'Swiss' goes into scare-quotes: the narration's own hedge

texture · 11 Nov YDAU — unnamed attestation

• When: 11 Nov YDAU, mid-afternoon MST, Phoenix — the simultaneity montage catches Orin and the hand-model mid-embrace
• What: IDENTIFICATION FLAG as in event 6 — no Luria naming. In the novel's what-everyone-is-doing-right-now montage, "Orin Incandenza was once again embracing a certain 'Swiss' hand-model" in a suite up "a different tall hotel (from before)" — and the narration has quietly changed its typography: where scene 113 said "putatively Swiss," the word now sits in the narration's own quotation marks, twice ("He let the 'Swiss' woman grind against the muscular knee of his good leg"). The affair is ongoing, athletic, wordless; the text's hedge has hardened from an adverb into scare-quotes. That the narration itself now refuses to write her nationality straight is the event; what she actually is, the scene does not say.