THE
MAN ON
THE TRA 1N
481
but aesthetic-existential, are transmitted. Yet they are transmitted
with a difference. Rotation is conveyed more or less intact whereas
repetition is accomplished only by a mediate act of identification.
Thus, reading about Huck going down the River or Tenente Freder–
ick Henry escaping from the carabinieri in Italy is somewhat like
going down the River and escaping. It is by virtue of the fact that
rotation is the quest for the new as the new, the reposing of all
hope in what may lie around the bend, a mode of experience which
is much the same in the reading as in the experiencing. But repetition,
in order to occur, requires a more radical identification. Thus when
Charles Gray in Marquand's novel returns to Clyde, Massachusetts;
or when Tom Wolfe returns to the shabby boarding house in St.
Louis-the reader can experience repetition only
if
he imagines
that he too is a native of Clyde or had lived in St. Louis. (He doesn't
have to imagine he is Huck-it is he, the reader, who is drifting
down the River.)
The moments of rotation and repetition are of such peculiar in–
terest to the contemporary alienated consciousness because they
represent the two obvious alternatives or deliverances from alienation.
The man riding a train- or his analogues, Huck on a raft, Philip
Marlowe in a coupe-is of an extraordinary interest because this
situation realizes in a concrete manner the existential placement of
all three modes, alienation, rotation, and repetition. The train-rider
can, as in the case of the commuter on the eight-fifteen, actually in–
carnate, as we shall see in a moment, the elements of alienation.
On the other hand, the fugitive in the English thriller who catches
the next available train from Waterloo station and who finds himself
going he knows not where, experiences true rotation; equally, the
exile or amnesiac who, thinking himself on a routine journey, sud–
denly catches sight of a landmark which strikes to the heart and
who with every turn of the wheel comes that much closer to the
answer to who am I?-this one has stumbled into pure repetition
(as when Captain Ryder alighted from his blacked-out train to
find himself-back in Brideshead).
To begin with, the alienated commuter riding the eight-fifteen
actually finds himself in a situation in which his existential place–
ment in the world, the subject-object split, the
pour soi-ens soir,
is
physically realized.
In
an absolute partitioning of reality, he is both
