Entering the System

Scholars of modernism are accustomed to thinking about how technologies reorganise perception of time and space. Subway systems built from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth transformed passengers’ perceptions of city space in modernist metropoles such as New York, London and Paris. Through their spatial organisation and the behaviours they encourage, modern subways model a new kind of movement that is at once physical and imaginative. Though these subways differ based on local geography, track layout and the like, they share a key structure: they connect distant points within city space without showing passengers the intervening sights and so ask the passengers to construct a kind of flexible, telescoping mental image of the city. The art and literature of the subway produced in this period reflects this modern experience formally and thematically through its unexpected shortcircuits and transfers between seemingly distant places and registers of language. In The Difficulties of Modernism, Leonard Diepeveen identifies the many ways that modernist writing has been characterised by its compression (2013: 57). From posters to poems, the cultural production of this period argues for the parallels between the spatial compression of the subway and the rhetorical and narrative compressions of modernist literature. Both ask us to navigate underground connections.

Following Wiebe Bijker, I investigate in this chapter how the early twentieth-century subway fits together as a ‘sociotechnical ensemble’ comprising mechanical, cultural, social and behavioural components (Bijker 1997: 274), an ensemble in which shared spatial and mechanical traits interact in complex ways with the particularities of urban space and history. Self-consciously experimental writing of the period, especially poetry, illustrates and explores the ways that the subway builds up a sense of place. In the sections that follow, I consider the ways that modern poets use the subway to represent new forms of mobility and perception, new attitudes toward the crowd and new citational practices, among other changes. Where conventional forms of wayfinding have failed, both subway riding and subway writing model new forms of orientation.

To start with a definition of terms: in order to understand the subway’s relation to modernism, it is helpful to understand what is meant precisely by a subway.