Carol Vanderveer Hamilton

American fantasies of upward and outward mobility, endless space, vast and remote landscapes, and possessive, libertarian-style individualism are all closely linked to the automobile. Only a few decades ago, no American automobile was more desirable or iconic than a compact sports convertible with a powerful engine. Designed to rival European sports cars like the Porsche James Dean died in, the Ford Thunderbird, first manufactured in 1954, deliberately evoked the American continent—prairies, canyons, Native Americans. The T-bird convertible became the ideal automobile for that quintessentially American genre, the road movie, and as late as 1991 it was the vehicle driven by Thelma and Louise in their flight to Mexico. In the first decade of the new century the West is still where television ads are filmed, and the open road is still an American fantasy, but the popularity of the compact sports car has given way to that of the “light truck,” a category that includes the SUV, the minivan, and the pick-up truck. It is therefore not surprising that the culture industry has abandoned the muscle car for what some websites have dubbed the “extreme machine.”

...

Extreme machines have become the leviathans of American suburbs and highways. Larger every year, the extreme machine may, as the aforementioned title High and Mighty suggests, provide its driver with a sense of the marginality of smaller vehicles and, by extension, their drivers. He literally looks down on them, and therefore perhaps does so figuratively as well. The extreme machine confers upon its owner the sense of a powerful self, safe from the car-jackers of the urban wilderness, immune to the vicissitudes of fatal collisions, remote from involvement in the negligible existence of small beings like pedestrians and cyclists. Encased in this gigantic metal carapace, the driver imagines herself as menacing and invulnerable as Robocop. The fantasy of power conceals fantasies of fear: that the city is dangerous, that the only way to defend oneself from other drivers is to overwhelm them, that hostility is the norm and cooperation the exception. Thus the extreme machine manifests its driver’s own attitudes, but as psychological projections. It is the driver who feels hostile, isolated, frightened, and entitled, who scorns the considered opinions and reasonable needs of her fellow citizens.

“Symbolism,” wrote Charles Feidelson, “is the coloration taken on by the American literary mind under the pressure of American intellectual history” (43). Focusing on the literature of the American Renaissance, Feidelson considered such richly ambiguous literary symbols as Melville’s albino whale; the lilac, star, and bird of Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last by the Dooryard Bloom’d”; Hawthorne’s scarlet letter; Emerson’s book of nature and transparent eyeball; and Poe’s House of Usher. For all these writers, Feidelson writes, symbolism was a means of knowing and understanding the world—an epistemology. The meaning of any individual symbol was not static but “accreted” as various fictional characters observed and interpreted it. Our writers’ creative fascination with complex, resonant symbols, Feidelson proposed, distinguishes American literature from the more social and historical narratives of British and European literature.

In this article I am suggesting that Feidelson’s approach be appropriated for the contemplation and understanding of extra-literary phenomena like the extreme machine. As Russell Reising points out, Feidelson’s “historical premise—that symbolism arose at a particular historical moment —could generate semiotic analyses of the relationships between cultural texts (literature, advertising, political discourses and so on) and social contexts, even though the texts themselves purport to transcend social determination.” One might extrapolate from this passage to ask the following questions: How do popular mass-produced objects and trends take on symbolic weight in American culture? What connections might we make between these commodities and American literary texts that represent historical events, debates, and individual psychology?2 And more specifically, if also more whimsically, is there a secret symbolic relationship between Melville’s Moby-Dick and the extreme machine?