Driving into the night: traffic jams and tragedies, a literary approach

A bit off topic this. A quirky look at the tragedy of traffic jams by a good friend of mine:

By Owen Davies

`The dream of freedom can quickly sour to nightmare, as the defiant boast of the modern (`I take value from myself alone!’) dwindles into a cry of anguish (`I am so lonely in this universe!’).’

Terry Eagleton1

Social and economic science has long appropriated the literary form of tragedy as a metaphor to describe the traffic jam. However, I will argue, whilst the correct metaphor has been selected it has in fact been misappropriated due to a misunderstanding of what a tragedy in literature actually is. What they are describing equates to an all together different literary form.

This misappropriation has serious consequences in the field of policy. It leads to prescriptive, conservative policies which merely tinker with the problem or make it worse. They are either supply-side (more roads) that threaten accelerated environmental destruction or demand-side (road-pricing) that threaten the overnight ruination of huge swathes of the middle classes.

Terry Eagleton’s acclaimed and contemporary theory of tragedy outlined in his book Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic 2, I will argue, can give us insight into the modern phenomenon of the traffic jam where sociological and economic theories have often left us cold.

The idea here is that literature and literary theory has developed a better understanding of the relationship between agent and structure than the social sciences which have long been embroiled in an interminable debate between the advocates of agency and the champions of structure. 3

In literature, character and plot are dialectically related, identical opposites struggling with each other for resolution. An author or dramatist is well aware that only a certain kind of character will make the chosen plot work in the required way. Get it wrong and either the plot becomes unfeasible or the character unbelievable.

Before looking at Eagleton’s theory of the tragic I would outline two examples from sociology and economics that describe the `tragedy’ of the traffic jam.

In 1966, the economist Alfred Khan developed a thoroughly structuralist theory of the traffic jam which owed a great deal to game theory. 4 In Khan’s `tyranny of small decisions’ there is absolutely no room for human agency in establishing or escaping this tyranny. Khan’s theory can be applied to economics, war, in fact a great number of things. Khan applied it to the traffic jam using the withdrawal of train services in Ithica, New York as more and more took to the once empty roads, despite the fact that the majority claimed to want to keep them, as an example of such post hoc decision making.

Two years later came G. Harding’s influential 1968 paper `The Tragedy of the Commons’ which dealt with population.5 Simply stated, it is in the interests of say a group of goat-herders with common ownership of a piece of land to maintain a certain equilibrium in use of that land. However, as individuals it is in their interest to cram as many of their own goats on to the land as possible and, as they all do this, all the goats and subsequently they themselves, starve to death. The traffic jam is thought to be a par excellence modern example of such a tragedy whereby empty roads are soon utilised way beyond their capacity. Harding’s answer to the tragedy is a` fundamental extension of morality’ though it is not clear how this is to be achieved.

Both approaches are hyper-structural leaving little room for meaningful agency and so a more appropriate literary metaphor would be the farce where plot so dominates the characters that they might as well not be there. In farce, the dazzling logic of the plot renders the nature of the characters near meaningless.

At the heart of tragic drama is the hubris of the main character. A character with inflated, even arrogant pride and an overestimated sense of his or her own power. It is important that they are seen as the authors of their own downfall. Aristotle was one of the first and certainly the most influential thinkers to attempt a theoretical grasp of poetics and, of tragedy, he authoritatively declared that it can only depict those with power and high status. With the advent of modern democracy traditionalist thinkers, at least, have declared `the death of tragedy’. Eagleton shows this to be a type of hubris in its own right. Democracy is, after all, only a legitimising of differences, an acknowledgement that we all have different and opposed interests, a breeding ground for hubris if not of kings.

For Eagleton, explained playwright Howard Brenton in his review of Sweet Violence, `tragedy did not die in the 20th century, but mutated into modernism’. 7

Brenton further elucidates on Eagleton’s thinking: `There is a tragic predicament at the very centre of contemporary western culture.

`Hegel defends the Enlightenment with a theory of struggle between reason and what he calls ``the night of the world’’, the chaotic lava of hatred and irrationality within us which can destroy us and what we build, but which is nevertheless the source of enormous energy. For Hegel, our history is about our attempts to negate the destructive negativity of ``the night of the world’’, and turn it to productive thought and social construction.

`Eagleton finds this reinforced by Freud’s vision in Civilisation and Its Discontents in which the death instinct, Thanatos, struggles forever within us with Eros, love, the instinct to build and prosper. Our modern tragedy is that Eros makes us desire individual freedom against all else. But we have made a Faustian bargain with the extremes of the late capitalist world, in which freedom hovers over the nightmare of chaotic social breakdown: ``What if reaching for one’s own fulfilment is the crippling, betrayal and scapegoating of others . . ?’’.’

Where, in this modern world, could we find a better example of the urge to build and prosper coming into conflict with the death instinct than the traffic jam? Millions of people jump into their cars in the morning full of the desire to go out and make a living for themselves and their families and then sit alone for hours on end in a metal coffin vegetating away to the inane chatter of DJs. Having put in a hard day’s work they then climb back into their cars to waste even more precious time such that when they arrive home they find the whole purpose of their labours have either gone to bed or do not recognise them.

Obviously, somebody sitting moribund in their motionless vehicle is not exactly great drama but the consequential social and economic dislocation is, and tragic they are too.

And what of the Faustian bargain that led to this nightmare. The rise of the motor car was certainly not an example of Khan’s post hoc decision making resulting from small decisions but was a conscious effort by late capitalism to prolong its existence. The transport infrastructure was essential but unprofitable and operated by an increasingly well organised working class. In return for the undermining of public transport, particularly the railways, the carrot of leafy suburbs and the open road, a car owning democracy if you will, was dangled in front of the vain middle classes. Their weight was to be used to undermine the growing threat to the domination of the 20th century monopolies.

A massive programme of road building was swiftly followed by a ruinous programme of railway closures and the car was relentlessly sold as the ultimate commodity for the fetishist. Now you could live miles away from the polluted area you worked not to mention the hideous dwellings of the workers.

Every good tragedy is accompanied usually by violence and crime and often ends with everybody dieing. Whilst the social and economic dislocation caused by the traffic jam is tragic, the damage done to the environment is criminal. In escaping smaller pockets of pollution and heading for the suburbs the middle classes have succeeded only in turning pollution into a global phenomenon from which no one can escape. In literary terms that is known as ironic.

Social and economic scientists like Khan and Harding owe the genesis of their work to an observation by Aristotle from his writings on politics: `That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.’ 9

This has long been appropriated by neo-liberals as proof that if a thing cannot be privatised it is not worth bothering with or, if it is worth bothering with it must be privatised. So far efforts to privatise the global environment have failed therefore, it would surely be better if we took Aristotle’s words as a warning and stopped the long drive into `the night of the world’.

This is a discussion paper as opposed to a policy paper and so I will leave it at that. Suffice to say that I am not advocating some kind of neo-medievalism. In fact, it is only the incredible technological advances associated with the computer and the internet which allow us to travel virtually and arrive instantly that raises the possibility of a different approach.

Ultimately, however, changing the way people move is going to require a political rather than a technical solution. At the moment the traffic jam is a tragedy, let’s not make it a farce.


1. Terry Eagleton is currently Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at University of Manchester.
2. (2002) Eagleton, T: Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Blackwell.
3. Structuralism seems to be all about history mechanically arriving at system whilst post-structuralism is a purely political explanation of system.
4. Khan, Alfred E. (1966) The tyranny of small decisions: market failures, imperfections and the limits of economics. Kylos 19: 23-47.
5. Hardin, G. (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons, Science 162, 1243-1248.
6. The Death of Tragedy
7. Brenton H. (2002) The Guardian, September 21.
8. Ibid.
9. Aristotle Politics Book II.