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PARTISAN REVIEW
In
The Life of the Automobile,
which has recently appeared in
English for the first time, Ehrenburg appraises the modern energies
through the effects of technology.
It
is a consistent rendering of the
Constructivist ideas of the 1920s-a nonfiction novel made up of
anecdotes garnered from newspapers, public records, the history of
objects. As the title suggests, the car is the main character, more alive
than the human characters.
Ahighway. A long string of cars. Inside the cars, of course, there were
people. The man was driving because he was a doctor. That one
because he was after a girl. That one was selling lightbulbs. And that
one had decided to kill a jeweler. All of them were driving, the cars
were driving, and the cars were driving because they were cars.
Most of
The Life of the Automobile
is concerned with the
capitalist incarnation of the car: how the workers are exploited, how
consumerism grows, how great entrepreneurs like Citroen, Morgan,
and Deterding think and operate. But Ehrenburg's indictment of the
machine age is not confined to the West. In the last section of the novel,
Ehrenburg describes Boris
K.,
a Soviet oil executive. After his girlfriend
commits suicide by throwing herself under his car,
K.
decides: "He
mustn't think of Musya. Musya no longer existed. Period. Paragraph.
Only one thing existed: his work, petroleum-for all time." What is
remarkable is that Ehrenburg-in 1929-wanted to show the similarity
between Communist Russia and the capitalist West. He realized that
cars, oil, rubber were the real forces to be reckoned with in a machine–
dominated world, whatever the ideology of a particular country.
At first glance,
The Life of the Automobile
might seem to resemble
Futurist fiction, but where Marinetti welcomed a human sensibility
"renewed" and a world transformed by technology generally and by the
car in particular, Ehrenburg's novel mocks the machine age and
pictures the car as a scourge. But although Ehrenburg sets out
to
denounce technological progress, he revels in the demonic beauty of
cars. Indeed, the rhythms of
The Life of the Automobile
are that of a
car on a highway or of a teletype machine.
It
is a montage novel, a
production in the industrial mode-as are the most original documen–
tary films of the period, like Dziga Vertov's
Kino Pravda. The Life of
the Automobile
is, in fact, supposed to be a documentary. "This is not
a novel." Ehrenburg asserts, "This is a stock market bulletin and this is
a political history. There is no room for poetic digressions. " The
modernist speciality is finding poetry in what had been perceived as
nonpoetic, and
The Life of the Automobile
is suffused with the poetry
of the car and of industrial civilization-a poetry that both seduces
Ehrenburg and appalls him.
