ATDDTA (6) : Home, 163-164

[Paul Nightingale]

Kit finds a kindred spirit in Fleetwood, who is also deemed surplus to
requirements: "They don't actually know I'm here." In this section Fleetwood
is the one person Kit can talk to, presumably as he continues to wander.
Colfax invited Kit to stay at "our cottage" (159) to meet Dittany, and
presumably offer him a successful liaison. Upon arrival Kit was
isolated--other than the brief encounters with Dittany, which effectively
underscored the absence of any interest in him being shown by others--and
hence the meeting with Fleetwood.

At "the top of a steep hill ... the mansion hidden in foliage somewhere
below" (164) Fleetwood reminisces, goes in search of his childhood. Already
the explorer, it seems, he "thought there had to be some portal into another
world"; and when he says he "couldn't imagine any continuous landscape that
would ever lead naturally from where I was to what I was seeing" he
describes something that sounds--in Metzian terms--like the experience of
cinema, the spectator identifying with the camera that provides the image on
the screen ahead. Going back to the concluding paragraph of the preceding
section (163), we might see Kit as a film spectator. If indeed the novel can
be read as a dissection of modernity--and the current chapter revisits the
ongoing differentiation of American capitalism from a European ancien
regime--then one key characteristic of modernity was cinematic vision (in
whatever form).

When Fleetwood talks about "out there" he differentiates the explorer from
the colonialist/capitalist/tourist: the former are "citizens of the trail"
(165), always moving forward, whereas the latter seek locations for
"expensive hotels" (and therefore the transformation of 'there' into a kind
of 'here'). At the end of the previous section Kit moved forward; he wasn't
dissuaded by the absence of "wall switches" (signifiers of a mastery of
nature, bringing light to darkness). His interest in (one might say,
preoccupation with) maths (what Colfax calls "a semi-religious attachment",
159) is similar to that of the "citizens of the trail" (165).

Consequently, we can see in Fleetwood a kind of idealism; of course he can
afford it, and one should recall that he doesn't have to "[find] waterfalls"
(ie, to make a living). He questions the importance of 'home'; and one might
speculate as to the effect this might have on Kit, who has himself
sacrificed home/family in order to make his pact with Scarsdale Vibe.