VLVL2 (3): The Snitch System (part 2)

[Tim Strzechowski]

Continuing . . .

"Answers to these questions are not so much stated as intimated through metaphoric and narrative connections.  One of the tropes connecting the snitch and kinship systems is the metaphor of virginity.  When Hector badgers Zoyd to give him information the government will find useful, the narrator informs us that "so far -- technically -- Zoyd had hung on to his virginity" (12) [...] To show how the metaphor overlays one set of associations onto another, I want to consider its implications as they have been worked out in feminist theory.  Losing one's virginity signifies inscription into a system of representations that structure relations, interpret responses, delineate options.  The expression paradoxically constructs refusing to do something as a presence, while making sexual activity an absence or loss.  Seeming to impart value to virginity, it also defines power relations between gendered partners that reveal how vulnerable women are in a patriarchal society.  The male is the seducer; he wins if he can pop the cherry.  The female is the seduced; symmetry requires that she wins if she can keep her virginity intact.  In fact her virginity is useful only as a bargaining chip, for if she hangs on to it for two long it becomes useless, a sign of a spinster that no one desires.  Virginity is thus valuable only as long as it is imperiled.  Let the pressure diminish, and it loses its currency.  Like money and information, it needs to circulate within a system of exchanges to exercise its value.  Unlike them, it is a coin that can stand only one transaction before disappearing.  Properly speaking, it signals an initiation into the exchange of money and information that follow.

"Consider how these implications work to structure the snitch system when the kinship system is mapped onto it through the trope of virginity.  Hector, pressuring Zoyd to turn informant, assumes the male role of seducer.  Zoyd occupies the female role of seduced, a position reinforced by his responsibility for the child ("I have a kid to look after now").  Information has meaning only if it circulates, moving through the system in a series of exchanges that involve money, incarcerations, promotions, power -- and not coincidentally, children.  Traffic between the two systems flows in both directions: the snitch system helps to organize the kinship system, even as the kinship system provides the presuppositions and gender relations that determine its structure.  The two effects are not, however, necessarily equal.  The threat that the snitch system poses to the kinship system can lead to solidarity rather than betrayal, a possibility realized most clearly in Zoyd's relation with Prairie." [...]

Have any hints of the "snitch" theme occurred earlier in the novel, which we may have missed?

Do any of the pop culture references in this chapter echo this theme? (or the theme of "loyalty"?)

Does the cartoony quality of the novel in any way reinforce this theme?

Respectfully,

Tim


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