ATDDTA (6) 177

[bekah]

This is sooo cool,  Tore.  Thanks.  I suspected as much but didn't 
have the resources or background,  much less the way with words, to 
get that out.   I had only a vague cognition waiting to be accessed. 
New grids on the old sphere,  delineating territoriality.   Dogs 
piss.  Men  pound stakes and spikes.

Bekah

At 11:28 AM +0200 4/10/07, 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?
>
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