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

[Jasper]

Thank you for a kick-ass kick-ass essay contribution!  BTW, that 
Displaced Person's song from GR shows up on pp. 283-284 in my battered 
old red Penguin edition (in case anyone else wants to look it up for 
context).

robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:
>              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.
>
>