In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

180 ARRAYS
Often, merciless conductors incarnate the arbitrariness of the railroad
system. [see Employees] In Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also
Rises, the first-person narrator and his friend Bill, traveling on a train
from Paris to Spain, give a generous tip to the conductor in hopes of
obtaining a table in an already booked-up dining car. But although the
employee pockets the money, he is by no means ready to change the
order of the reservations-and he remains politely unimpressed by the
passengers' furious reactions: "'Give him ten francs.' 'Here,' I said. 'We
want to eat in the first service.' 'Thank you,' [the conductor] said. 'I
would advise you gentlemen to get some sandwiches. All the places for
the first four services were reserved at the office of the company.' 'You'll
go a long way, brother,' Bill said to him in English. 'I suppose if I'd given
you five francs you would have advised us to jump off the train.' 'Comment?'
'Go to hell!' said Bill" (Hemingway, 87). For the American sailor
who travels through Europe without a passport in B. Traven's novel Das
Totenschiff (The Death Ship), a disconnected exchange with the conductor
during a train ride from Paris to Limoges adumbrates his dealings
with a bureaucracy that will never even begin to acknowledge the specific
circumstances of his precarious situation:
All of a sudden the conductor walked through the corridor and opened
the door to the compartment in which I was sitting. I had no time to
attend to my urgent private business. So I sat there and looked him
straight in the face ... He opened the door, glanced at me doubtfully,
made a gesture as though to close the door again, and then said,
"Excuse me, sir, where did you say you wanted to get off or change
trains?" He said this in French. I could grasp the meaning, but not the
exact words. So I had no answer ready ... The conductor gave me no
time to explain. "Would you please let me have your ticket again?" he
asked. (Traven, 50)
All these aspects of the railroad as an autonomous, inflexible, threatening
system are summed up by a horrible nightmare in G. W. Pabst's
"psychoanalytic" film Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of a Soul). A
telegram in which the main protagonist's good-looking cousin, a traveler
in exotic lands [see Wireless Communication, Center vs. Periphery],
announces his intention to spend some days visiting him and his wife
turns the host's self-reproaches and frustrations over a childless marriage