ATDDTA (6) 177

[Tore Rye Andersen]

bekah quoted:

>177: 16   "...with the difference now being the railroads which ran
>out over all the old boundaries, redefining the nation into exactly
>the shape and size of their rail network, wherever it might run to."

Railroads have always been an important metaphor for Pynchon, but the role 
of the railroads is probably more complex in AtD than in any previous 
Pynchon novels.
On the last pages of Lot 49, Oedipa walks down a stretch of railroad track 
and discovers her continuity with the rest of America:

"Becoming conscious of the hard, strung presence she stood on - knowing as 
if maps had been flashed for her on the sky how these tracks ran into 
others, others, knowing they laced, deepened, authenticated the great night 
around her." (Lot 49, 179)

The railroad in this quote is a positive presence, it's a network connecting 
Oedipa with fellow sufferers.
There are also plenty of railroads in GR, and in that novel, the railroad 
often functions as a metaphor for life/history itself, with all the points 
and switches standing in for the choices we have to make as we forge ahead. 
That metaphor is also richly present in AtD, e.g. as Yashmeen takes the 
train:

"Leaving the Südbahn, she gazed backward at iron convergences and receding 
signal-lamops. Outward and visible metaphor, she thought, for the complete 
ensemble of "free choices" that define the course of a human life. A few 
switching point every few seconds, sometimes seen, sometimes traveled over 
invisibly and irrevocably. From on board the train one can stand and look 
back, and watch it all flowing away, shining, as if always meant to be." 
(AtD, 811)

And on p. 845, the relentless march of European History is described as a 
murderous "locomotive running without lights or signals, unsettling as 
points thrown at the last minute".

Railroads in AtD are much more than metaphors for life/History/destiny or 
positive symbols of continuity, however: As implied in bekah's quote, 
railroads are the visible manifestations of and practical means to 
colonialization and modernity, and thus - in Pynchon's book - a sinister 
force, the technological equivalent of Mason and Dixon's visto. For Werfner,

"the primary geography of the planet is the rails, obeying their own 
necessity, interconnections, places chosen and by-passed, centers and 
radiations therefrom, grades possible and impossible, how linked by canals, 
crossed by tunnels and bridges either in place or someday to be, capital 
made material - and flows of power as well, expressed, for example, in 
massive troop movements, now and in the futurity" (AtD, 242)

And Renfrew, not surprisingly, mirrors Werfner's take on railroads and the 
Balkans:

"The railroads seem to be the key. If one keeps looking at the map while 
walking slowly backward across the room, at a certain precise distance the 
structural principle leaps into visibility [...] and beyond that the 
teleology at work, as the rail system grows toward a certain shape, a 
destiny - My God I'm starting to sound like Werfner." (AtD, 689)

Of the Trans-Siberian Railroad we hear:

"From a high enough altitude, as we have often observed, indeed that great 
project appears almost like a living organism, one dares to say a conscious 
one, with needs and plans of its own. For our immediate purposes, in opening 
up huge regions of Inner Asia, it can only make more inevitable Russian, and 
to a degree, European access to Shambhala" (AtD, 259)

- and as the railroad opens up shamanic Asia, the magic will of course be 
lost. So in AtD, this "steel proliferation across the World-Island" (567), 
this "considerable webwork of rail" which makes its way "across leagues of 
formerly unmarked Siberian forest and prairie" (795) is most often described 
as a conduit for the evils of capitalism and modernization. Whatever 
happened to that positive image of the railroad from the closing pages of 
Lot 49?

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