ABSTRACT
A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath - a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit. (1973a, 21)
One way or another, the motif of the car haunts the twentieth-century imagination, offering a fascinating index of successive dominant social, intellectual and cultural concerns. If it is perhaps the case, as the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard argues, that: 'All you need to know about American society can be gleaned from an anthropology of its driving behaviour' (1988, 54), then it is equally probable that much of what one needs to know about the general intellectual temper of twentieth-century society can be gleaned from its 'driving' literature.
