The risk inherent in questioning the motive behind any joke, in suggesting that its value may be aggressive and its motivation cynical in nature, is that it seems to expose a fun-factor deficiency in the questioner. "I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers" is a gag designed to give the more bitter reader (who, again, needn't understand the line's real meaning) the thrill of cultural mastery – a sense of what it would be like to be so clever you can diss Tennessee Williams's sincerity at will. Talk about nessun dorma," is a typical invocation: it requires no understanding of the allusion, but invites the reader to bask in a sense of shared refinement. "All night long, not a shadow in the neighbourhood. Like a major bank, like a marriage, Bleeding Edge is an idea too big to fail – at least, not without grand-scale disillusionment.Īs if this had burdened Pynchon with the task of keeping the investors sweet, he supplies regular perks external to the story, mainly in the form of intellectual flattery. Add to this thematic weight the fact that Pynchon invokes the tones of multiple genres – detective story, chick lit, teen lit, sci-fi, Tom Wolfean social satire – and the fact that it takes almost 500 pages, most of them frantic with pop-culture references, to unfold, and a sense emerges of the scale of investment Pynchon demands from his reader. Its concerns are momentous: 9/11 – which takes place just over halfway through – the internet, and the price of capitalism. It prompts a question relevant to him and to all contemporary artists, from writers to directors to choreographers: if the present day is atomised, paranoid, infantile, obsessive, can a work of art capture this without taking on these attributes itself?īleeding Edge is a multi-character detective(-ish) story, set in 2001 in a New York thrumming with ventures linked to Silicon Alley, the home of Manhattan's tech companies. There's no uninnocent dead.W hen March Kelleher, the leftwing, paranoid blogger in Bleeding Edge, invites the heroine, Maxine Tarnow, to recall "what Susan Sontag always sez", Maxine responds: "I like the streak, I'm keeping it?" But March – the novel's voice of misguided sincerity – persists, correcting her: "If there's a sensibility you really want to talk about, and not just exhibit it yourself, you need 'a deep sympathy modified by contempt'." Sontag's idea strikes at the heart of what Thomas Pynchon has undertaken in Bleeding Edge.
You know what? All the dead are innocent. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Never caring about who's paying for it, who's starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the anetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. Showing us exactly what we've become, what we've been all the time." No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Not when 'everything changed.' When everything was revealed. “Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window.that was the moment, Maxi. And whatever happened then is on our ticket.” As if it was us who created Bush and his gang, Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Feith and the rest of them-we who called down the sacred lightning of 'democracy' and then the fascist majority on the Supreme Court threw the switches, and Bush rose from the slab and began his rampage. Somewhere, down at some shameful dark recess of the national soul, we need to feel betrayed, even guilty. "But there's still always the other thing. It would take a mind hopelessly diseased with paranoia, indeed a screamingly anti-American nutcase, even to allow to cross her mind the possibility that that terrible day would have deliberately been engineered as a pretext to impose some endless Orwellian 'war' and the emergency decrees we will soon be living under. Which of course is not to suggest that Bush and his people have actually gone out and staged the events of 11 September. But who's in any hurry to imagine? To make the awful connection? Any more than Germans were back in 1933, when Nazis torched Reichstag within a month of Hitler becoming chancellor. One look at these faces and we know they're guilty of the worst crimes we can imagine.
The shifty liar's look, the twelve-stepper's gleam in the eye.
We see those official close-ups on the screen. “Just to say evil Islamics did it, that's so lame, and we know it.
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