Scene 046: separatist groups list
Themes
Connects to
Summary
A one-page bureaucratic interstitial: the "ALPHABETICAL TALLY OF SÉPARATISTEUR / ANTI-O.N.A.N. GROUPS WHOSE OPPOSITION TO INTERDEPENDENCE / RECONFIGURATION IS DESIGNATED BY R.C.M.P. AND U.S.O.U.S. AS TERRORIST / EXTORTIONIST IN CHARACTER," with a coding key (Q=Québecois, E=Environmental, S=Separatist, V=Violent, VV=Extremely Violent). Seven entries: Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (Q, S, VV); Le Bloc Québecois (Q, S, E); Calgarian Pro-Canadian Phalanx (E, V); Les Fils de Montcalm (Q, E); Les Fils de Papineau (Q, S, V); Le Front de la Libération de la Québec (Q, S, VV); Le Parti Québecois (Q, S, E). The A.F.R. and F.L.Q. alone carry the VV rating.
What to notice
The comedy is in the key: where the taxonomy runs out of words it just doubles a letter — "VV=Extremely Violent" — bureaucratic escalation by typography, the state grading its enemies the way a ratings board grades content. Notice the sequencing trick the novel runs in miniature here: a name that translates to Wheelchair Assassins arrives first as a deadpan joke filed among electoral parties and eco-groups, and only hundreds of pages of accrued dread teach you it was never funny. And the alphabetical form is a small reader-training exercise — the list gives no hierarchy of menace beyond its parenthetical grades, so you are put in the analyst's chair, left to guess which line items will come off the page.
Beats
- p. 144: The header and key — real Canadian political parties (Bloc, Parti Québecois) filed alongside fictional terror cells, all flattened into one threat taxonomy; the lone non-Québecois entry is pro-Canadian (the Calgarian Phalanx, anti-Reconfiguration from the other direction).
- p. 144: The A.F.R. listed first by alphabet and worst by rating — the novel's antagonists introduced to the reader as a line item.
Themes in this scene
- Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: O.N.A.N.'s counterintelligence view of its own discontents — Interdependence produces an alphabet of resistance, graded for violence; the document's deadpan equation of electoral parties with wheelchair assassins is experialism's political comedy.
Connections
Backward
- The tally is also a client roster of the dead: Guillaume DuPlessis moved to metro Boston "to act as liaison between and general leash-holder for" these anti-O.N.A.N. groups (p. 59, scene 016) — all seven entries orphaned by the burglary Gately botched; the document reads as the bureaucracy cataloguing what DuPlessis's death set loose.
- The F.L.Q.'s VV tag pairs with n.47 (scene 038): rowdier than the A.F.R., Hawaiian-ironic — also the cell U.S.O.U.S. suspects of dangling the anti-Entertainment.
- Answers Orin's "What all do you know about Separatism?" (scene 041, p. 137) with the official catechism seven pages later — the novel's collage logic at work.
Forward
- The A.F.R.'s (Q, S, VV) rating is cashed out across the novel: DuPlessis's death fallout (scenes 016/031), the Antitoi murders, the train-jumping cult history (n.304), and the YDAU endgame assault on E.T.A./Joelle.
- Les Fils de Montcalm recur in the Marathe/Steeply serial and in A.F.R. inter-cell politics later in the book (the "Montcalmists" of scene 088; nn.110/304); Les Fils de Papineau appear only in this tally — the book's later Papineaus are the Québec region, not the cell. "Rollents" (sic) is the book's deliberately broken French, worth preserving exactly in citation.
Notable passages
- p. 144: the full tally with its (Q, E, S, V, VV) key — the canonical roster of anti-O.N.A.N. groups and the first formal naming of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents in a document; worth reading verbatim.
What links here
- Founding of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents; the escutcheon, "the squeak," and the stated war-aims
- Guillaume DuPlessis, coordinator of the Resistance, dies in Gately's botched burglary — the inciting decapitation
- The catalogue of anti-O.N.A.N. / Séparatisteur groups
- The separatist ecology: the A.F.R. among the anti-O.N.A.N. cells
- Separatist groups list
- Steeply's Jarvik-heart article
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- the Jarvik-heart article: 'She stole my heart, stop her!'
- the Jarvik-heart article: the heartless fate
- the container that, for once, holds no fix
- the separatist tally: the graded alphabet of resistance
- the separatist tally: the graded alphabet of resistance — "(Q=Québecois, E=Environmental, S=Separatist, V=Violent, VV=Extremely Violent)…"
- the separatist tally: the graded alphabet of resistance — "Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (Q…"