AtDTdA (9): 242: Today's kick-ass question

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

             Today's kick-ass essay question:
             Discuss the significance of the railway lines to 
             Renfrew/Werfner, AtD, and/or Pynchon.  Pay 
             special attention to the idea of "flows of power"; 
             Renfrew says this can be expressed as "massive 
             troop movements", but note also that railways 
             help facilitate trade, and strong trading partners 
             rarely go to war with one another.  (Of course 
             they often team up and go to war against some 
             other team....)  Also consider the idea of 
             rail-worthiness.  Who decides?  Super-scholars 
             may choose to make connections with Pynchon's 
             other work (COL49 and M&D come immediately 
             to mind).

Well, first off let's all thank Jasper for leading off in high style and with 
plenty of cross-references. I'm no "super scholar", though Wile E. 
Coyote's "E-Vile" "Super Genius" seems to come to mind. . . .

http://looneytunes.warnerbros.com/stars_of_the_show/wile_roadrunner/wile_story.h
tml

Plenty more at youtube, can't find the cartoon myself, but it's in there, 
somewhere, I can smell it from here.

There's three Rail theme'd episodes that come to mind, the first opens 
Gravity's Rainbow inside a railcar rolling through a bombing, perhaps 
the transmitted thoughts of one who fell victim to a railway bombing as 
inscribed on the dreamscape of some unfortunate out at P.I.E.S.C.E.S.:

         A screaming comes across the sky. It has 
         happened before, but there is nothing to compare 
         it to now.

         It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's 
         all theater. There are no lights inside the cars. No 
         light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron 
         queen, and glass somewhere far above that would 
         let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid 
         of the way the glass will fall---soon---it will be a 
         spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming 
         down in total blackout, without one glint of light, 
         only great invisible crashing. GR 3

And it quite goes on, and makes ever so much more sense in the wake 
of reading Against the Day. In particular the passage we're reading now.
Probably some of the same cars were used in AtD, but they're quite a 
bit more worn and frayed by now, often rolling on the very same lines, 
through the same towns and countrysides.

The second when Oedipa crosses the tracks at the end of COL 49:

         She walked down a stretch of railroad track 
         next to the highway. Spurs ran off here and 
         there into factory property. Pierce may have 
         owned these factories too. But did it matter now 
         if he'd owned all of San Narcisco? San Narciso was 
         a name; an incident among our climatic records of 
         dreams and what dreams became among our 
         accumulated daylight, a moment's squall-line or 
         tornado's touchdown among the higher, more 
         continental solemnities---storm-systems of group 
         suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence. 
         There was the true continuity, San Narcisco had 
         no boundries. No one knew yet how to draw them. 
         She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making 
         sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never 
         suspecting that the legacy was America. COL49, 147

And that is, in its way, the turning point for the book, the point where 
Oedipa was broken down by the Tristero. The sequence goes on for 
four more [exquisite] pages, and is the penultimate scene of the 
novel. The Train, the Railways, tie lines, all given pride of place, 
rather outsized and a little bit harrowing in the immensity of its 
enclosure. with no way for Oedipa to go on, save "as an alien, 
unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia." COL 49, 151

The third is located about six pages before we meet up with Geli Tripping in GR.

         If you see a train this evening
         Far away against the sky,
         Lie down in your wooden blanket,
         Sleep, and let the train go by.

         Trains have called us, every midnight,
         From a thousand miles away,
         Trains that pass through empty cities,
         Trains that have no plave to stay.

         No one drives the locomotive,
         No one tends the staring light,
         Trains have never needed riders,
         Trains belong to bitter night.

         Railway stations stand deserted,
         Rights-of-way lie clear and cold:
         What we left them, trains inherit,
         Trains go on, and we grow old.

         Let them cry like cheated lovers,
         Let their cries find only wind.
         Trains are meant for night and ruin.
         We are meant for song, and sin.
         GR, 288

That song has echos of "Pan's Labyrinth" for me. Obviously,
any sort of transformer---shift energy from one level to a higher, 
perhaps better place, which might happen if you, say, move 
from one place to another, like changing your address from 
Turlock to Santa Cruz---would be of interest to Pynchon on the 
alchemical level. Course, I'm just  a simple country scryer, no 
point in askin' me questions 'bout that. . . .

            [Tonight's thrilling episode of "The Psychical 
            Detective" features Dennis Weaver as Psychical
            Detective Ben Beaver!!!]

Point is, given the general running pattern of this perp, I'd be
looking for transformative magic [both good and bad] around 
railroads and given Charles Hollander's take on things I'd be 
looking at the Robber Barons. I also can't help but think of 
how the tracks are signifiers for preterition---as in "from the 
wrong side of the tracks". But it's big enough theme for 
Pynchon to give it pride of place in two of his most acclaimed 
works. And his most recent, of course, as well.