the Orin-Hal phone call (pp. 1011–1012)
But you can tell your Subject that Himself’s work was all very self-consciously American. His interest in politics was subordinate to form. Always. And none of it’s banned.
Context
Here is the theme's great dramatic-irony wrong answer, delivered with total confidence by the maker's own son. Orin, fed the question by "Helen" (Steeply in drag, hunting the samizdat through the family), asks why "The Mad Stork's name would come up in connection with somebody saying samizdat" — and Hal, soaking his ankle, brushes it aside: Himself's work was self-consciously American, his interest in politics "subordinate to form. Always," and "none of it's banned," freely orderable inter-Grid in Manitoba or Vera Cruz. Every clause is wrong in the way only the truth's opposite can be. The reader knows Himself made the one cartridge that is exactly a samizdat — sub-rosa, hunted, lethal, the object the AFR is disemboweling people to find — and that its interest is precisely not subordinate to form but is the pure weaponized form itself. Hal's serene ignorance is the book's structural joke: the person closest to the artifact is the least able to see what it is, so the Entertainment hides in plain sight inside its own maker's filmography, filed under "self-consciously American" and "none of it's banned."