THE MAN ON THE T RA I N
<489
ground. The movie-goer is over the abyss. The young man in a Robert
Nathan novel or in a Huxleyan novel of the Days After the Bomb
may rest assured that if he lies under his bush in Central Park, sooner
or later
she
will trip over him. But what of the reader? He falls
prey to his desperately inauthentic art by transposing the perfect
aesthetic rotation to the existential: he will lie in his green shade
until doomsday and no fugitive Pier Angeli will ever trip over him.
He must seek an introduction; his speech will be halting, his gestures
will not come off, and having once committed himself to the ritual
criterion of his art and falling short of it, he can only be-nothing.
In no event can he become a person; not even Cooper can do that,
for the choice lies between the perfected actual and nothing at
all.
His alienated art of rotation instead of healing him catches him up
in a spiral of despair whose only term is suicide or total self-loss.
III
A man riding a train may incarnate alienation (the com–
muter) or rotation
(i.e.,
the English variety: "I was taking a long
delayed holiday. In the same compartment and directly opposite me,
I noticed a young woman who semed to be in some sort of distress. To
my astonishment she beckoned to me. I had planned to get off at
North Ealing, but having nothing better to do, I decided to stay on
to render what assistance I could ...") But he is also admirably
placed to encounter the Return or repetition. Tom Wolfe, lying in
his berth while the train passes by night through lonely little mid–
western towns, is alienation re-presented and so reversed. He may be
lost and by the wind grieved but he is withal triumphant. .But George
Webber going home again and Charles Gray going back to Clyde are
transmitted intact--once the reader, who has never been to Clyde
or Asheville, has made the shift. But this is not rotation, for it is a
deliberate quest for the very thing rotation set out at any cost to
avoid; the rider has turned his back upon the new and the remote
and zone-crossing and now voyages into his own past in the search for
himself. It is thus in the nature of a conversion. Unlike rotation, it is
of two kinds, the aesthetic and the existential, which literature accord–
ingly polarizes. The aesthetic repetition captures the savor of repetition
without surrendering the self as a locus of experience and possibility.
