Reading Eric Packer As Dangerous: A Dangerous Seer;Visionary;Prophet

Elise Shifrin and Eric Packer in the Taxi

Elise: You know things. I think this is what you do. I think you're dedicated to knowing. I think you acquire information and turn it into something stupendous and awful. You're a dangerous person. Do you agree? A visionary. (C 19)

Jesus was a visionary. Jesus was and still is dangerous.

Foucault: Knowledge is not for knowing. Knowledge is for cutting.

From Burroughs Live, 1960-19997 p. 104

New York Interview 1968

Burroughs: ... Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American a great book. I hadn't read it before, but when I got to the point of the milk bar...   

Jeff Shero: The what bar?

Burroughs: The milk bar. You know the explosion in the milk bar. He's looking around in this milk bar, and I said wait a minute, time to hit the floor. I knew when the explosion was going to take place. I hadn't read it yet. And that was about two years before the same explosion happened in the milk bar in Algiers. I had been in Algiers eating in this milk bar. Two months after I had left there, about two years after Graham Greene had written this scene with people, their legs all splattered with Maraschino cherries and ice cream and blood and brains, passion fruit, pieces of mirrors __ in this very milk bar where I would eat __ a friend of mine got to the milk bar just at this time and saw this scene. Wow! Graham Greene had written that.

Writers don't want to take responsibility for these things; they have to. A long time ago I said, "The Soccer scores come in from the capital." You remember the Soccer riot in Peru __300 people. That's what it referred to.

Jeff Shero: Why do you think Genet is the only one who has taken responsibility for his characters? What about Kesey? You know Kesey's book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ?

Burroughs: Sure. It was simply that Genet was one of the first ones to state this.

Jeff Shero: So more than that, it was Genet who recognized it?

Burroughs: Genet recognized it, yes, probably before I did. But if the soccer scores are coming into the capital one must pretend an interest. That was 10 years before this soccer riot happened. I realized what writers write happens. Therefore writers have responsibility to be there and to do something about it. In Chicago Genet said to me, "writers now must support the youth movement, not only with their words, but with their presence." I agree with that one hundred percent.

DeLillo has been noted for having predicted a number of catastrophic events. Cosmopolis  has been written about as predicting the dot.com meltdown in Bush II's reign. I don't think so. I think it predicted the 2008 derivative meltdown which was a much more catastrophic event. Now was Eric Packer the model for it? We will never know, will we?


Eric: "How will we know when the global era officially ends?”
Vija: “When stretch limousines begin to disappear from the streets of Manhattan.”


Eric: He knew they would figure it out eventually how he'd made it happen, one man, bereaved and tired now. (C 140)

Eric Is Shorting the Yen

Eric Packer's Residential Tower

Eric is doing what's known as shorting the yen. He is borrowing yen in huge amounts with his multi-billion hedge fund. A hedge fund hedges. It hedges its bets. It plays both sides. It protects equity capital. But Eric of Packer Capital isn't. He is gambling in the world of cyber-capital. If he borrows huge amounts of yen, then when it drops he pays back the yen at a much lower rate relative to the dollar (or whatever currency) and the difference is his huge profit. The speculative cyber-capital profit.


Say I agree to buy your house for market value in six months and pay you for it in six months when I expect the bottom to drop out of the real estate market. But I take possession and control of it now. By written agreement. You say yes for the option money I pay.  I get your house and sell it at today's high market price say $1,000,000. In six months I pay you for your house which is now worth $300,000. I have made 700,000 minus the option price I paid you, in profit. And not only that, I have borrowed the $300,000 that I used to buy your house. This is what Eric is doing with the yen.  He is within a world where he knows numbers signifying yen, chart. A world of linear time, historical time. It charts. Even if it charts according to patterns of nature so complex they cannot be seen as the numbers run across the screen. Eric sees these patterns. He is performing within dialectical, linear, historical time. A world where if the yen goes up, then it must come down. A world of polar opposites, of good/evil, up/down, origins and utopian horizons of cyber-capital progress continuing into a future of expanding opportunity and visionary innovation.

But he is in a simulated reality. Like the actors on the simulated set of Water For Elephants. Only the actors know they are but Eric Packer does not.

This is where Vija comes in, the voice of Foucault. Vija, VJ(ay) Day, a pun bringing the Bomb to mind? A kind of playful puzzle that DeLillo likes to toss out for our and his amusement (as Nabokov says he does). An inversion opposing the strength of the Yen opposed to the Dollar? For chuckles?

Since DeLillo has the reputation of predicting the future, and the critiques of Cosmopolis were using the stock market crash under Bush II as confirmation of his genius, were they not a bit ahead of themselves? The derivative market crash was still to come in five years following publication.

Now I am wondering if an Eric Packer was pulling the strings behind that meltdown only stopped by vast outpourings of treasury money into the pockets of the gambling bandits, which we are witnessing in $4.00 a gallon oil at the pump. But separated in time so the connecting dots are not drawn. Just a tidbit for my paranoid imagination to play with.

I think it may have been Baudrillard that discusses that an author might consider taking responsibility for his characters and their actions. The example given was in Graham Greene's novel  The Quiet American set in 1950's Viet Nam. A terrorist hides a bomb in the bicycle frame outside a coffee shop where it blows up, projects metal pieces, killing and wounding people. I think it is Ballard who reports that a similar incident occurred outside the coffee shop he had always frequented. He immediately connected it to the fictional account in Greene's novel and reflected on a writer's responsibility for the actions of his characters.

Did someone copy Eric Packer in 2008? We will never know, will we?