The high-speed way in which we travel about in the world profoundly affects how we envision that world and the creatures upon it. In an essay, “Like standing on the edge of the world and looking away into heaven”: Picturing Chinese labor and industrial velocity in the Gilded Age in Common-Place vol. 7, no. 3: April 2007, Deidre Murphy talks about how it looked to the first American high-speed transcontinental travelers:
In late 1869, just months after the transcontinental railroad linkage was completed at Promontory Point, Utah, a young illustrator for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper was ordered by his publisher to make a trip across the nation on a railway sketching tour.
… The scenes created during … these cross-country assignments revealed the vastness of the national landscape, the means by which industrial achievement allowed Americans to traverse the nation with great speed, and the ways representations of Chinese workers were essential to that formula.
… Text accompanying the illustration describes passengers experiencing the railroad in the Sierras as it “hangs over deep valleys, that make the brain whirl when the eye is turned into their depths; and again it passes along high embankments, and shoots suddenly into tunnels that pierce solid rock, and save a high ascent to the skies.” These lines reveal an acute awareness of the rushing landscape. Here a sense of speed is conveyed with a vertigo-inspired intensity. In this illustrated article, the velocity of the train provides for a new kind of “panoramic” vision in which elements of the landscape—such as mountains, valleys, and rivers—acquire a new connection to one another. In this context, Chinese immigrants become one feature on—but not necessarily “of”—this novel, passing scene. Mesmerized and physically “sidelined” by the train, they linger somewhere between the landscape all around them and the speeding railroad cars before them.
What is happening here, in relation to the sidelined workers, is a kind of visual transference. One of the attributes of mechanical speed, as cultural historians have explained, is its ability to become a new space upon the plane of a constantly receding picturesque landscape. It was not simply the case that traveling at speed inspired new sensations. Additionally, and far more radically, mechanical velocity created a new realm of sensation—one that was experienced as wholly separate from and intrinsically different from its surroundings. Becker’s illustration reveals that this transformation of mechanical speed into a new form of space, one of the most basic experiences of industrial modernity, was also marked by considerations of the racialized, laboring immigrant presence that made such a shift possible—and particularly in relation to an ambivalent awareness of Chinese presence. In this image, then, Chinese workers are depicted less as the creators of that industrial space and more as its visualized parameters. Like sentinels of industrial change posted between the locomotive and the natural landscape, they witness and react to the mechanical velocity of the railroad, even as it leaves them behind.
If Chinese figures helped reinforce the notion of industrial speed as its own new kind of space, what sort of meaning was that space imbued with in relation to their watchful forms? How did the returned gaze of Chinese laborers function in relation to envisioned awareness of industrial speed? In another illustration, published in 1878, railroad laborers are again depicted pausing in their work (something they probably did far more within the pages of the periodical than in real life) in order to stare at a passing train (fig. 2). As the engine passes them on a tight curve, the workers are hemmed in on one side by its shiny mass. A rider near the conductor’s compartment regards them while various other figures atop the trailing cars mimic his pose. Meanwhile, on the other side of the seated workers, the approach of another figure, probably a foreman, is made ominous by the gun he carries and the dog he leads. Here again, the static and liminal pose of the observing Chinese laborers is pronounced. It is actually even more emphatic than it was in Becker’s earlier sketch because its composition is more constricted. The workers’ pose is enforced not only by the steeply angled mountain landscape but also by the imposing presence of both the train and the gun-toting figure.
And, again, the matrix of locomotive speed and natural grandeur is highlighted in juxtaposition to the stationary laborers. Establishing the contrast to the workers’ stillness, the text announces, “we have reached Cape Horn, the steep jutting promontory which frowns at the head of the Great American Canon [sic], and the train swings round it on a dizzily narrow grade, a wall of rock towering above, and the almost vertical side of the abyss sweeping down below.” “[I]t is like standing,” the reporter concluded, “on the edge of the world and looking away into heaven—a heaven where verily ‘God hath made all things new.’”
Needless to say, this separation by speed is many times more prevalent today than it was back then. To move slowly, and look at things slowly requires an act of will. And there’s no way of knowing if we can voluntarily re-envision what we already know from our high-speed life.
-Julie
