5 - Flying
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
Summary
And these pictures that flash through your consciousness as this magic of speed is enveloping you! They come from the mind's deepest recesses. They whirl from a darkness and live for an instant before you. Pictures from the past, and pictures from out of the time that is now upon you, and pictures perhaps of things to come.
Speed! Speed! Speed!
The wonder is upon you. It is carrying you into a greater world. You are living as you have never lived before … You have never grasped the strangeness of time – you have never pierced its mystery till now. (Kennedy 1919a: 115)
One of the many memorable motoring images in Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby is Nick Carraway's account of his drive across the Queensboro Bridge in Gatsby's ‘gorgeous car’: ‘with fenders spread like wings we scattered light through half Astoria’ (Fitzgerald 2008 [1925]: 51, 54). The extravagant styling of Gatsby's car – thought by commentators to be modelled on a 1922 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost – reminds us just how quickly early twentieth-century car design and manufacture turned to another mode of transportation – aviation – to symbolise and embody the experience of driving and passengering. As David Jeremiah has observed:
From the outset, flying along had a strong association with motoring. Austin had the winged wheel as its trademark. Chrysler had a winged helmet; and the Hillman and Aston Martin names were winged. At the same time, the artist-illustrators [most notably, Gordon Crosby – see Figure 5.1] worked to give a visual expression to the sensation of cars flying over the crest of a hill, with the driver struggling to retain control and keep the wheels on the ground. (Jeremiah 2007: 113)
Yet, as the texts discussed in this chapter reveal, the reason designers – as well as artists and writers – turned to the metaphor/motif of flying was almost certainly in order to capture the heightened cognitive awareness that motoring afforded alongside its novel physical sensations (see also Mom 2014: 649–50).
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- DrivetimeLiterary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness, pp. 156 - 201Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016