The dossier was a deeper form of truth, transcending facts and actuality. The second you placed an item in the file, a fuzzy photograph, an unfounded rumor, it became promiscuously true. It was a truth without authority and therefore incontestable. Factoids seeped out of the file and crept across the horizon, consuming bodies and minds. The file was everything, the life nothing.
Underworld sounds like it is going to be a gangster novel and perhaps that it is so, metaphorically speaking. More literally speaking, however, it is a novel about the Cold War and paranoia. Everything about the story is related to the concept of the Cold War as a pervasive reality almost bordering on a living entity. Every facet of American life from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the destruction of the Berlin Wall was defined in some way and to some extent by a network of spies on both sides going about their business and doing their thing. The information put into untold millions of dossiers by bland faceless individuals on both sides would actually have the power to some how wind up infecting and impacting the lives of ordinary citizens. A crazy time, to be sure and that reality is illuminated in this quote.
“The Giants win the pennant.”
This line is spoken by Hodges. And then, over the course of the next half-page of text, it is repeated four times, word for word. It is not the result of the imagination of the author. It is not an original creation of the writer. Even the repetition is not a fictional invention. Those words were actually said and then repeated in succession and they may well be the most famous words associated with Major League Baseball aside from Lou Gehrig’s emotional assertion of his self-consideration of being the luckiest person on earth.
Although a novel of the Cold War that is obsessed with paranoia and spying and the nuclear threat, the central event associated with the novel is the most famous home run in the history of Major League Baseball, a dinger almost instantly nicknamed “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World” when Bobby Thomson’s bat making contact with a ball thrown by Ralph Branca resulted in the New York Giants…well, you know. And what is the point? Well, Thomson could not have hit that home run had Branca thrown that particular pitch at that particular time. Thomson will be the hero of the story and Branca the goat, but they will always and forever be connected by the one singular moment in time.
And what is the connection between Us and Them, how many bundled links do we find in the neural labyrinth? It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.
And there it is. What is Thomson’s home run without Branca’s ill-considered pitch? Perhaps the exact opposite: perhaps a pop foul that moves no further outward from home plate than the length it takes for the catch to stretch out his arm and change history forever with the sound of an easy out plopping into his mitt. The Cold War pitted the United States and the Soviet Union against each other for fifty years in a series of battles that neither can ultimately claim as a definitive victory. The Soviet Union may have collapsed, but was there really even one single item amidst all those millions of dossiers that can be said to have been essential to that collapse? Or was the fall of western communism—perhaps only a brief respite rather than a genuine collapse—the result of something that exists entirely apart and completely separate from the competition?
