The airship as floating signifier

I'm been thinking about airships today, after I finished Jean-Christophe Valtat's Aurorama. The book itself is decent but a bit disappointing. An absolutely killer set-up--alternative history that takes place in an Art Deco, steam-punk pastiche of about seven or eight different European cities (dubbed New Venice) located near the North Pole, with anarchist revolution, police in top hats and capes, and garbagemen wearing Carnival-style bird masks--that is somewhat marred by Valtat's decision to wear his politics on his sleeve (I'm starting to think that this is near-universal prediliction of modern French male writers, particularly when they decide to go "slumming" into genre fiction) and a plot that doesn't really get going until about 200 pages into the thing. Also, Valtat is French but wrote this in English, which means that the dialogue is pretty stilted at times. But the cover says this is the first in a series, so I have hopes.

Anyhow. The story features an airship, which reminded me a number of other books/stories that have airships (short story by M. Chabon in a McSweeney's collection, that huge thing by Pynchon a couple of years ago, Pullman's Northern Lights trilogy). And then I did some (very cursory) research at the local Borders and online, and realized that steam-punk is rife with airships or zeppelins or whatnot. Which in turn provoked the question: what it is that is so appealing about airships? I mean, they seem to touch a chord with so many readers of these books, and they certainly do so with me, but maybe in a manner that makes me distrust myself: that nostalgic, romanticizing part of me that wants to remember all the beautiful aspects of a world I never lived in and to ignore the day to day drudgeries and evils of that world.

Airships are a part of modern technology that we have passed by, mostly because we found something that does what they do, but only better. Thus they appeal to folks like me, who are conflicted about modernity: they flatter our conservative side, the idea that once things were more elegant, more civilized, more interesting, but also celebrate some of the fundamental aspects of the modern human being. They speak to a breaking of barriers, a lifting of ourselves out of the ordinary--or the seemingly necessary--that technology makes possible. They take us off our earth-bound lives, let us seen things anew. This is what modernity promises. But then it gives us lots of other things too--pollution, a rat race that seems it can only get faster, crazy new ways to kill ourselves. Airships seem to signify a moment that we have lost, when we could have put a stop to some of the really pathological elements of the modern world. They are all things good about technology and none bad. Crystal goblets, jazz music, urbane and witty dinner companions. They don't emit exhuast, or don't seem to. Like luxury liners, or the Orient Express, they allow us the image of cosmopolitan travel, but at a sane pace, and for the right reasons. It is significant that villains almost never come from airships. Indeed, in both the Pynchon and Valtat works, they allow for a kind of utopian vision of democracy as joyful and only slightly dangerous anarchy.

The lie of the steam-punk zeppelin is that the brake on innovation was ever possible. Modernity doesn't respect the kinds of limits that the airship represents. The whole point of the modern world-view is that limits are intolerable: that is its demonic genius, both what is wonderful and horrifying about it. The airship suggests, pleasantly, that our world and that our technology didn't have to be like this. But of course it did, once we accepted that world's, and its technology's, basic premise: things can always be better. It was not inevitable that the airplane would supplant the airship, but it was inevitable that something would. Which is why trains and steamships, despite their similarities to the airship, do not feature so prominently in these alternative universes. We know why they've largely disappeared as travel technologies. Not because of some dramatic disaster in New Jersey 80 years ago, but just because they were too damned slow. They are, to use some Barthean terminology, history, and not myth.