Atdtda27: Ticket stubs and heroes, 751-753

[Paul Nightingale]

At the outset, Kit is looking back: “Afterwards people would ask Kit ...”
etc. Ticket stubs stand in for snapshots as a record of his journey, as a
way of bringing him, ie Kit-the-traveller, into being. As he is read by the
signs he too, as an outsider, is sensitive to the importance of reading to
make sense of his surroundings. Later, there is “plenty of
post-revolutionary evidence as they [roll] along” (752), another indication
of the writing of history, as with the account given of Namaz Premulkoff, “a
great hero in these parts”.

Furthermore, if the journey cannot otherwise be mapped accurately (“he knew
in a general way”), it nonetheless exists to be read as a series of smells
juxtaposed to the discourse of “Western field reps more than happy to bend
his ear”. Again, once aboard the train, “[w]hat he found memorable as he
proceeded was less the scenery than a sort of railroad-metaphysics ...” etc:
hence “his own observing consciousness” (752). The opening passage is
critical of tourists, people who “define themselves by where they’d been
able to afford to travel” (751); those for whom travel is a performance of
identity are always, in a sense, elsewhere. ‘Here’ is ‘not-there’. Kit,
however, locates himself in opposition to any ‘there’: “... as he stood
between carriages, out in the wind, facing first one side, then the other
...” etc. Subsequently he “[falls] into conversation with a footplate man”
returning home to his family who describes Namaz (752). Kit contributes
little to the exchange with a man defined in relation to his absent family,
whose discourse interrupts the narrative of introspection; but his safety,
as he is made aware, is dependent on the mythical Namaz. If, at the outset,
Kit’s identity is determined by ticket stubs, here Namaz exists as a set of
beliefs: he cannot be dead to those who have never seen him, so to speak, in
the flesh (753).

The tourist has been juxtaposed to “barkhans or traveling sand-dunes a
hundred feet high, which might or might not possess consciousness ...” etc
(752), just as Kit’s left-right manoeuvring is succeeded by the observation
that “the predators tended to be skyborne, the prey to live beneath the
surface, with the surface itself, defining them one to another, a region of
blankness”, ie one awaiting inscription. Kit’s interlocutor, however, can
identify and describe “a purposeful dustcloud in the distance”.

On “skyborne predators”, of course, cf. Yashmeen’s dream on 749: “We
ascended, or rather we were taken aloft, as if in mechanical rapture, to a
great skyborne town ...” etc.

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