thinking abt what you’ve said re “trompes l'œil de l'esprit” in heat 2. that’s the kind of stuff i wish i was smart and or literary-minded enough to find myself because i always think it’s so cool when it’s pointed out to me. so, that being said, (and if you don’t mind sharing), what are some of your favorite examples of this ?
First of all you are SO smart and manifestly literary-minded! My instinct for locating some of these artifacts in the text is largely a function of my deep love for Mann's storytelling and having gone over it again and again and again. Mere exposure means I am more likely to catch concordances where they occur (Heat 2 is abundantly referential of the broader "Mann Canon"), and some of the wackier "emergences" are just like, I was primed to notice this stuff anyhow because I happen to be interested in a lot of what Mann appears to be interested in. Which includes hermeneutics! He is an English grad, after all.
For starters, I feel like anybody who reads a considerable amount of fiction will detect an inherent strangeness in the prose of Heat 2. It is difficult to put your finger on unless you really slow down, something a summer page-turner does not encourage most readers to do. Your brain paves right over it in digesting the substance of the actual narrative. It turns out that "strangeness" is the byproduct of a genre text that is screaming its own architecture with all the reflexivity and deliberation of "highbrow" literary fiction, that is advertising the extremity of its constructedness, occasionally its flagrant deviance. I'll give you an example:
This is the kind of dialogue that would have every copy editor at every publisher in America setting off alarms and flashers and clamoring for revisions. You want to stylize your cop dialogue, that's fine, but you find a way to do it without repeating the word "lie" SIX TIMES in the span of TWO LINES. Human beings do not generally speak like this, and more crucially, writers do not write human beings speaking like this. The very structure of the text is drawing attention to itself by way of excessive repetition, a flagrant style violation, the kind published writers endeavor to avoid as a rule. (Even Nate's reply includes a bizarre kind of redundancy! "So far, up to now" is a phrase akin to "ATM machine.")
The book is riddled with aberrations like this, curious metaphors, unusual choices of adjectives ascribed to people or objects, turns of phrase that stand out as being anachronistic, or highly stylized, or that simply do not have any precedent in American English, even trade jargon. So what exactly is going on here?
My theory is that it is a dare, a seduction gambit, to entice the perceptive reader to engage the text in ways a crime novel is not "supposed" to be used, manipulated, interpreted. After all, I already seem like a nut. Nobody in their right mind should be marking up Heat 2 like Delmore Schwartz with his copy of Finnegans Wake. But Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner have written the book so that you CAN do this. It is absolutely an open work. I would stake my checking account on it. All along, albeit very carefully and subtly, Mann has been trying to beckon his audience closer. Not just to look, but to participate in meaning-making. It's why even the stuff that gets panned comes roaring back for reappraisal 30, 40 years later. His films (and now, a novel) are objects designed to be used and to be useful, to endure that use, because he understands the role of art in making sense of our lives. They are dense with meaning and reward exploration.
ANYWAY, as to your actual question, probably the "embedded Rossetti" is my favorite instance of a textually hidden image.
One can also "hear" rock music in the text diegetically:
Suggesting that "non-diegetic" echoes from the same band, constituted within the form of the textual narration itself (suggestive metaphors, lyrical allusions, associative imagery), are unlikely to be accidental or arbitrary:
If I were a grad student I would write my thesis on how Heat 2 is a covert ergodic text. Somebody smarter and more qualified than me will probably get to it eventually. But it is such a delightfully wacky book, and nobody has picked up on it yet, basically because of what it says on the tin. Convention, expectation. The bookstore shelf it occupies. Ironically, an amusing metacommentary on labeling theory and the plight of so many of his protagonist ex-cons.
