Texaco

Texaco is invoked alongside Shell as a modern oil company in a darkly comic exchange about the afterlife of ancient organisms. The joke turns petroleum into the transformed remains of life from the Cretaceous, making the fuel sold by companies such as Texaco part of the novel’s meditation on evolution, extinction, and the persistence of matter.

The company in the evolutionary argument

In a conversation that moves between spiritual language and biological history, one speaker calls the dinosaurs Brahman and asks whether they were blinded by Maya. The reply redirects the discussion toward the present: anonymous tetrapods have entered the circuit as the “black blood” of the universal spirit, and contemporary cars run on Cretaceous blood. Shell and Texaco name the modern commercial endpoint of that transformation.

The image collapses immense stretches of time into an everyday act of consumption. The reptiles that might once have appeared as separate, imposing individuals are now fused into a vast petroleum reservoir; their ancient bodies have become fuel in automobile tanks. Texaco is thus not described through its corporate history or operations, but functions as a recognizable label attached to the material conversion of prehistoric life.

The price of transformation

The dialogue punctures its cosmic scale with a retail price: the speaker exclaims that the fuel costs eight crowns per litre, then teases the other person that the same fate awaits him. The line shifts abruptly from the universal spirit and geological time to the price at the pump. That bathos is the point: the grand transformation of life into fossil fuel is presented not as remote prehistory but as a commodity measured and sold in ordinary units.

The company’s narrative significance is therefore allusive and thematic rather than that of an acting organization. Texaco’s name helps make the evolutionary image concrete, while the joke about the speaker’s eventual fate extends the exchange’s unsettling equivalence between living beings and matter that will outlast them. The text offers no further account of Texaco; its force here rests on the collision between corporate fuel, extinct life, and cosmic speculation.