ATDDTA (6) 177(railroads)

[Joseph T]

On Apr 10, 2007, at 5:28 AM, Tore Rye Andersen wrote:

> 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?
>
In lot 49  perhaps the railroads may be seen to parallel the  
alternate postal system. Once competitive with other forms of  
transport  as Thurn and Taxis were with state mail, the rails have  
become secondary to Interstates and Air transport and become a kind  
of preterite system as Big Oil has become the colonizing and imperial  
global force.
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