Bleeding Edge ramblings

To write a coherent take on Bleeding Edge is not only hard but also inappropriate, given how incoherent much of the story and backstory is.

In a good way, though—one of Pynchon's main themes is that history is not cause-and-effect. Events have messy causes that we force rational explanations onto, and often the causes are more by hidden forces than individual people. Bleeding Edge puts forth the idea that America suffered 9/11 in an Old-Testament-Righteous-Retribution-for-Sin kinda way, with all sorts of international affairs and subculture intertwining plots, to boot. The novel marks a moment in American history when the Internet becomes our society, when cyberspace begins to overtake meatspace, and when the American government solidifies full surveillance and control of the population.

Does Tech have a role to play in 9/11? That's one of the main questions you're left asking yourself after the finishing book, as well as the following:

- Did Spetznaz have involvement?

- Did the Mossad?

- Did the Bush administration?

In Gravity's Rainbow, we learn how British scientists and companies developed plastic patents that Germany used to develop V2 rockets that bombed London. Could we have seen something similar here, for how American cutting edge or "bleeding edge" tech was used by terrorists or others in the region?

The Bad Guy is also tough to pick out. You want to hate a character named Nick Windust, a DC Think Tank-looking person who is actually an amoral "Friedmanite," who had been wreaking havoc and destruction throughout South America in the name of the free market. It's hard to hate him because the protagonist is helplessly drawn to him. You also want to hate Gabriel Ice, the hotshot startup dweeb who is at the center of fraud and financing that goes to an uncertainly owned Emirati bank entity. There are no redeeming realities to this character, though.

There's a great deal of Biblical imagery in the novel. Many times the narrator, Maxine or at times some omniscient version of Maxine, references the sin of American society, the sin of our government's actions and of our individual citizens. There are angelic references all over: many characters are described as having halos, some as having wings or the ability to fly, and some outright Angel names. We see Sodom & Gomorrah come up, too. These are fewer than references to sin, but we do see Babylon and Sodom referenced explicitly. At one point, Maxine looks back and considers maybe turning into a pillar of salt, which happened to Lot when he looked back when leaving Sodom.

Likely, four major characters are meant to represent the four main Archangels. The villain Gabriel Ice shares the same name as the Archangel Gabriel, and at one point the narrator specifically references Azrael, the Angel of Death. There are twins Misha and Grisha, at first glance no resemblance to angels, but they are said to also be named Deimos and Phobos. Bear with me—Misha and Grisha are Russian diminutive name forms of Michael and Gregory. Michael, ok, that's an obvious Archangel—the Archangel in fact. Gregory is known as the "watchful," as is Uriel. Misha and Grisha's father, Igor, served (serves?) the Russian Spetznaz, and Deimos and Phobos are Greek gods of Terror and Fear whose father is Mars, the god of War. Igor is Mars, and Raphael is likened to Mars, as well.

So there we have the four Archangels–Gabriel Ice, Igor, Misha, and Grisha. There are probably more hidden in the novel that I have yet to uncover.

What would this all add up to? Gabriel was tasked with destroying Sodom, and Gabriel Ice runs a Tech company funding Emirati accounts harmful to the US. Misha and Grisha are twins likened to "torpedos" three times, and in the Hallowe'en episode dress up, both, as Osama Bin Laden. They must have had some involvement, or what they represent (the Spetznaz).

A big commentary in the novel is the Internet is fundamentally bad—maybe. We have Ernie, Maxine's dad who was protesting in the 60s, explain that the US government invented the Internet through DARPA for continuation of control purposes in the event of nuclear war. It's a Cold War quasi-weapon (and Pynchon points out that we named the 9/11 site "Ground Zero," a reference to a Cold War attack, but I digress). We see that on Hallowe'en, no one is pretending, we are all images all day of something, whether on All Saints' night or not, because of the Internet's imagery. We see that Bad Guys use the Internet for their own purposes. Yet, we also have posited that the idealism of Tech—freedom of information, libertarianism, and all that—seem to echo the hippie movement of the 60s. And we see that there are hackers and geeks who are fighting for the good of the Internet, throughout the novel and at the end—there is hope.

Open questions are myriad:

- What do the Aztec and Iroquois versions of Hell have to do with Gabriel Ice and Nick Windust, where Gabriel Ice puts his servers in a fictional Iroquois deep cave likened to Hell and Nick Windust is said to have lost part of his soul to the Xialbaba?

- What are colors supposed to represent? (This is a Pynchon novel, they're there on purpose). Purple is mentioned at odd times in the context of sinister items—grain rot, glasses of the mean Dogbert, Purple Drank t-shirt worn by Windust. Light green and pink show up several times, as well.

- What role does the calendar play in understanding the plot? The opening scene is the spring equinox of 2001, the solstice is roughly when Maxine descends into the Montauk Project/Gabriel Ice baddy lair, and so on.

- What is the importance of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, which comes up a lot?

- Do characters' sexual fetishes (feet, sodomy, so on) imply important points to the themes of the novel, the hidden meanings, or are they just there for character development? They were pivotal in Gravity's Rainbow, so I'm inclined to think the same here; perhaps Freud and Lacan are needed to make sense of it.

I could ramble for hours but will stop for now. I would love to discuss further, if any readers should make it to this far in this post and have read the book themselves.