IVIV20: Maybe then, 368-369

[Paul Nightingale]

The chapter began with Doc, inspired by sporting loss, leaving home to seek
company, "tak[ing] his disappointment out on the road" (364). On 366 he asks
Sparky if he can "look in here once in a while".

Here, returning home, he thinks of those he might know in the same situation
(368). Up the page, anonymity, "a convoy of indeterminate size", and no way
of knowing anyone. At the start of the twentieth century modernist writers
like Durkheim and Tonnies described the alienation inherent in urban
societies; in the 1960s alienation was inherent in the consumer society
described by Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man. IV ends with the attempt to
reconstruct some kind of community, however ironic his speculations (the
"alumni associations" that return again and again to a meaningful moment).

>From speculating about an indeterminate future, "phones as standard
equipment in every car ..." etc, Doc wonders about what he'll do here and
now "if he misse[s] the Gordita Beach exit" (368). Doc's reading of
landscape (a nod at documentary realism: "He knew that at Rosecrans ..."
etc) is succeeded by speculation: "Maybe then it would stay this way for
days ..." etc (369). There are alternative endings on offer here, the
fantasy that offers anonymity as a kind of liberation ("across a border
where nobody could tell anymore in the fog who was Mexican, who was Anglo,
who was anybody") set against passivity, not for the first time Doc
"pull[ing] over on the shoulder and wait[ing]". The latter option has cops
and "a restless blonde", the citizen still a PI.