The Literary Junction: Trains and Memory in the Twenty-First Century

Twenty-first-century French literature is crisscrossed by rail infrastructure. Several books even recorded the transition to the new millennium through this mode of transportation, turning the train into a literary junction and making it an important feature of the contemporary. The examples I peruse show that railroads today have become carriers of the past, capable of recording personal and historical events, oriented toward memory and retrospection. Instead of focusing exclusively on books set on trains, I propose we cull references of all scales, including the small notations that speed by in texts otherwise devoted to other topics. This exercise of trainspotting reveals that the specificity of railroad memory today can be apprehended through the category of the museum: train cars appear as animated outdoor galleries while the passengers’ bodies turn into ephemeral works of art. The article concludes with Philippe Vasset’s Une Vie en l’air . In this narrative on the 1960s project of a hovertrain from Orléans to Paris, the museum functions as a productive countermodel to create a literary genre that renews the railroad novel of yore: the “Machine.”