This is partly in response to the "Maybe?" post from below, as well as a continuation of a thread from class on Monday. I don't know about the east-west / modern-postmodern parralel regarding Matt and Nick, but I think it'ss quite useful for unpacking the differences between Nick and Klara. Both moved westward from New York (allegorically, from modernity to postmodernity), but the two have reacted to the shifts in very different ways. The seeds of this theme are planted early. During their first encounter after so long, Klara wonders if life didn't "take an unreal turn at some point;" and "becasue [she's] famous," but because "it's just unreal" (73), to which Nick responds in swiftly modern judgment: "I lived responsibly in the real. I didn't accept this business of fiction of whatever Klara Sax had meant when she said that things had become unreal" (82). Nick's language betrays, I think, an underlying sense of the "truths" of life - I can see the world with my own eyes and this "unreal" nonsense is just ridiculous. I can imagine someone saying something analogous about power dynamics: racism? yeah yeah yeah, if you work hard enough, you get ahead, period! The way that the narrativization of history factors in here is also interesting. After eschewing Klara's contention that things had become unreal, Nick proclaims that he "does not stand helpless before [history]" and similarly that "if we believe that history is a worksheel powered by human blood - read the speeches of Mussolini - at least we've known the thing together. A singe narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation" (82). Yet on a more local level, notwithstanding the way he forces it into a clean "single narrative sweep," Nick's entire life seems to be so many "wisps of disinformation:" his constant performance of identity, his fixation with individual moments of (false) redemption/understanding, the Tarantino-quirky dialogue with Marian. Is Nick just deluded? How are we supposed to read his proclamation of "living responsibly in the real"? It would be easy to write this off as some kind of denial (i.e. Klara is in touch with the "unreality" of things, whereas Nick chooses to continue ignoring it), but I think we actually need to interrogate the category of "real" itself. A theorist named Baudrillard proposed in the early 80's that in postmodernity reality has been eclipsed by what he terms "hyperreality." He believes we have arrived at a historical juncture where simulacra - copies without originals, or copies that gain autonomy and thus cease to be "copies" - precede the original, and that the "real" has become an amalgam of self-referential simulacra. Consider this passge during Marvin and Brian's dealing about the homerun ball: "This is what technology does ... It makes reality come true" (177). If we buy something like this, then in some ways Nick is a more authentically mimetic subject of the times than Klara, in the sense that everything he does that we might find odd / disturbing / appalling (appropriating personages he has seen in film, getting in touch with his "heritage" in a way that resembles quite little), is what postmodern subjects are "supposed" to do. Even theory has gone this direction: play within the simulacrum, revel in irony, link as many desultory signifiers together as possible, violate traditional texts. What should we make of Klara, who seems to be more aware of, and therefore significantly more alienated by, the hyperreal aspects of life in her world? I don't know. Her desire to make a difference with art is admirable, but in hyperreality, activism becomes simulacral as well. I bet amazon.com would be able to tell Klara (as it can for all of us, or will be able to, given suffienct algorithms) what books she would like before she even knows. Probably "avant-garde" or "revolutionary" ones - but what do these categories even mean anymore?