Automobility,materiality and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis

Introduction

Through a detailed analysis of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, this paper examines the way the history of the car and automobility produces an object that is both a symbol of freedom and a steel and oil cage that imprisons its owner in debt and everyday drudgery. ¹ Ideas of the car shift between a transcendent object of desire and a material and ecological disaster, and the paper demonstrates the ways that the novel contributes to debates about urban congestion and loss of the open road and the function of the car as a symbol of power and prestige. It also explores the possibilities of a digitized, interactive and complex post-car world in which automobility itself becomes compromised.

My interest in the car in literature further develops research I have been carrying out since the late 1990s into an understanding of the ways that spatial theory can support new and different readings of modern and contemporary writing. ² In these studies, following Henri Lefebvre and others, space is never neutral, a grid or container within which things happen, but is something produced by social and cultural activity. There is no single or normal perspective, no time at which space doesn’t change, and space is made up of moving elements in different contexts. The moving figure not only produces new spaces, but performatively constructs itself as it moves through space. Automobility via the car and road system becomes a significant element in 20th- and 21st-century experience in westernized culture that has had a noticeable impact on the form and content of literature despite being largely unexamined; present but not really seen.

A number of recent publications from the social sciences and human geography, including John Urry’s Mobilities in 2007 and Tim Cresswell’s On the Move in 2006, have sought to establish an agenda for the study of mobility by emphasizing the broad range of its applications and the depth of its engagement with contemporary life. ³ There are more specific works on automobility, and Peter Merriman’s Driving Spaces, for example, gives a detailed history and analysis of the development of the British motorway system and challenges its conceptualization as a ‘non-place’. Two collections of essays; Automobilites and Against Automobility have also considered the car and the road in more detail. ⁴ Automobilites includes essays by key figures in the field (Thrift, Urry and Merriman mentioned above) on automobility and national identity, on systems of mobility and the affective aspects of the car, while Against Automobility examines the conflict between regulation and representations of freedom through essays grouped into sections on the conception, regulation and representation of automobility. Earlier accounts that combine the technical and the cultural include James Flink’s authoritative and helpful historical studies in The Automobile Age and Car Culture. ⁵ Alongside these, and other recent academic accounts of automobility and automobility systems from the social sciences and human geography, there are more general accounts, including Autopia, a collection of essays that ranges across periods and disciplines, and Autophobia, a monograph that traces the trajectory of the development of the car in the 20th century. ⁶ A more recent contribution to the debate, Kingsley Dennis and John Urry’s provocatively entitled After the Car, examines the ecological and economic reasons why the world might need to become ‘post-car’, and the potential futures of the car as it becomes part of, and produces, the complex and interactive systems that control its movements. Information about cars and car culture is also readily available from more popular sources such as magazines, websites and television programmes (and Top Gear is the most obvious example in the UK) although these are more likely to be enthusiastically uncritical or technically orientated. Despite this flurry of publications, indicative of a mobility turn in social and cultural studies in the first decade of the 21st century, studies of the influence of automobility in literary fiction and poetry remains a neglected subject in relation to its importance in other parts of cultural and economic life. ⁷

Within the range of academic and more popular studies, the particular contribution of this paper is to position DeLillo’s novel in a moment when ideas of automobility look backwards to a 1950s and 1960s when the spread of car ownership among working people (particularly the American middle classes) brought with it illusions of freedom and prestige, and a future when automobility operates within complex digital systems that both enhance and limit functionality. The car in Cosmopolis finds itself at just such an intersection, stuck in a traffic jam and unable to even get across town for a ‘haircut’, while the passenger not only has meetings and medical check-ups in the car, but also has another ‘haircut’ by losing millions of dollars speculating on the yen as he uses the interactive functionality of the equipment the car contains to move money in global markets.

Current scholarship on automobility

Nigel Thrift attests to the car’s invisibility in general when he says that the ‘car has become a common feature of everyday life, a background to a background’ ⁸ and Kristin Ross in Fast Cars Clean Bodies refers to the car in America as ‘completely integrated into the banality of the everyday’ and one of a category of goods whose ‘habitual use had effectively removed them from the discursive realm’. ⁹ Others simultaneously agree that the car has been neglected, and stress its importance as an object that is not just one among others, but a world of its own. John Urry has claimed that the ‘automobile is the single most important innovation in 20th Century America’, and that the ‘car is a way of life, not just a transport system’. ¹⁰ For Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects from 1968, not only does the car ‘epitomize the object’ but it is also a ‘complement to all other objects considered together’. The car, he explains, is its own system, and ‘only the domestic sphere as a whole [Baudrillard’s emphasis] holds a position comparable in value . . . to that of the car’. ¹¹ Urry returns to this topic when he says that: ‘automobility is by far the most powerful [of such] systems in the modern world’, ¹² and cars and roads are a ‘powerful complex made up of technical and social linkages – traffic police, licensing authorities, petrol refining and distillation, roads, hotels, garages, suburban developments’. ¹³ The novelist Patrick Hamilton makes the same point four decades earlier when he interrupts his novel Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse in order to provide a chilling moment of alienation in ‘Coleoptera’, a chapter length vision of England smothered by beetles. The beetles, which are also cars, need a complete system to function, and finally enslave a population by creating a world that functions entirely for their benefit. The chapter can be read as a metaphor for encroaching fascism through a reference to the Volkswagen Beetle, and as a reflection of Hamilton’s personal hatred of the motor car following his disfigurement when he was run down as a young man. Hamilton, like Urry, emphasizes the interdependent nature of roads, garages and hotels that are required to keep the car on the road, describing an integrated system rather than an independent phenomenon, an important element of a post-car world. ¹⁴

Work from the social sciences on mobility and automobility references a limited range of literary works; examples include Marinetti and the futurists, Jack Kerouac and the Beats in general and Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. There is, understandably, little ‘close reading’ or consideration of the aesthetic or formal qualities of the text. ¹⁵ Other texts from cultural and literary studies, whose focus is on automobility and the car in literature, useful and stimulating though they are, tend to focus on texts from the first half of the 20th century and provide little forward trajectory. Allen Samuels’ chapter in Utopia references only some of the early modernists (Stein, Wharton and Eliot) and Toad from Wind in the Willlows. ¹⁶ Jean Baudrillard’s essay on J.G. Ballard’s Crash is a stimulating account of the erotics of the cyborg that effectively locates the work in a science fiction context but not in the broader field of the experimental novel. ¹⁷ The principle focus of Speed by Enda Duffy is, as the title suggests, on the concept and practice of speed. ¹⁸ While it does contain analysis of some literary texts, these are again the more obvious candidates from literary modernism (Woolf, Fitzgerald, etc.) and Ballard as a representative of postmodern fiction. Deborah Clarke’s Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth Century America, while broad ranging in the texts it refers to, limits itself by gender and nationality. ¹⁹ Roger Casey’s Textual Vehicles does cover a broad range of American fiction, but again, doesn’t provide the kind of detailed analysis required to draw out the implications of the form and content of the works. ²⁰

References to modernist literary works, often from around the 1920s and certainly before 1950, make up the bulk of the current material available. Andrew Thacker’s essay in Against Automobility, for example, focuses on early 20th-century literature, and Virginia Woolf in particular. The only ‘contemporary’ (although now over 40 years old) novel it mentions is again Ballard’s Crash. In the late 20th or early 21st century, automobility, cars or driving practices seem to become increasingly invisible (not just a background but a background to a background). The reason might be very straightforward. Perhaps Flink is right when he says that the early decades of the 20th century when cars first became available, and the 1950s and 60s when car production and consumption and road building produced new spaces for working people, represent the two most significant periods in the history of the car. ²¹ By the late 20th or early 21st century the experience of the scenery or the landscape rushing towards drivers and passengers is hardly new, and one as likely to induce boredom as stimulation. The road trip has been replaced by the budget airline. The experience of the freedom of the open road is as likely to be replaced by the tedium of the traffic jam. Cars also no longer need our personal attention. There is little opportunity to tinker with the mechanics. They have become part of a technological world where things don’t break down and can be ignored. The endless attention given to their lorry by the Joads in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, ²² where the driver feels for the rumble of main bearings giving out through the pedals beneath his feet and listens for a tappet that is out of time beating itself to death on the cylinder head, is unnecessary in cars that run unproblematically between service intervals, or the fully networked mobile office in Cosmopolis where the financier Eric Packer is driven around a clogged Manhattan in a white stretch limousine, of which more later.

The car in contemporary life has, however, not disappeared. Car ownership remains not only stubbornly present, but is on the increase, and as well as the function of automobility has multiple complex and significant meanings. It sells youth, beauty, sexual allure, freedom and power as well as family life and the romance of the lone traveller. It is more than a product but the ‘quintessential manufactured object produced by the leading industrial sectors’. ²³ It reinforces national boundaries and is part of the construction of national identity, but also transgresses them in its global production and distribution. ²⁴ The car industry has, however, done more than sell its products, it also sold a method of production, introducing the manufacturing process of Fordism (and now post-Fordism and Just-in Time production methods) and proved a useful testbed for the scientific theories of Taylorism, changing the relationship between the worker and their object of work. ²⁵ Rather than the artisan worker moving between the cars as they were being built, the worker was stationary except for the single repetitive task brought to them on the conveyor belt. In an ironic twist the product that was supposed to provide personal freedom of movement, pinned the worker to one place on the production line and the mobility of the worker, whose movements are now restricted to a repetitive pattern, was replaced by the mobility of the machinery. It was a production system admired by both Hitler, who kept a photo of Henry Ford on his desk, and Stalin, who was inspired by Fordist production techniques for the large scale industrial innovations in The Soviet Union. ²⁶ But Henry Ford’s ambitions went beyond the development of new ways of producing cars. ²⁷ By introducing the five dollar day, a wage far in excess of the industrial norm, and introducing mass produced cars at a low price through the Model T, he made sure that his workers also became his customers. He also made sure they became model citizens, and the composition of his workforce, and particularly those on the five dollar eight hour day, was developed and monitored by his ‘Sociological Department’ (later to become the Education Department), which ensured that participants in the scheme had the appropriate ‘family budget, diet, living arrangements, recreations, social outlook, and morality’. ²⁸ There were also mandatory classes in English for those who were non-native speakers. In such ways the social and cultural impact of the car lies in its production processes as well as its consumption. It is materially implicated in working lives, in leisure ‘choices’, in the construction of geographies and the process of suburbanization as the concept of a drive to work area develops. Cultural and aesthetic concepts of automobility become inextricably linked to the materiality of the petroleum driven car with implications that include global territorial disputes and world economies as well as the ecological impact of the production of cars and their use. ²⁹

Any view of the potential of a post-car world has to take the depth and breadth of these global relationships into account, as well as the ways the car represents individual dreams of freedom, escape and social prestige. The car may be a steel cage driven by polluting petroleum products that condemns the driver to endless journeys to and from work, but it is also a fetishized object of desire that can provide freedom, social status and sexual liberation. ³⁰

Automobility in Cosmopolis

It is to a more detailed analysis of DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis that I now want to turn in order to demonstrate one role that the 21st century car can play in the form and content of novel-length fiction, but also, and more specifically, to draw out the relations between an automobility that the car promises, the materiality of its presence and the ways it points to a time ‘after the car’. By bringing together the discursive and the material aspects of automobility I can examine the car as a thing in itself, a material object in the world that is part of a system of material objects. I can also examine the semantic and philological contexts of the car as it becomes an object within language (the ‘thing’ becomes the thing that is said) through the texts that it produces and by which it is produced.

While ostensibly a novel that mainly takes place in a car, the relationship of DeLillo’s novel to more traditional road fiction or travel narratives is more parody than imitation, and has more in common with the high modernism of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the way the action takes place in one day. The car in Cosmopolis is not going anywhere – it covers time and not distance. The more usual role of the car, in the road movie and in literature, is that of liberation, freeing the driver and passengers from the constraints of time and space, and moving them from the ‘everyday’, a diurnal round of locally based activities, to a different experience of time. The car journey not only liberates the driver and passengers from day-to-day life, but it also liberates them from anxiety and fear of death (while also, ironically, making them more likely to die in a car crash). It does this by locating them within the moment of travel, a time that both cheats death, and heightens awareness of it. ³¹ The car in Cosmopolis has the opposite function. Its crawl through the city is the daily crawl through another 24 hours. It is also in the car that the daily medical examination pronounces Eric Packer’s prostate to be ‘asymmetrical’, a condition he fears will kill him, but as we find later, could well have saved his fortune. The journey is also, literally, towards Packer’s death, an event that is foreshadowed early in the novel.

It’s a journey that certainly does not have the teleology of that of the Joads, whatever the consequences of arrival in California, or even the futility of those in Kerouac’s On the Road, where Sal Paradise admits: ‘It was a completely meaningless set of circumstances that made Dean come, and similarly I went off with him for no reason’, and where at least the aim is to ‘move’ even if not to arrive. ³² Nor is it a journey of discovery of land and identity as in Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, or an escape route into an unknown future for the villain as in Patrick Hamilton’s Gorse trilogy. The car in Cosmopolis is a vehicle that was never meant to go anywhere, and can’t anyway because of the density of the traffic. There is no sense of a journey being completed but rather of a vehicle in endless circulation. The ‘time’ of the narrative is not the time of a journey measured in miles per hour, but the length of a day. The search for a haircut, the reason he gives for taking the car (see p. 15 of the novel) is finally only an act of nostalgia, and in no sense the end of a journey, but another missed opportunity by Packer to connect with the fleshly existence of other human beings.

Materiality in Cosmopolis

The ‘white limousine’ is encountered on First Avenue in a group of 10 similar cars that are ‘identical at a glance’. ³³ Beyond the glance, however, each one bears the marks of its owner’s customization. Cars, for all their status as manufactured commodities, as design statements and as carriers of brand identity, are also the subjects of customization. Eric’s adaptations may be invisible but he is fully aware of the cultural and social implications of his car and its place in the discourses of power, as well as its material presence:

He liked the fact that the cars were indistinguishable from each other. He wanted such a car because the thought of it was a platonic replica, weightless for all its size, less an object than an idea. But he knew this wasn’t true. This was something he said for effect and he didn’t believe it for an instant. He believed it for an instant but only just. He wanted the car because it was not only oversized but aggressively and contemptuously so, metastasizingly so, a tremendous mutant thing that stood astride every argument against it. ³⁴

Roland Barthes in his essay ‘The New Citroen’ similarly introduces the DS Citroen as transcendent, as an object that has ‘fallen from the sky’ and is a déesse or ‘Goddess’. ³⁵ Barthes, punning on the name, makes a particular claim for the vision of the DS as more ‘spiritual’ than previous cars that had ‘belonged rather to the bestiary of power’. ³⁶ In this way it appears marked by its difference to other cars and not its similarity. He is also, through his focus on difference, saying something not just about the car in general, or the DS in particular, but about the ‘object’. The object is the ‘messenger’ of a world above nature, and if its deific status is confirmed by its appearance as a vision and as a perfect commodity that completely conceals both its material origins and the labour of its construction, then its object status is confirmed by touch. The elements of the car are not welded together but ‘juxtaposed and held together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape’ and the ‘material itself . . . promotes a taste for lightness in its magical sense’. ³⁷ Like Christ when he appears to Mary and instructs her to ‘touch me not’, the car is located in a spiritual realm. ³⁸ When the car goes on show, however, it is subjected to an ‘assault of touch’, that replaces the mystifying function of the vision. By coming into close proximity with the body where the ‘lines of union are touched’, and through the practice of driving, the object becomes ‘prostituted, appropriated’. It becomes ‘mediatized’, in a process that is like ‘exorcism’, and reduced to ‘the very essence of petit-bourgeois advancement’. ³⁹ Through use, goddess becomes mortal, and the car is reduced to a commodity.

Packer also wants to believe in the transcendent qualities of his car but is only able to maintain the ‘vision’ for the briefest of moments. He is pulled back to the car’s social and cultural practices and the raw power that is derived from them. His ‘chief of security liked the car for its anonymity’, for example, although it is also a symbol of aggressive wealth. ⁴⁰ It is a place where Packer is subjected to the most intimate medical examination, a place of sexual conquest and an ‘office’. Packer’s customization of the car has multiplied its potential meanings. The blank white surface of the outside contradicts the multi-layered interior with its ‘club chair’ and ‘array of visual display units’ with ‘medleys of data on every screen’. ⁴¹ Later in the novel they are described as ‘a cluster framework’ and a ‘work of video sculpture, handsome and airy’. ⁴² In contrast to the lightness of the data the video sculpture transmits, the car also has some of the qualities of more traditional three-dimensional art and architecture. The ‘floor of the limousine was Carrara marble from the quarries where Michaelangelo stood’, ⁴³ not only linking it to European Renaissance sculpture but also to Parker’s building, which has a ‘marble lobby’. ⁴⁴ Parker describes the construction of the limousine in more detail to his wife after they accidentally meet in a book store. She asks him whether the car is a quiet place to work and he says ‘I had the car prousted’. ⁴⁵ Prousting, he goes on to explain, is to cork line the car to keep out the noise:

The way they build a stretch is this. They take a vehicle’s base unit and cut it in half with a huge throbbing buzz-saw device. Then they add a segment to lengthen the chassis by ten, eleven, twelve feet. Whatever desired dimension. Twenty-two feet if you like. While they were doing this to my car I sent word that they had to proust it, cork line it against street noise. ⁴⁶

This technical conversation is the earliest moment of intimacy we see between husband and wife. He continues:

The vehicle is armoured of course. This complicated the cork lining. But they managed in the end. It’s a gesture. It’s a thing a man does. ⁴⁷

The irony, as we discover a few lines on, is that the cork lining doesn’t work in a city that ‘eats and sleeps noise’. The ‘important thing’ about the cork is not that it works but ‘that it’s there’. ⁴⁸ It is invisible, beneath the surface, and only Packer is aware of it, of his intervention. Similarly the ‘partition behind the driver . . . had a cedar frame with an inlaid fragment of ornamental Kufic script on parchment, late tenth century, Baghdad, priceless’. ⁴⁹

The functional and the aesthetic become intertwined within a power structure that produces both, and the car’s customization begins to reflect some of Packer’s other artistic interests. The poetry and the art Packer collects can sustain notions of abstraction that the size of the car and its material presence don’t permit. Poetry for Eric combines both material presence and absence: ‘He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper.’ ⁵⁰ The poem becomes three dimensional in the relationship between paper and script. It is not type that can be rubbed out. Despite their abstractions, it is the poems that ‘made him conscious of his breathing . . . one breath after another’. ⁵¹ The poem’s materialism is geared into its own physical existence, rather than relating to or representing a non-verbal world of objects or emotions. The source of their affect is not via an external world they try to represent, but lies in their own status as material objects that relate to Eric’s own physical and biological existence. Later we find that his interest is in language in general, and in examining certain words by focusing on them in different contexts, and his interest in the conceptual extends to visual art, and ‘paintings that his guests did not know how to look at . . . white paintings that were unknowable to many, knife slabs of mucoid colour’. ⁵²

His financial dealings are both conceptual and abstract; while apparently divorced from the physical world they are part of the construction of the material lives of people. As Shiner, Packer’s adviser says early in the novel: ‘People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do.’ ⁵³ For Packer the data itself on which he bases his financial decisions is abstract and concrete, conceptual and representational:

He looked past Chin towards streams of numbers running in opposite directions. He understood how much it meant to him, the roll and flip of data on a screen. He studied the figural diagrams that brought organic patterns into play, birdwing and chambered shell. It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. In fact, data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process . . . Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole. ⁵⁴

In the same way that the abstractions of the minimalist poetry and the conceptual art that has colour without form still reflects something of the flesh and the organic, while simultaneously denying it, the data takes on a presence that allows Packer to deny its bodily origins in human labour. The nature of the data, and its distribution and interpretation and the process of decision making that comes from its analysis, has more in common with the process of reading abstract rather than representational art. The figures don’t pretend to give a picture of the world, even if the figures seem organic, but become a kind of material text. Their non-representational nature makes them a thing in themselves, a kind of ‘objectivist’ poem that is not only objective in that it is removed from the point of view of the observer but also objectivist in that it becomes an object in the world. Packer, it is reported in the novel, has shifted his work from dealing in ‘stocks’, a representation of material even if not actual material, to ‘the movements of money itself’ ⁵⁵ a decision that has aesthetic benefits for him: ‘He found beauty and precision here, hidden rhythms in the fluctuation of a given currency.’ ⁵⁶ His ‘chief of theory’, called Vija Kinski, similarly comments on the dematerialization of property. It is represented, she claims not by ‘weight or shape’, but the ‘price you pay’. ⁵⁷ The house has become the ‘number itself’. ⁵⁸ The process of abstraction produces, according to Kinski, an ‘aesthetics of interaction’ and the application of mathematical logic in the analysis of the data is replaced by intuition, and the need to remain ‘authentic’ to one self. ⁵⁹ The relationship between materialism and history is broken, to be replaced by ‘a common surface, an affinity between market movements and the natural world’. ⁶⁰ History is not rooted in the crumbling city, or in the run of data that changes every fraction of a second, but only remains in the fleshly organic existence of individuals.

The material implications of Packer’s financial activities are personified by Benno Levin who finally confronts and kills Eric, telling him he is:

a figure whose thoughts and acts affect everybody, people, everywhere. I have history, as you call it, on my side. You have to die for how you think and act. For your apartment and what you paid for it. ⁶¹

The straightforward act of revenge on behalf of all the lives Packer has destroyed, and by extension the revenge of the individual on the casual cruelty of a financial system that ruins lives without even knowing them, is finally represented by Levin’s need for a physical intimacy that Packer is incapable of. Levin has constructed Packer as a figure that becomes both a nemesis and a saviour. Packer is the person with whom Levin is finally most intimate, and he wants a relationship that can both heal and save him. By killing him, the purpose of his life is over, just as the plot of the novel loses purpose when we know that Packer is to die only a third of the way through. Levin’s life is ruined, but Packer at least knows he existed, and Levin is finally able to say he can ‘speak for myself’, writing with a yellow pencil on white paper with blue lines a story of an entire life that he wants to stretch to 10,000 pages without ‘repeating myself’. ⁶²

If Levin finally makes himself exist through the act of writing, an act that is materially and physically described, the car, which also survives the events of the day and remains ‘in circulation’ and taking up space, still has to construct its own meaning through its use. Cars are more than a list of their technical specifications. The car may be globally produced, but this does not inscribe a transnational significance. Its consumption and use are always in local contexts. The stretch limousine is, for example, ‘a powerful signifier of American urban excess’ but is also ‘a popular sight on Britain’s roads where it serves as the venue and the vehicle of choice for certain kinds of carnivalesque event regardless of class, ranging from hen parties, to birthdays, to the release of prisoners’. ⁶³ As Jane Melman says when she gets in the car: ‘All these stretch limos, my god, you can’t tell one from the other . . . We could be kids on prom night . . . or some dumb wedding wherever.’ ⁶⁴

Cosmopolis as post-car

Eric Packer’s car is not only a car of the powerful elite in Manhattan that could be mistaken for the transport on a hen night, but also the car of the future. Thrift claims in his essay ‘Driving in the City’ (a response or companion piece to Michel de Certeau’s ‘Walking in the City’), that the modern car demonstrates the ‘interaction between technology and embodied human practice’ in its ‘systematic application of knowledge about embodied human practice’. ⁶⁵ It does this in two ways: through the use of computer software and through the application of ergonomics. Computer software now manages the driving process, and in sophisticated and expensive cars will not only stop the front wheels from spinning during acceleration and the wheels from locking under heavy braking, but will also control basic properties of car behaviour such as suspension, and ancillary devices such as wipers, lights and audio systems. Engines, that in previous iterations of the motor car were the preserve of the enthusiastic tinkerer, are now governed by engine management systems. In Packer’s car we never know the make or size of the engine, or its performance. ⁶⁶ By contrast the iconic V8 is almost a character in films such as Bullitt, where the offbeat rhythm of the engine forms a backdrop to the action of the film, and is a topic of debate in Philip K. Dick’s In Milton Lumky Territory as two travelling salesmen compare the merits of the ‘American’ V8 over the ‘European’ straight 6. ⁶⁷ The power of the iconography of Packer’s car makes such conversations futile.

This lack of attention to the car’s driveability is for good reason. The journey in Cosmopolis not only lacks purpose, but it also doesn’t go anywhere geographically. Its purpose is to fill up a day, and a day in which Packer loses his money speculating on the yen, his wife’s family fortune and his own life, and only ever gets half of his hair cut. If there is a broader spatial dimension to its journey it is through the technology in the car that constructs the global reach of his financial dealings (of which more later) and through its system of ‘night vision display’. The car is equipped with cameras that can reveal objects ‘beyond the range of headlights’ that appear on the windscreen as a ‘series of thermal images’. ⁶⁸ The car therefore produces space beyond that of its normal operations and beyond the phenomenological perception of its own visual range.

Despite all this technology the car is curiously inept at covering space in its urban environment. While it might have ‘no vulnerable point of entry’, a claim that is tested to the full when it is the subject of attack as it finds itself in the middle of an anti-globalization protest, it cannot really cover much distance, and certainly not with any grace. ⁶⁹ The customization carried out by Packer was in order to enhance its functionality as a mobile office and to increase security, and has nothing to do with the driving experience. Nor does the car seek out the open road. It spends the earlier parts of the novel stuck in traffic, with any potential automobility reduced to an immobility, and through the course of the novel the car is held up by a presidential motorcade, the anti-globalization protest, funeral procession and an art performance where 300 people lay naked in the street. Even where it can go faster it doesn’t:

Traffic was scant but the car kept to the daylong draggy pace. This is because Eric was in his seat talking through the open window to Torval, who walked alongside the automobile. ⁷⁰

The automobility system, car and roads, are returned to the pace of the 1865 locomotive act, where a vehicle was limited to 4 mph (and 2 mph in towns) and preceded by a man with a red flag.

The car not only produces space through its technology rather than through travel on the open road, and its reach in terms of finance is very broad indeed, but also maintains a constant material presence. Packer, sitting in the front seat of the limousine for the only time, asks his driver a question that he asks himself at the start of the novel but allows to remain unanswered: ‘These stretch limousines that fill the streets . . . Where are they parked at night? They need large tracts of space.’ ⁷¹ The pragmatic response confirms the endless circulation of the limousine in the Manhattan financial district, it is parked in an underground garage while Ibrahim, the driver, ‘drive[s] home through the stinking tunnel’. ⁷²

Although it may not fulfil the traditional function of the car in the novel, neither providing the way home or the way to escape from home, the fully networked car in Cosmopolis has a significant impact on the lives of the individuals who climb in and out of it. It desynchronizes work and life patterns, bringing in Jane Melman, his chief of finance from her morning run by calling her on her mobile phone and getting her to meet the car. It is her ‘day off, damn it’ and, as a single mother (although one with a nanny) a day she needs ‘desperately’. ⁷³ Their meeting involves the construction of functioning systems, whether for mobile phones or the network of roads, laws, economic circumstances, modes of production and consumer culture required for the traffic system to ‘work’. Co-presence, the physical meeting of people in the same place, becomes a process of negotiation, often characterized by tension, struggle and conflict rather than chance or long held arrangements.

The car and mobility

The car in Cosmopolis is finally associated with immobility as much as mobility, or rather its potential mobility is emphasized by its inability to go anywhere. The apparent automobility it provides doesn’t even get Packer for his haircut without getting attacked by demonstrators and finally shot by a stalker. The function of the car is to provide for a different sort of mobility; that of data and money, and can be located in part in Kingsley Dennis and John Urry’s vision of the future of automobility as expressed in After the Car. They identify four key drivers in the need to develop a changing future for the car: climate change, dwindling oil supplies, increased digitization and the production of virtual worlds and changes in populations. Their future is a world in which the car, the systems on which the car depends and the broader environment it finds itself in, adapt and change in light of flows of digitized information. Drawing on ‘complexity’ theory to support their ideas, they argue that a stable position of equilibrium cannot exist, and that ‘systems are in process, moving, unpredictable and responding and adapting to their environment. And that environment is itself changing and adapting.’ ⁷⁴ The car and road system has, they argue, potentially reached a ‘tipping point’ ⁷⁵ or a state of ‘self-organized criticality’ ⁷⁶ where change might occur on a large and unpredictable scale. Such change might result in, for example, an increased emphasis on locality, where workers, in a reverse of the 1950s process of suburbanization that separated work from home by the commute, remain at home. Change might also result in a reverse of the suburban sprawl and the introduction of high density housing where car use becomes unnecessary. ⁷⁷ Cosmopolis makes a mockery of such aspirations; Packer doesn’t drive to work in a car, but works in a car, keeping it running all day while going nowhere. His adaptations to his car don’t produce a low-carbon solution, but only serve to increase its weight through armouring. The car does not become de-privatized, an important element in future scenarios of a low-carbon city, but has an intensely private interior, guarded by security staff, and a place where not only his work life but also his sexual, medical and domestic life can take place in public but outside of public view. He takes everything with him, including his retinue of advisors, doctors and bodyguards. The car in Cosmopolis also, however, points to the future while mocking its aspirations. While the car in Cosmopolis is hardly in the intelligent managed transport system Dennis and Urry envisage, it is able to respond to its complex and changing environment because of this connectivity, and the infra red cameras are only one example. ⁷⁸

The novel is also explicit, though, about the ways that the networked car can interact with systems of finance, and contribute to the mobility of capital. And I would claim, and begin to conclude, that what the car in the novel represents is not the ability to move one person around one country, or the privacy of individualized transport, but through its connectivity to move money, or the promise of money in the futures markets, from country to country. Packer is working with what Kinski describes as ‘cyber capital’, money that operates outside of spatial boundaries, or recognizes no boundaries, and money that operates outside the normal functions of time. Kinski goes on to say: ‘It is cyber-capital that creates the future’ and ‘the present . . . is sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets’. ⁷⁹ Capital has not only gone global, and as David Harvey says in The Enigma of Capital, ‘the conquest of space and time . . . [has] long taken centre stage in the collective psyche of capitalist societies’, but can operate while it is on the move. ⁸⁰ The centre, as Yeats predicted, has not held, and as Ezra Pound cried out in the final unfinished Cantos, ‘I cannot make it cohere’. There is no sovereign power at the centre of the world, or evil emperor pulling the strings. It is a man in a car, stuck in a traffic jam and on his way to get a haircut, having a series of sexual and other physical encounters including a medical examination that tells him his prostate is asymmetrical. And the notion of the asymmetrical and its relationship to a complexity theory that challenges serial determinism begins to take on a further significance in Packer’s final conversation with Levin. While history might have told Packer that the yen could climb no further, he had failed to take account of all the information available to him. The daily medical examinations that had discovered his prostate as asymmetrical had also given him information that should have helped him to understand the ways currencies might behave. Packer’s use of the aesthetics of the organic to predict currency fluctuations, ‘the way signals from a pulsar in deepest space follow classical number sequences . . . which can describe the fluctuations of a given stock or currency’, failed to take account of the ‘lopsided’, the ‘thing that’s skewed a little’. ⁸¹

The clues lie in the patterns of the organic, and in their irregularity as well as their regularity, and the intelligent car in the digital future must plan its journey in the light of all available information. As complexity theory suggests, it must not just fit into the system but produce the system as it goes along. The car is therefore is not only part of the system of the road, a system approaching gridlock that the car tries to circumvent, but is also part of the system of international communications. It is a mobile that requires an engine and a driver, and one that can be inhabited. The car is not only mobile, but also constructs a mobility around itself.

This essay has tried to demonstrate, using one main example, the ways that contemporary literature has used ideas of automobility and the car. There are others. Sarah Waters in Night Watch uses ambulance driving in the Second World War to represent women’s freedom, and their engagement with the physical work during the bombing of London in the Second World War. In Baby No Eyes, by the New Zealand novelist Patricia Grace, the young couple build a car in order to escape the colonized present of everyday and try to rediscover a pre-colonial and aboriginal past on a trip that results in a car crash and the death of a child. The poems of Bill Griffiths explore the moving relationships between language and geography in poems that are not only nomadic in form but reflect the necessarily rootless nature of motorcycle gangs, the lightness of travel and the catastrophe of arrival. The early mainstream novels of Philip K. Dick reflect the changing spatial relationships of mid-century USA with the construction of the Interstate Highway and its impact on processes of suburbanization. Many of these works might predate DeLillo, but taken together, and as a series of examples, they begin to demonstrate the social and cultural impact of automobility and the automobile, and the different ways that spatial relationships are inscribed and reconfigured in an object that is always trying to transcend itself. ⁸²