ATDDTA (6) 177
bekah
bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net
Tue Apr 10 19:11:50 CDT 2007
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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