Shadow Ticket

“But there also exist other Hitler movies, yes, some even filmed in color, home movies, a warmer, gayer Hitler, impulsive, unorthodox, says whatever comes into his head, what’s wrong with that?”

Uncle Lefty offers an alternative perspective on Adolf Hitler, speaking as a man in 1932 who sees fascism as a coming force. Lefty accuses Hicks of holding a mistaken understanding of Hitler, citing a conspiratorial belief that the truth about Hitler is being hidden from the public. Here, the novel relies on a form of dramatic irony specific to historical fiction: The reader can effectively see the future and knows that Hicks, not Lefty, is vindicated by history.

“We want to believe that objects are pure, innocent, when the truth is that they lie open to every vibration that comes their way, law-abiding, criminal, everything in between…”

The implication that objects can carry traces of past actions speaks to the innate desire of people like Hicks or Thessalie to believe that they are leaving an impression on the world. Their fleeting, fickle modes of existence may not seem to have much influence on the world around them, but the supernatural offers an alternative reality in which unseen, invisible traces are being left everywhere. This is not just a view of an alternative supernatural world, but of a world in which even seemingly insignificant people and every seemingly minor gesture can leave an impression.

“Just so long as you ain’t another one of these metaphysical detectives, out looking for Revelation. Get to reading too much crime fiction in the magazines, start thinking it’s all about who done it. What really happened. Hidden history.”

This metafictional warning from Lew Basnight serves as a commentary on the book itself, casting doubt on the usefulness of a worldview predicated on uncovering secrets. The characters in Shadow Ticket are detectives, bootleggers, and spies, but their self-identities are informed by the archetypal detectives, bootleggers, and spies portrayed in fiction. Lew Basnight warns Hicks against thinking of himself too much as a fictional detective and against trying to play the role of a detective, rather than being his authentic self.

“How many more times is Hicks going to let somebody down like this, somebody who trusted him? He blinks awake.”

Hicks dreams of a scenario in which he fails to help Stuffy Keegan. When he wakes, he reminds himself that it was only a dream, but the existence of the dream gestures toward the actual desires in Hicks’s subconscious mind. Hicks feels an unspoken desire to save Stuffy, even though he has no real responsibility to do so. The dream—and the guilt of failing to save Stuffy—show that Hicks feels as helpless in his dreams as he does in waking life, highlighting The Surrender of Individual Agency to Systemic Power.

“We haven’t even begun to show how dangerous we can be, and the funny thing? Is, is we could be running the country any day now and you’ll all have to swear loyalty to us because by then we’ll be in the next war fighting for our lives, and maybe that’ll be all you’ve got.”

When he visits the FBI officers, Hicks is given an ultimatum in language befitting a gangster. He is threatened with the implication of violence, told to keep in line lest he face trouble in the future. The interaction shows the blurred moral lines in the United States at a time in which the most prominent institutional representation of federal order employs the language and tactics of organized crime.

“Are you aware of the American Indian belief, referenced in depositions filed on Miss Airmont’s behalf, that once you save somebody’s life, you’re responsible for them in perpetuity?”

Throughout the novel, Hicks is warned that he has a responsibility to protect Daphne because he once saved her life. The notion is attributed to a traditional Ojibwe belief, but it is used by people who have no connection to Ojibwe culture to cajole Hicks into doing what they want. These people do not sincerely believe in the idea; they simply want to manipulate Hicks. The deployment of the idea by white characters reflects the misappropriation of Indigenous culture for corrupt purposes.

“And the press coverage!—class traitor, baby gun moll, this and worse, no delusions herself about what she’s become, and only a rough idea how it happened. She’s lost her grip but she’s still my daughter, for heaven’s sake, she needs to be rescued from that milieu.”

Daphne’s mother, Vivacia Airmont, makes a plea to Hicks to bring Daphne home. Rather than frame the request in emotional terms, she can only think about how Daphne’s actions will damage the family’s reputation. This, Hicks is made to realize, is the unloving, self-serving household from which Daphne wishes to escape. This introduces a moral conundrum in which Hicks must decide whether he can bring Daphne back to this sort of “milieu” (90).

“Only during working hours, at the moment we’re still off the clock, this isn’t official elf business.”

The scene with the Christmas elves employs absurdism. Not only are Hicks’s possible assassins dressed in silly costumes, but they rigidly adhere to the notion that even Christmas elves have business hours. And, as with most enterprises in contemporary American society, they are being made to work outside of hours on something which “isn’t official elf business” (103). Even the Christmas elves and assassins are bound by the same system of social control.

“‘Someday,’ he whispers, ‘it’ll be the right joint, and a full-size band, maybe even a moon like this one, and we’ll dance like those Castles do, long as you like, I promise.’”

Hicks loves to dance and is an excellent dancer. This affinity for dancing may be unexpected in a man who presents as a typical hardboiled detective, but Hicks’s choice of words reveals his sincerity. When he is declaring his love to April, when he is promising her a future together, he chooses to do so via a dance-orientated dream. His happiest future is one in which he and April dance together, all their other worries stripped away. Hicks’s most optimistic vision of the future is one in which he dances.

“This shouldn’t be happening, but is.”

As he is driven to accept the Airmont assignment, Hicks feels that he is being pushed forward with little agency over himself. The surrender of individual agency to systemic power is broadly experienced elsewhere in the novel, as characters feel that the rise of fascism and the coming war should not be happening, but they feel powerless to intervene. Like Hicks having his agency taken away, many parts of society feel as though they future is being driven in an unwanted direction in an unstoppable manner.

“The only good to come of it’s that now with the old lot on their way out, there’s a second chance, not only for Germany but for all civilization.”

Alf Quarrender is ostensibly on the side of Germany’s enemies. As a British spy, he is working against the German state. Yet he sympathizes with the treatment of Germany and understands Germans’ desire to seize a second chance. Alf is not alone in this feeling, which helps to explain how so many people tolerate fascism since they have not yet grasped the coming horrors of war and genocide.

“Things will never go back to the way they were, it’ll all just keep getting more, what the Chinese call, ‘interesting.’”

In this interwar period, any attempt to define “normality” seems impossible. Any attempt to return to the way things once were is equally impossible. Instead, the characters are burdened by a sense of helplessness, as though they are being pushed directly together a more “interesting” (143) future which will not be good for anyone. They cannot go back, but they fear what is to come.

“Cheese Fraud being a metaphor of course, a screen, a front for something more geopolitical, some grand face-off between the cheese-based or colonialist powers, basically northwest Europe, and the vast teeming cheeselessness of Asia.”

In another metafictional gesture, Egon Praediger acknowledges that the international cheese consortium at the heart of the novel’s plot is a metaphor for European colonialism in Asia. Going to war with Asia to bolster the cheese market is just one example of the inseparability of politics from the financial interests of capital, with many capitalists in the book (such as those Americans who later back a coup) supporting fascism for their own financial gain.

“For even the most hopelessly ill-imagined lamp deserves to belong somewhere, to have been awaited, to enact some return, to stand watch on some table, in some corner, as a place-keeper, a marker, a promise of redemption.”

Just like the tasteless lamps, every character in Shadow Ticket has the possibility for redemption. The encounter with the lamp is a sign for Hicks that he does not need to be pessimistic about his future. There is always the opportunity for reform; the question becomes whether the characters can seize upon the “promise of redemption” (164).

“You know what it is. Don’t pretend you don’t know. Everybody knows what it is.”

Vassily is spooked by the possibility that an invisible rider is perched behind the trio of Soviet-backed assassins. This potential ghost rider is a metaphor for the broader sense of unease he feels with the rest of society. He tries to give a voice to his vague sensation that something is not right, and he implores others to recognize the invisible rider in society itself, the unseen forces threatening their lives. Everybody may know what they are, but they seem unwilling to actually acknowledge them, whether they are the forces of capitalism or fascism.

“That thing where it looked like you were walking forward but you’re really sort of gliding backwards?”

Hicks’s dance moves represent the generally deceptive nature of motion in society itself. Hicks is praised for a dance move in which he appears to move forward while actually moving backward. This dance step mirrors postwar society’s attempts to feign forward, progressive motion while actually hurtling backward, inevitably toward violence and war.

“They both know that runaway fiancées and their duty-bound pursuers are expected to fall in love—stage, screen, and radio are full of it.”

Hicks and Daphne play the roles of detective and runaway fiancé; thanks to the prevalence of media, they are both aware of their stereotypical roles in this genre story. They are warned against playing to these roles and allowing fiction to dictate their real actions. They must act for themselves, they are told, rather than mirroring the stories they see on the screen. The warning is against media influencing behavior.

“Heino gets to make the final call. If he says they’re a Jew, whatever they were when he made the collar, by the time he brings them in, they’re a Jew.”

Slide explains the flimsy underpinnings of the antisemitism spreading across Europe. Even a professional, notorious hunter of Jewish people has no real understanding of what he is doing. Instead, he simply points at people and his accusation alone is enough to determine whether his victims are Jewish. There is no rigor or science to the persecution; only mindless brutality and the pretense of order.

“Russia remains the world’s largest untapped reservoir of pre-Christian faith…magical and shamanic arts…Dialectical materialism will never succeed with a people who regard the material sphere as essentially spiritual.”

The Soviet project, Alf envisions, is doomed to fail. The failure will not be so much due to the ideology of the Soviet state, but due to the attempt to impose any ideology on the supernatural. As in capitalist countries, this attempt to control, codify, and rationalize through ideology the supernatural ends with rejection and failure. The spiritual offers relief beyond the ideological and, due to the necessity of this relief, the spiritual can never be conquered by ideology. The invisible forces of the world resist understanding and comprehension.

“Somebody said it’s safe long as you keep moving fast enough, something about centrifugal force.”

Throughout the novel, characters feel as though they must move forward. This forward motion feels like escape or a movement toward safety, but the characters rarely reach their destinations. They mistake motion for safety and purpose, believing that so long as they keep moving fast enough, they will not have to worry too much about where they are going or what is behind them. Centrifugal force feels like purpose, but it is ultimately motion without meaning.

“Then abruptly out again into blessed sun glare, sky blue, Glow starts up the engine again…the racket resumes.”

Glow pilots the autogyro out of a cloud, into a brief moment of serenity, and then—as she restarts the motor—the “racket resumes” (261). This flight, in which serenity is achieved for a brief moment, is a metaphor for the interwar period. Much like the interwar period, this illusionary moment of serenity is achieved by turning off the engine and surrendering control. What seems like serenity is actually freefall and a surrender of agency, masquerading as peace.

“As he would later come to explain it, that moment was the beginning of his new career of nonbelligerence.”

The submarine and its captain are evidence that everyone (and everything) is capable of reform. The submarine was once a military vessel, but after the captain witnessed the atrocities of war, it was repurposed into a vehicle of “nonbelligerence” (280). The submarine and its crew have rejected their old military identities and refused to return to port; they will not allow themselves to be absorbed into the same terrible machine that made the submarine. Instead, they are forging a new future on their own terms, finding their redemption by rejecting the idea that they are built for violence.

“Seems revolution has broken out in the U.S., beginning in Wisconsin as a strike over the price per hundredweight that dairy farmers were demanding for milk.”

While Hicks travels from the United States to Europe, political violence travels in the other direction. The novel presents a counterfactual in which wealthy Americans orchestrated a coup in defense of their wealth. This reimagining of history illustrates the delicate balance of forces in the United States, suggesting that America was not immune to social revolution or the threat of fascism. The United States is not unique in this regard, the novel suggests. Like Hicks, the country faces a diverging future.