Yet another textual precursor of what is to come:
"If only I did keep a .45 under my lingerie. At that, I've a bit of trouble convincing him the upright vacuum cleaner isn't a gun. He makes me lug it into the living room and demonstrate." (p. 705)
First, this establishes the presence of an "upright vacuum cleaner" so that it is not a deus ex machina when, seven pages later, Wanda swings the cleaner on high and uses it as:
"A heavy, awkward club." (p. 712)
Secondly, and ironically, Wanda denies that the vacuum cleaner is one kind of weapon, a gun, then uses it as another, a club. But we can't see everything coming, can we?
Regarding the question of whether a vacuum cleaner is a weapon, Wanda wonders:
"Try to look at this through his eyes. Difficult. I take it all for granted. How much can he actually see, as alien as it is to him?" (p. 704)
An intelligent, paper-eating insect entering a library would think not "There are a lot of books in here" but "There is a lot of food in here."
Finally, for now, the metaphorical wind is ever-present:
"The cold wind through me whistles the exhaustion out." (p. 710)
5 comments:
Human beings often -can't- see -- in the sense of a comprehensible image -- things that are violently novel.
Eg., Indian descriptions of horses, the first time they saw them, tended to sound much more like deer; sometimes they portrayed them with antlers.
I read or heard that the first audience to be shown an animated cartoon - of a dinosaur - did not know whether they had seen a live animal on stage.
Paul: and the first time a moving picture showed a locomotive coming "towards" the audience, they recognized it -- and many screamed, fainted, or frantically ran away.
They were familiar with locomotives; they weren't familiar with 'moving pictures' of that size. So they reacted as they would to a -real- locomotive suddenly coming straight at them.
The image (we've mostly seen it) doesn't look very convincing to us.
But that's the thing; you don't generally 'see' what the image in your mind shows; input from your visual nerves is only part of it. The rest of it is filled in from 'stored memory'.
I've seen cats, who generally ignore TV images, suddenly go 'click' when they see images (of birds, for instance, or other cats) and it activates their responses.
Note that the comment about the gun in the context of Wanda's upright vacuum cleaner is also an ironic reference to "Chekov's Gun" -- a theatrical technique, where something foregrounded in an early act is there to be used later. In written fiction, it's called 'foreshadowing'.
(From SM Stirling.)
Incidentally, Wanda makes an error amateurs often do in fighting -- she knocks Castelar down with the vacuum cleaner, then runs for the phone. And nearly gets killed or whatever when he recovers. When I was helping to teach a self-defense course, we emphasized not making that mistake. If you knock someone down, you must -keep hitting them- until they -cannot- get up again. Only then can you safely move on to doing something else; getting the hell out of Dodge, for example. She should have hit him over and over again with the vacuum cleaner, or kicked him in the head a couple of times, hard, once he was down.
(From SM Stirling.)
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