THE MAN ON THE TRA I N
487
her from the police after she, in an act of desperation, snatches a
purse-it is only a question of time before everydayness overtakes
them. Whether it is Elmwood or the toolshed in the park, Linda
or the fugitive girl, Pepper being Pepper, hardly a week passes
before he is again in the full grip of everydayness and once more a
candidate for suicide. Perfect rotation could only be achieved by a
progressive amnesia in which the forgetting kept pace with time so
that every corner turned, every face seen, is a rotation. Every night
with Linda is a night with a stranger, the lustful rotative moment of
the double plot in which one man is mistaken for another and is called
upon to be husband to the beautiful neglected wife of the other.
One man's everydayness is another man's rotation.
The modern literature of alienation is in reality the triumphant
reversal of alienation through its re-presenting. It is not an exist–
ential solution such as Holderlin's Homecoming or Heidegger's
openness to being, but is an aesthetic victory of comradeliness, a
recognition of plight in common. Its motto is not " I despair and do
not know that I despair" but "At least we know that we are lost
to ourselves"-which is very great knowledge indeed. A literature
of rotation, however, does not effect the reversal of its category,
for it is nothing more or less than one mode of escape from alienation.
Its literary re-presenting does not change its character in the least
for it is, to begin with, the category of the New. Both Kierkegaard
and Marcel mention rotation but as an experiential, a travel category
rather than an aesthetic. One tires of one's native land, says Victor
Eremita, and moves abroad; or one becomes
Europamude
and goes
to America. Marcel sees it both as a true metaphysical concern to dis–
cover the intimate at the heart of the remote and as an absurd optical
illusion-"for Hohenschwangau represents to the Munich shop–
keeper just what Chambord means to a tripper from Paris." But
what is notable about it for our purposes, this quest for the remote,
is that it is peculiarly suited to re-presenting; it transmits through
art without the loss of a trait. As a mode of deliverance from aliena–
tion, experiencing it directly is no different from experiencing it
through art.
The Western movie is an exercise in rotation stripped of every
irrelevant trait. The stranger dropping off the stagecoach into a
ritual adventure before moving on is the Western equivalent of Huck's
