334/334/Part II

The second part of the 334 novella is subtitled Talk. Every scene in this part is either monologue or dialogue.

Summary

After a breakdown, Shrimp reconnects with January. Lottie describes her spiritual quest. Mrs. Hanson finds captive audiences in Len Rude and in her paralyzed father.

12. The Bedroom

(2026 - Shrimp - reality)

in cross section the building was a swastika

This architectural design is not unheard of. The counterclockwise version described here is the opposite of the one used by the Nazis.

megalithic masses of the Cooper Union complex

Cooper Union is an arts and engineering school located on Astor Place, six blocks from 334 E. 11th. It has only three medium-sized academic buildings, but Disch imagines it expanding drastically (as, in the real world, NYU has done).

Disch attended Cooper Union very briefly in 1959, studying architecture, until he realized "that I didn't have the makings of an architect. I was interested more in how a building looked than the way it was built, which is not the right attitude with which to approach a career in architecture."

13. Shrimp, in Bed

(2026 - Shrimp - monolog)

I've started a petition

Shrimp's effort to get the elevators fixed is long overdue, since they have been broken since at least 2021.

a toadstool at the MODICUM office called R.M. Blake

Blake was previously described by Alexa Miller as a bureaucrat who would gladly evict a family from public housing over some petty error in paperwork.

did you see The Orphans the other night?

The plot of the show Shrimp describes, though it's set "sometime in the Nineteenth Century," is from O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" (1905).

14. Lottie, at Bellevue

(2026 - Lottie - monolog)

How Lottie ended up at Bellevue (which is a psychiatric facility as well as a major emergency medical center in New York) will be described toward the end of Part VI.

15. Lottie, at the White Rose Bar

(2024 - Lottie - monolog)

There was a White Rose Bar on Whitehall St., near the Staten Island Ferry terminal, until some time in the 1970s.[1] The block has since been replaced by a large office building.

Universal Friends

The name of the spiritualist group Lottie attends may be a reference to Jemima Wilkinson, a Quaker mystic who founded a sect by that name in upstate New York in 1790.

some lines of poetry .... el último dolor

The poem that Juan claimed to have written for her is actually "Poem 20" by Pablo Neruda (English translation here).

16. Mrs. Hanson, in Apartment 1812

(2024 - Mrs. Hanson - monolog)

that uprising about who owned the churches

This is the only reference in the novel to some sort of schism within the Catholic Church about forty years earlier, one result of which has been the ordination of female priests. Disch suggested similar events, with an American branch of Catholicism adopting more liberal doctrines and also attracting a large African-American following, in his later novel The M.D.

17. Mrs. Hanson, at the Nursing Home

(2021 - Mrs. Hanson - monolog)

As described in her final scene, Nora is talking to her father.