, it seemed so impossible for reality to supplant the myth of America which literature and film had shaped in her mind that, to recreate it meant going, as often as possible, to the movies. On the road, it proves difficult to be satisfied with the landscapes she had already pre-visualised. A much-anticipated visit to the Grand Canyon leaves her filled with ennui: now what? (Beauvoir 181). In America Day by Day (1948), a remarkable and relatively understudied travelogue partly obscured by the publication, a year later, of The Second Sex (1949), she reflects that being on the American road itself delivers her to a closer experience of modern America than any destination. This has to do with the fluidity with which the motorist can travel across the continent, the ease with which they can stop, rest, get fuel along the way without having to waste time stopping into any towns. Bars and motels along every highway make her feel welcome: “What charms us about these places,” she writes, “is that they were meant for us. Tourism has a privileged character in America: it doesn’t cut you off from the country it’s revealing to you; on the contrary, it’s a way of entering it” (164–65). This collective “us” means Americans as well as non-Americans: in fact, this collective us means that all who travel America are American, and that to be American means to travel America. This idea seems hardly modern. Alexis de Tocqueville had said it long before, and Americans like John Steinbeck were soon to recycle the same statement: America was a nation of restless people, founded as it had been by the restless rejects of Europe (Steinbeck 1962, 10) and to more than one author who claimed to be interested in America, finding America meant not so much visiting all the inevitable places but taking part in this seemingly antithetical motion: a tradition of being unable to stay put.

The twentieth-century expression of this restless spirit was so completely interdependent with and fuelled by access to the car that, even to Soviet satirical writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, travelling as special correspondents in the mid-1930s, it was already very clear that the quest for “real” America was to be enacted on the road or not at all. Even so, the essence of the continent proved elusive, hard to attach to any material reality. Having been told upon arrival in the United States that New York City was not America but actually “a bridge between Europe and America” (2013, 1), Ilf and Petrov had turned to some of the other great cities, including the capital Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Connecticut, where Mark Twain’s house could be visited. In every city, they asked locals if they were near enough yet to having found the heart of America. The answer was always no. The tone of their travelogue, later serialised in Russia and only published in English in 2007 as Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, is humorous, but the authors are only half-joking when they report that, asked in which direction America might be, Americans all tend to point to somewhere else, some place in the distance. “They couldn’t say for certain where the actual America is located […] – they just pointed their fingers vaguely into space” (1).

Based on this corrective assessment, and considering that travelling by private automobile is “the cheapest way to travel in the United States” (1), they decide to head back to New York, purchase a Ford Model T, and set out west to find out where America might be. It is only after having been to California and back that Ilf and Petrov come to conclusion that “real” America is in fact best embodied by a non-destination: more precisely, a gasoline station at the intersection of two roads. They produce a photographic representation of this one-storey commercial construction which, though it seems like a mundane sight, conjures up the flat architectural economy of the country’s sprawling highways, where a modest but already far spread-out apparatus of service and hospitality structures the landscape of modern automobility. To this gasoline station picture, one which may have been overlooked by many, they offer the provisional caption: “This right here is America!” (13) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

“This right here is America!” from Ilf & Petrov’s American Road Trip, 2013

This, arguably, is the birth of an alternative emblem of Americanness. The white, single-storied gasoline station and convenience store against a background of road signs , adverts and electric cables may be essential fixtures of modern American life, the scene is more than the picture of a way station to someplace else. Even taken on its own, the station suggests a transit point within a fast-expanding, increasingly standardised network of North American automobility, and it is not a stretch, in this sense, to say that it is a synecdoche for the whole of America.

A growing interest in domestic tourism in America since the years of the First World War may have inspired Ilf and Petrov’s understanding of the road’s importance to an authentic experience of modern America, especially since such an interest had been rapidly seized by a growing tourist industry and publicly promoted as a “ritual of American citizenship” (Shaffer 4). Promotional campaigns such as See America First had, since the 1910s, enjoined Americans nationwide to make the most of their own land and seek out the scenic wonders of the American west while war-torn Europe was off-limits (Shaffer 181). The flexibility of road travel, liberating former train passengers from fixed routes and schedules, also shifted the sole focus of the quest from National Parks and quintessential historic destinations to the journey itself, which embraced a newfound access to America’s small towns and byways. The roadside industry can be traced back to these auto-touring practices, which not only had motorists brave the strenuous conditions of their journey aboard a badly insulated, hardly padded vehicle, but also preferred the autonomy conferred by auto-camping (Belasco 22–23). Rather than staying in impersonal hotels, campers may have felt that they were reviving the “strenuous life” of the pioneers, thus engaging with a patriotic spirit which Theodore Roosevelt hailed as the antidote to turn-of-the-century decadence (Belasco 30). Even as cabin courts grew out of these initially bare camping grounds and a profitable industry began to flourish, the flexibility and freedom of the roadside hospitality industry were experienced as a return to both the roots of the country’s founding myth and the informality of the family homestead, turning the roadside into modern America’s “home away from home .”

In the heart of the Great Depression, the impetus to learn from America by looking at its overlooked byways took the form of a never-published Fortune magazine article that would instead become one of the most iconic photo essays ever produced on the subject of America: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). In the summer of 1935, writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans were commissioned by Fortune to document the living conditions of tenant farmers in Alabama, victims of a system to whom the recently implemented New Deal could be of no help. They embarked on a journey south the same year that Ilf and Petrov immortalised their road signs and gasoline station and produced a portrait of the Depression among the sharecroppers of southern cotton fields. Staying with the farming family whose lives the project would chronicle, Agee and Evans also documented a few fixtures of public life in rural Alabama, such as a crossroads convenience store and post office with its adjoining gasoline pump as a self-questioning picture of progress amid the domestic hardship of the neglected and immobile. It is no doubt this idea of blind permanence in American progress that Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue captures while hailing, in the middle of the economic crisis, this seemingly negligible roadside construct as the soul of America. This discursive move, far more playful than Agee and Walker’s reporting of social and economic neglect, anticipates much of the mid-to-late twentieth century’s road trip iconography which consciously and consistently seeks America, like Roberta Frank would twenty years later, in the material world of overlooked, “in-between” places (Sontag 99). It is, strikingly, a take on modern America from the outsider’s perspective.

A year before he set out on the road to Alabama with Evans, Agee, by then already an established feature writer for Fortune, had written about the “Great American Roadside” as one of the rare industries to seem immune to the economic blow of the Great Depression. With no small amount of the enthused lyricism characteristic of his prose style, he addressed the American reader in the second person, assuming that they already knew the ins and outs of the roadside well, but were yet to measure the breadth and economic meaning of its network. Indeed, the fact that many users nationwide took its impeccable services for granted was a sign of the ingenuity with which the roadside had inserted itself into contemporary life. Daily users supposedly ignored the fact that, if the single roadside structure seemed unimpressive when considered on a one-time visit, the system which had produced it was acquiring gigantic proportions.

[It] may never have sharply occurred to you that the Great American Roadside, where [the motorist] pauses to trade, is incomparably the most hugely extensive market the human race has ever set up to tease and tempt and take money from the human race. This roadside, the most vivid part of a new but powerfully established American institution, is a young but great industry that will gross, in this, the fifth year of the great world depression, something like $3,000,000,000. (Agee 1934)

It could be said that, given that the love affair between Americans and the automobile was now in full swing, the roadside industry emerged from objective practical necessities, which in turn meant that for a long time, it has paradoxically been too pedestrian an object of study to broader architecture history and social criticism. Yet the roadside’s expansion, proportional to the intensification of car ownership and the multiplication of highways, would gradually make its way into the iconography of the road movies and road narratives that would define a now well-known era of American life. These cultural explorations of the American roadside have preceded (and in the present case encouraged) scholarly investigation of the roadside as a key social and historical space, one which holds narrative possibilities that have come to define the modern road trip as a cultural construct. By the end of the twentieth century, few would have disputed that the most familiar roadside structures could evoke a picture of modern America that was, if not unanimously described as “authentic,” at least universally acknowledged as familiar, some would even say quintessential. While the road on its own may be abstract, nondescript, larger than representation—and as Lynne Pearce puts it, any Internet search will reveal that the road trip’s road is always the same road, leading to the same vanishing point (Pearce 2016, 95)—only its commercial landscape tells us that a road is the modern American road, transposing the abstraction of the motion forward into an architectural time and place . It is the landscape of the roadside, gradually styled in the postwar years after the motel and the commercial strip to which it gave birth (Jakle et al. 18), that brings us back to the geographic economy of America.

Bringing the traveller’s imagination back to a time when America was “borderless,” the culture of the mid-twentieth-century road trip would re-instil mobility into a society which, by the end of the Second World War, seemed to have become as inflexible as the Old World (Beauvoir 294). The 1940s mark both a peak in the commercial history of the American roadside industry and the consolidation of the road trip in the public imagination as “a nationally representative American narrative” (Norman 2016, 125). Before the turn of the century, Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” extolled a wild roadside perceived as “latent with unseen existences” (Whitman...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: By the Way—The Roadside as Other Space
• 2. “Stationary Trivialities”: Life on the Margins in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955)
• 3. “Roadside Eye”: Accidents and Epiphanies in Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958)
• 4. “We’re All in Our Private Traps”: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and the Decline of the American Motel
• 5. Roadside Chronicles: Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984)
• 6. Conclusion: America Revisited
• Back Matter