With the speed of modern time, railway accidents involving humans and animals became a common theme of literary texts, travel books, journal reports, legal discussions, as well as photography and motion pictures. One early depiction of moving trains, J. M. W. Turner’s painting “Rain, Steam and Speed” (1844), captures the inherent danger posed by railways to wildlife, by inserting the shadow of a startled hare running on the tracks in front of the locomotive. As Wolfgang Schievelbusch notes in his seminal The Railway Journey (1977), in the 19th and early 20th centuries, “the train journey entailed a sensation of violence and potential destruction,” evoking responses of subliminal fear, anxiety, powerlessness in the face of the potential disaster (129-130). In Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982), the “nineteenth-century paradigm of order,” set on the predictability of the machine “running on a fixed schedule along a prescribed route,” does not eliminate its “demonic potentialities:” the ways in which the railway is epitomized as a site of potential clashes, sudden threats, and fatal endings (159).
Accidents may also be interpreted as an allegory for the sweeping and ever-accelerating speed of early fossil capitalism, as many nuanced, localized crashes are inevitable, gruesome, and disastrous. In Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (2013), Hartmut Rosa reflects on railroads as a catalyst for new modes of conceptualizing social change. With the incremental speed achieved by trains after the 1830s, acceleration became gradually entangled with the idea of the accident, prompting the need to reconsider the limits of acceleration — both on the tracks and in social structures (82). In Peter Sloterdijk’s La Mobilisation Infinie (2011), the fatal accident derived from the permanent mobilization of modernity is conceived as an event where the terms of “civilizational panic” are defined and the horizon of catastrophe is shaped, triggering imaginative alternatives within the paradigm of acceleration or, as Sloterdijk puts it, as “learning with the catastrophe” (96).
We believe that the debate surrounding the early instantiations of the accident caused by speed is more relevant today than ever before, as it dialogues with ongoing discussions on environmental change, processes of world-shaping, and the interaction between humans, non-humans, and technological bodies. To a large extent, railway accidents create models of understanding for what Amitav Ghosh sees as the great derangement, the disaster of environmental manipulation instigated by the imperial circulations of commodities spiked around the same time of the exportation of railroads to non-Western colonial spaces (The Great Derangement, 2016; 125). As with Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital (2016), we look into the history of coal-powered speed to understand its intensifying embroilment with the environment, for which “the great derailment” looms as another metaphor of the Anthropocene.
Aimée Boutin will start by addressing the tensions between the early formulations of the train as the “iron horse” — a disturbing “copulation” of the natural and the artificial — and the anxieties brought to existence by the urge to “tame” the technological machines over the tracks. In the context of 19th-century France, Boutin thinks that poetry captures the earliest and most nuanced clashes. From Alfred de Vigny’s “La Maison du berger,” a response to the fatal derailment on the Paris-Versailles line (May 8, 1842), to various poems by Hermance Lesguillon, Pierre Dupont, Maxime Du Camp, and Louisa Siefert, Boutin will show how poetic form, rhythm, and metaphor characterize the confrontation of humans with animal/mechanical locomotion and the poets’ existential questions, “where is humanity headed?”
John Schranck will then look at the invention of the train whistle as a direct consequence of the clashes between trains and animals, and how it led to the scientific finding of the Doppler Effect, the sonic quintessence in the experience of modernity. Seeking to unravel the paradoxical entanglements of the train whistle, whose sound has come to signify precisely the deadly collision it attempts to prevent, Schranck analyzes the zoo- and anthropomorphic depictions of the train whistle in John Cheever, William Faulkner, and Johnny Cash, which blend nostalgia with the fear of a modernity lethally accelerated. At the crossroads of science studies, literary interpretation, and cultural studies, the discordant modern soundscape inaugurated by the train whistle gives a fresh insight into the paradox and the affective apprehension of the accident.
Lastly, Ana Ilievska will foreground the railroad dispositif as a scene for accidents that occur onboard of the moving train, now a site for chance encounters, events, unpredictability, and contingency. Focusing on the works of Émile Zola, Eça de Queirós, and Luigi Pirandello, in which the crises of the railroad accident coincide with the crises of social and personal identity, Ilievska is able to establish a rich array of relationships to grapple with the accelerated bodies, and show how the sophisticated, controlled machine/subjectivity could suddenly go wrong.
Through different yet reverberated approaches to railway accidents, these three papers deepen the conceptualization of the accident and rail modernity. We would like to highlight the complementarity of the three papers in historical, geographic, and methodological senses, aiming to foster a multilayered and rigorous conversation that cuts across disciplinary boundaries. If railroad studies open up new perspectives on connectivity, transnationalism, global exchange, and environment-shaping, we want to make sure that our panel would be reflective of this highly generative framework. Focalizing on this theme of intensity and potentiality, we want to sparkle discussions on topics that are critical to understanding modernity and relatable to the most urgent matters today.