I had planned to try to blog these elements together, but instead made this audio mashup. I’m guessing it’s even less comprehensible than if I tried to connect the ideas in text, but on the bright side it has Iggy Pop.
The bomb lurks in the back history of The Passenger. That, and the idea of language as a virus mentioned previously, brought the Home of the Brave version of “Sharkey’s Night” to mind. I ran that into the passage from p. 116 relating the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and followed that with J. Frank Parnell’s brief soliloquy on madness and the neutron bomb from Repo Man. He speaks of split personality, which relates to Alicia’s hallucination conversations in the novel. I ran some soundtrack music from the movie underneath the book passage as connective tissue. That goes into one of said conversations, discussing passengers and death, with an instrumental Iggy backing track, perhaps for ironic effect. Or unironic, as the case may be. The Ice T/Body Count rendition of “Institutionalized” may be unnecessary, but I just discovered it. I used a karaoke version underneath the next passage, in which The Kid may be telling us how to understand the novel. I see a theme of elemental forces – fire, water, earth, air – throughout the book, so Ned Beatty’s speech from Network comes next, with more Repo Man/Pop backing. Unfortunately, it’s not entirely instrumental, but maybe the competing voices fit metaphorically. Another brief clip, and then it closes out with Iggy’s “The Passenger,” appropriately. Or not. Pop’s lyrics were influenced by Jim Morrison’s poetry in The Lords and the New Creatures, which may be another rabbit hole to descend sometime.
Speaking of which, there are some lines in the first passage, “Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing” that for whatever reason made me look up Leviathan: “…often an embodiment of chaos and threatening to eat the damned after their life.” O what a tangled web…
