Atdtda [4]: What Kit knows, 99-104 #1

[Paul Nightingale]

Off to meet Tesla, "Kit remembered visiting Colorado Springs as a youngster"
(99); and this recollection brings the family back into the narrative--the
return of the repressed, perhaps. Foley Walker appears, identified as
"special assistant to famed financier Scarsdale Vibe"; and, if we go back up
the page a bit, Tesla is identified as "renowned", the target of "[word] ...
on the electricians' grapevine", which connects him to Vibe. From Kit's pov,
the two famous men are differentiated from those who are not famous, by
definition not known by reputation: he knows Foley isn't Vibe because he
"read[s] the papers and look[s] at the magazines" (100). Going to Colorado
Springs, then, invokes the family, a set of intimate relations (eg the
memory of Frank's embarrassment) that doesn't 'belong' here; it also brings
into play another set of relations, with power. Foley is described as a
"deputy of Wealth", which in turn means that Scarsdale Vibe, already
represented by the talk that surrounds him, becomes the representative of an
abstraction (and the role of the media is key). Similarly, Yale is
represented in the only way Kit knows how, a "passable back-east voice" and
a reference to fiction. In the previous section he turned his experience of
maths and electricity theory into something expressible, kind of like a
religion (98); here he is also struggling--not too strong a word, I
think--to find a form of words that will do justice to his experiences and
perceptions of where he's at.

The previous section has demonstrated Kit's intimate relation to, eg, "the
god of Current" (98); the current (no pun intended) section, by way of
contrast, emphasises his distance from, but connectedness to, power. He
might have known "students, out here usually for the summer from back east";
but the Ivy League world they inhabit the rest of the time is another
planet. Kit has been unsuccessful with girls, it seems; if we conclude he is
still a virgin (his "line" has "never worked", 99-100), his innocence
extends beyond the sexual.