Atdtda35: What he was seeing was anybody's guess, 990-995 #1

[Paul Nightingale]

In 66.4 Günther describes ‘jobs [that are] nowadays more efficiently
performed by various sorts of machine’ (987), human labour obsolete. Then,
with reference to Frank’s ‘own crew’: ‘The more they learn, the less you
work, everyone benefits.’ However, at the start of 66.5, Günther expresses
the fear of the capitalist who must delegate: ‘I make myself insane every
night imagining what everyone is up to’ (988). By the end of that section,
Frank has successfully trained the workers, ‘[finding] a couple of these who
actually enjoyed learning the work’ (990; and note that, upon their arrival
on 989, we find ‘the foreman all but dragging Günther down out of the saddle
going into a long list of crises’, suggesting a desire for some kind of
leadership or tuition, or simply someone to take responsibility for what has
gone wrong). Hence, ‘pretty soon they were running most of the technical
chores, leaving Frank more time to go into town and relax, though he was
never sure what happened when he wasn’t actually looking at them in the
light ...’ etc. So the worker who has become, in effect, an extension of the
machine remains an unpredictable agent, never reducible to the level of
machinery. Moreover, Frank leans towards Günther’s mode of thinking: lacking
omniscient power he is suspicious of those he must trust. And one recalls
that, on 985, he does not delegate.

At the bottom of 985 ‘Frank misse[s] out on the festivities, having found an
empty freight car at the yards and gone to sleep’. On the following page,
66.3 ends with him ‘spending more and more time down at the trainyard’
(986). The new section (66.6) begins with Frank in Tapachula, ‘tend[ing] to
spend time at a cantina ...’ etc (990). The narrative, then, continues to
describe Frank’s off-duty time in terms of routine, behaviour that is
predictable in ways that of the indigenous plantation workers isn’t. Above
the section break: ‘... peculiar as the Tarahumare had been, some of these
Chiapas tribes made them look as humdrum as metallurgy professors’.