The moments of rotation and repetition are of such peculiar interest 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 coupé—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 incarnate, 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, suddenly 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 placement in the world, the subject-object split, the pour soi-en soi, is physically realized. In an absolute partitioning of reality, he is both in the world he is traveling through and not in it. Beyond all doubt he is in Metuchen, New Jersey, during the few seconds the train stops there, yet in what a strange sense is he there — he passes through without so much as leaving his breath behind. Even if this is the one thousandth time he has stopped there, even if he knows a certain concrete pillar better than anything else in the world, yet he remains as total a stranger to Metuchen as if he had never been there. He passes through, the transient possible I through the static indefeasible It. The landscape through which he passes for the thousandth time has all the traits of the en soi; it is dense, sodden, impenetrable, and full of itself; it is exactly what it is, no more, no less, and as such it is boring in the original sense of the word. It is worse than riding a subway through blackness, because the familiar things one sees are not neutral or nugatory; they are aggressively assertive and thrust themselves upon one: they bore. Whereas beyond the subway window there is nothing at all. As is especially noticeable on the subway, the partition exists as well between oneself and one’s fellow commuters, a partition which is impenetrable by anything short of disaster. It is only in the event of a disaster, the wreck of the eight-fifteen, that one is enabled to discover his fellow commuter as a comrade; thus, the favorite scene of novels of good will in the city: the folks who discover each other and help each other when disaster strikes. (Do we have here a clue to the secret longing for the Bomb and the Last Days? Does the eschatological thrill conceal the inner prescience that it will take a major catastrophe to break the partition?)
Actually the partition is closer than this. It exists as well between me and my own body. One’s own hand participates in the everydayness of the en soi and is both dense and invisible; it is only on the rarest occasions that one may see his own hand, either by a deliberate effort of seeing, as in the case of Sartre’s Roquentin, or through the agency of disaster, as when the commuter on the New York Central had a heart attack and had to be taken off at Fordham station: Upon awakening, he gazed with astonishment at his own hand, turning it this way and that as though he had never seen it before.
To illustrate the zoning of the alienated train ride: Suppose the eight-fifteen breaks down between Mount Vernon and New Rochelle, breaks down beside a yellow cottage with a certain lobular stain on the wall which the commuter knows as well as he knows the face of his wife. Suppose he takes a stroll along the right-of-way while the crew is at work. To his astonishment he hears someone speak to him; it is a man standing on the porch of the yellow house. They talk and the man offers to take him the rest of the way in his car. The commuter steps into the man’s back yard and enters the house. This trivial event, which is of no significance objectively-empirically, is of considerable significance aesthetically-existentially. A zone crossing has taken place. It is of extraordinary interest to the commuter that he may step out of the New York Central right-of-way and into the yellow house. It is of extraordinary interest to stand in the kitchen and hear from the owner of the house who he is, how he came to build the house, etc. For he, the commuter, has done the impossible: he has stepped through the mirror into the en soi.
Zone crossing is of such great moment to the alienated I because the latter is thereby able to explore the It while at the same time retaining his option of noncommitment. The movie It Happened One Night stumbled into this fertile field when it showed Clark and Claudette crossing zones without a trace of involvement, from bus to hitchhiking to meadow to motel. It is a triumph of rotation to be able to wander into Farmer Jones’s barnyard, strike up an acquaintance, be taken for a human being, then pass on impassible as a ghost. The reason the formula ran into diminishing returns was that this particular zone crossing created its own zone, and its imitators, instead of zone crossing, were following a well-worn track. A more memorable zone crossing was Hemingway’s fisherman leaving the train in the middle of the Minnesota woods and striking out on his own. To leave the fixed right-of-way at a random point and enter the trackless woods is a superb rotation. Swedes know this better than anyone else. Travelers in Sweden report two national traits: boredom and love of the North country — alienation and rotation. This penchant for taking to the woods reverses the objective-empiricaclass="underline" when Swedish planners took note of this particular “recreational need” and provided wooded areas in the vicinity of Stockholm, the Swedes were not interested. And it is no coincidence that when the Swedish government did take measures to set aside the North country for hiking, there occurred a sudden increase of Swedish tourists in quaint out-of-the-way English villages.
2
The road is better than the inn, said Cervantes — and by this he meant that rotation is better than the alienation of everydayness. The best part of Huckleberry Finn begins when Huck escapes from his old man’s shack and ends when he leaves the river for good at Phelps farm. Mark Twain hit upon an admirable rotation, whether he knew it or not (and probably did not or he would not have written the last hundred pages). A man who sets out adrift down the Mississippi has thrice over insured the integrity of his possibility without the least surrender of access to actualization — there is always that which lies around the bend. He is, to begin with, on water, the mobile element; he is, moreover, adrift, the random on the mobile; but most important, he is on the Mississippi, which, during the entire journey, flows between states: he is in neither Illinois nor Missouri but in a privileged zone between the two. To appreciate the nicety of this placement, consider the extremes. A less radical possibility would be his floating down the Hudson River; one sees at once how rotation is hindered here: One remains entirely within New York State; there is no zoning; there is no sense of pushing free of land into a privileged zone of the mobile. No one ever had the ambition of floating down the Hudson on a raft. On the other hand, the more radical possibility, his finding himself adrift on the ocean, is too rarified a possibility for rotation. The absolutely new, the exotic landfall, is too foreign to the pour soi to exhibit by contrast the freedom of the self. Compare, for example, the fantastic rotation of Tom Sawyer floating in his balloon over the Sahara in his latter-day adventures; compare this with Huck and Jim slipping by Cairo at night. The former is the standard comic-book rotation; the latter is a remarkable coup, the snatching of freedom from under the very nose of the en soi. A Cairo businessman sits reading his paper, immured in everydayness, while not two hundred yards away Huck slips by in the darkness. Huck has his cake and eats it: he wins pure possibility without losing access to actualization. The en soi is never farther away than the nearest towhead; the sweetest foray into the actual is a landing in the willows and a striking out across the fields to the nearest town. It is noteworthy that the success of his sojourns ashore has as its condition the keeping open of a line of retreat to the beachhead where the raft lies hidden — and in fact the times ashore do most characteristically and happily end disastrously with a headlong flight from some insuperable 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 Tom and his eternal play-acting.