THE MAN ON THE T RA I N
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raft lies hidden-and in fact the times ashore do most characteristical–
ly and happily end disastrously with a headlong flight from some in–
superable difficulty and a casting off into the mainstream leaving the
pursuers shaking their fists on the bank. What does happen when the
beachhead is lost for good and Huck and Jim are stranded ashore?
Rotation and possibility are both lost and in their stead we have
dreary ToT. and his eternal play-acting.
The role of Jim should not be overlooked. The chance encounter
with Jim on Jackson'S Island is a pre-puberty version of
La soLitude
a
deux.
When the Bomb falls and the commuter picks his way through
the rubble of Fifth Avenue to Central Park, there to take up his
abode in an abandoned toolshed
a
la Robert Nathan, everything
depends upon his meeting
her
and meeting her accidentally (or, as
they say in Hollywood, meeting cute: note here the indispensability
of chance as an ingredient of rotation; he may not seek an intro–
duction to her but must become entangled in her wirehaired's leash).
To be sure, a certain narrow range of solitary rotation is possible:
Huck's life on Jackson's Island before meeting Jim is very fine, but
after catching the fish, eating it, taking a nap, that's about the end
of it. He meets Jim none too soon. Crusoe, it is true, achieved a
memorable rotation, but it is only on the condition of the abiding
possibility of the encounter; at any moment and around the next
curve of the beach, he may meet...
Rotation may occur by a trafficking in zones, the privileged
zone of possibility which is the River in Huck Finn; the vagrancy
zones of Steinbeck: ditches, vacant lots, whorehouses, weed-grown
boilers, packing cases; the para-bourgeois zone of
You Can't Take It
With You
with Jean Arthur and her jolly eccentric family (an ex–
ceedingly short-lived rotation: what could be drearier than the mad–
cap adventures of these jolly folks experienced a second time?). Or it
may occur simply by getting clean away. Huck's escape is complete
because he is actually thought dead. The getting clean away requires
a moral as well as a physical freedom. Rotation is eminently
attractive to Pepper Young living out
his
life with Linda in Elmwood
-yet he may not simply walk out one fine day.
If,
however, on
his annual trip to Chicago for Father Young, the train should be
wrecked and he should develop amnesia-that is another matter. A
notable escape is managed by Tenente Frederick Henry
in
A Farewell
