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Searching for Solidarity at the Train Station

Mattia Filice’s Driver, a poetic novel about train conductors in France, offers an empathetic vision of working for the public.

Claude Monet, The Saint-Lazare Station, 1877.

At the end of Émile Zola’s 1890 novel La Bête humaine, a runaway train careens through the night, an “escaped monster” of astonishing force that advances toward “the future in spite of all, heedless of the blood that might be spilt.” Zola’s was one of the first novels to seriously consider the social and cultural ramifications of the train, which had yanked Europe into the industrial age and facilitated a great migration of workers from the country to the city. With this had come profound anxiety about the perils of modernity, incarnate in the hulking machines now roaring across the continent. What Zola saw in the train remains relevant: If anything, we have only become more apprehensive about our reliance on unfeeling technology—and the possibility that we might lose something of ourselves in the headlong race toward an optimized future. 

In Europe, the railway still reigns as a mode of transport: More than twice as many people in France alone travel by train each year as in America. But this is more than just evidence of a well-maintained intranational infrastructure. The railways that crisscross the continent are seen as a birthright and a site of contestation for the fragile social democracy that knits together much of Europe. An outsider might confuse the SNCF, the state-owned company that operates regional train service in France, for an entire branch of the French government, so omnipresent it is in the daily lives of millions, and so dispositive of national disorder. Persistent battles over wages and pensions lead to regular railway strikes—as much a part of the annual calendar as Paris Saint-Germain matches—that snarl the country’s matrices of commerce. Railway workers (or chéminots) are leading figures in the perennial struggle for workers’ rights, but also objects of misplaced ire: deemed tyrannical by the disgruntled commuters and scheming bosses for whom their demands for dignity are merely inconvenient, yet relied upon to to keep a nation smoothly functioning. 

It is this presumption of authority—and the suggestion of danger—that attracts the anonymous narrator of Mattia Filice’s verse novel, Driver (translated by Jacques Houis), to his calling. Waiting for a commuter train delayed by a storm, he is suddenly struck by the driver’s control of quotidian rhythms and the appealingly transient, adrenalized nature of his work: “no office or sedentary living.” A film projectionist by training, the narrator admits he has only “a rough idea” of who a driver might be—a cowboy of sorts, “a deep voice a cocky attitude / a guy who stands up for himself.” But this vague impression is motivation enough for him to undertake a series of grueling interviews and psychological tests, and to agree to a militant course of training with the SNCF, cloaked here in a secretive epithet: “the Company.” 

The narrator and his fellow trainees “are evaluated 24-7 / observed scrutinized peeled / like the orange” a colleague eats every morning. They attempt to memorize the 12,000 technical terms contained in their manuals, and to prove to the watchful Company that they won’t succumb to such intolerable afflictions as fatigue or nerves. So much for our John Wayne of the rails: Bruised from his hazing, he sees that what he has been initiated into is “an apprenticeship in kowtowing.” The driver, he quickly realizes, is a “hybrid creature,” one “invested with both power and submission.” His colleague puts it more simply: “You don’t thank an orange / You squeeze it.” The trains they operate are heirlooms from a bygone age of European prowess, to be defended and maintained with prideful care. But the drivers themselves are rendered nearly invisible to the public they serve. Sequestered in their train cabs—and asked to apply a kind of monastic focus to their work—they are the thankless guardians of a crucial institution, and Driver sets out to........

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