From horse carriage to car. History, form, and nature of a literary <i>topos</i> (Woolf and Musil)

This article analyses a literary tradition of accidents tied to automobility. It first focuses on horse carriage accidents and how literature took a perennial interest in the way such accidents created new and unforeseen human relations. It then concentrates on the opening scenes of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften where cars are central not because of movement but paradoxically due to malfunction, breakdowns, and stopping. The article reads these two scenes in the light of the history of horse carriage accidents, as well-established topos, which they both rely on as a recognisable literary form and which they also develop according to the new technology of the car. These analyses lead to a Deleuzian argument on the difference between the nature and the function of the modernist literary car. The function of the car is to move people from A to B. Its nature on the contrary, what it is capable of on its own, is in fact to break down. It is this difference that the modernist novel not only explores but also makes the foundation of its narratives.