Identificación de los tres subgenomas presentes en el citotipo hexaploide

To be carless in Scott Fitzgerald's world is to be a social nonentity - a point powerfully made in the novels This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. We have already seen how, in the latter, Anthony Patch's agency is circumscribed by his lack of an automobile. In This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine is similarly frustrated by a lack of motive power whilst in Gatsby garage owner George Wilson's economic, social, and personal delinquency is reinforced by his carlessness. However, it is in the short fiction 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz' that Fitzgerald most profoundly links carlessness with social estrangement. Whilst John Unger (for which read 'hunger') looks longingly enough at the Washington's magnificent Rolls-Pierce, Percy Washington's apology to his friend for the buggy ride to the machine confirms Fitzgerald's intention to foreground automobile ownership as a sign of social agency: ' It wouldn't do' , he says, 'for those Godforsaken fellas in Fish to see [the] automobile. ' (SS: 1 86) There is a class of beings, then, for whom motor-car ownership is quite impossible.

As we have seen too, motor-cars are signs of solipsism and social agency in E. M. Forster's fiction, but whilst the large and luxurious automobiles of both Howards End and A Passage to India

(Henry Wilcox uses his car to pursue the traditional aristocratic entertainments of hunting and fishing) F orster is even more inclined than his American counterpart to use the absent car to make a statement about social agency. In Howards End, for example, Leonard Bast dreams of 'a most magnificent place at Streatham and a 20-h.p. Fiat' . (62) However, the inflexibility of the Edwardian social hierarchy is still such that these relatively modest trophies of cultural conquest elude him and he, like members of the servant class, must walk or take public transport. Of course, a similar set of transportation demarcations was transferred to India. However, on the sub-continent the 'rules' governing transit were organised along racial, rather than economic, lines.

In A Passage to India then, an entrenched set of values demand that Indians travel in tongas or by bicycle, whilst Europeans are characteristically conveyed in private carriages or in private motor-cars. Hamidullah Begum, an Indian lawyer acutely aware of the plight of his people under European colonialism, says that it is impossible for Indians to be friends with Englishmen. He illustrates his point by making sardonic reference to the fact that, in the weeks following Turton's arrival, he had once had the honour to ride in the Collector's private carriage. The veracity of Hamidullah' s cultural assessment is evidenced in numerous ways throughout the narrative, but is particularly and humiliatingly apparent when Aziz, as approaching Major Callendar's compound in a tonga, fears 'a gross snub ... the

inevitable snub' at the hands of European officialdom. ( 1 8) He

remembers a 'case' when 'an Indian gentleman had driven up to an official's house and been turned back by the servants and been told to approach more suitably - . . . '. (ibid) It becomes immediately apparent that, in sign of his servitude, the Indian is to approach on foot; that his arrival in a vehicle of any kind (even a tonga) would denote some sort

of cultural audacity. The whole scene, moreover, is a subtle

representation of General Camp bell's 1 9 1 8 'salaaming-order' , an edict

which effectively forbade any Indian to ride a wheeled conveyance in the presence of European dignitaries. 165

So, whilst the legal machinery of the Raj sought to reinforce the colonisers' cultural superiority, the Nawab Bahadur is excused its most

humiliating excesses since, until the trial anyway, he is in league with the European authorities. It is an alliance variously signalled although the Nawab's transport privileges, including his ownership of a motor­ car, underscore best his moral complicity in the denigration of his people. Conversely, immediately after the trial that so embarrasses the Raj, Adela Quested is denied the mechanised conveyance which bore her to the court-house, her carlessness symbolising her newly acquired 'untouchable' status - something she now shares with Fielding. She is therefore forced to leave the court with the latter in a victoria coach. In this highly political novel then, it is pertinent to assert that the ownership of a motor-car is an overt sign of cultural hegemony and that carlessness foregrounds second-class citizen status.

Other modern writers too, are alert to the cultural significance of the absent automobile. In Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway, for example, Peter Walsh, having been rejected by Clarrissa, stares into the showroom of an automobile purveyor and dreams of a machine that might rescue him from his emotional situation and restore his damaged ego. Walsh's carlessness therefore appears to confirm his inadequacy as a lover and, moreover, his failure as a man. In the same novel, a despairing Rezia Smith contemplates what life with her husband might have been like (and indeed could still be) given a cure for his psychological condition. She muses that Septirnus ' . . . might have been a clerk. .. might end with a house in Purley and a motor-car ... ' . (93) For

Rezia, as for Leonard Bast, such is the essential paraphernalia of life, the motor-car a clear sign of middle class normalcy; its absence paradoxically emblematic of non-being.

However, as both Forster and Fitzgerald are at pains to point out, those who seek to invest their lives with meaning through identification with technology have it all wrong. In the texts of both writers then, technologies of all kinds, and especially motor-cars, are presented as symbolic indictments of the early twentieth century. Indeed, while Forster and Fitzgerald foreground that the motor-car robs us fmancially and socially, they also reinforce that, as a component of the modern technical order, it robs us intellectually and emotionally. The price of too strong an identification with the wheels of progress, they argue, is

our very status as responsive, feeling, and humane beings who have the ability to connect with others.