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All of Agent #4’s travels seem to occur just prior to major conflict in that area. It appears that the Agents of Vevoda are tasked with being an instigator or at least a catalyst to conflict in order to drive sales for Vevoda.
For example, Agent #41 (see p324)
- He sent one of S’s wharf-rat confederates plummeting into a gorge (O, poetry!). (B–. October, 1906). See p175.
- He torched the library at Leuven. (Leuven, Belgium. August, 1914)
- He sold the Japanese on the Mukden plan. (Mukden – now Shenyang – China. September, 1931)
- He has performed dozens of S-dispatches, spanning three decades.
It’s safe to conclude that all of the Agents may have travelled in order to ensure conflict that would drive sales of the Black Vine.
In addition to all of the sightings of Agent#4 we are about to examine, we know for certain that he was part of the conspiracy to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 (see pp299-304). He was in Sarajevo shortly before the assassination, sitting in Schiller’s Delicatessen, urging a member of the conspiracy to get the job done. He then boarded a train for Budapest, where he met his untimely demise at the hands of S and his bottle of plum rakija.
With this in mind, let’s analyze the other known locations of Agent #4 and the potential conflicts he may have had a role in birthing. See pp261-262.
- Danzig – Berlin, October, 1908. This particular notation relates to the photograph itself on the back of which the locations are written. Agent#4 is traveling from Danzig to Berlin, Germany. It was in Berlin in October 1908 that the Bosnian Crisis began. We can safely conclude that Agent #4 was there to ensure this crisis occurred.
- Tangier, June 1905. The First Moroccan Crisis began in Tangier, Morocco in March of 1905 and peaked in mid-June of the same year, likely thanks to our friendly agent.
- B—, October 1906. We have yet to discover the location of B—, but it seems clear that Agent #4 was present to ensure that the bomb provocation incident on the wharf (a plan the other agents knew about for days – see p104) took place. See p100-101 for S’s eyewitness account of Agent #4 handing the bomb to the Agent in the boiler suit, followed by p261 when S recognizes him as Agent #4 from the photograph.
- Los Angeles, December 1910. The Magonista Rebellion surged after the release of The Magon brothers from a Los Angeles jail in 1910. Their rebellion, centered at this time from Los Angeles, is considered a large spark which began the Mexican Revolution.
- Tripoli, September 1911. The Italo-Turkish War began in September, 1911, beginning as the Italian Fleet arrived at Tripoli and began bombing the port.
- Salonika, March 1912. Salonika, today known as Thessaloniki, is the capital of Macedonia. In 1912, Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia abandoned their then differences with Macedonia and formed a coalition against the Ottoman Empire. This helped spark the First Balkan War, in which Thessaloniki had to surrender in October, 1912.
- Sarajevo – June 28, 1914. Agent #4 is a conspirator in the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, igniting World War I.
- Budapest, June 28, 1914. Agent #4’s lifeless body arrives on the train.
We can conclude then, that wherever B— is/was and whatever happened there in and shortly after October, 1906, was a major conflict – or simply Vevoda protecting his “venal self interests.”
Thoughts On "S" 
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Hello, this may not be the proper thread, but can anyone tell me what books are referred to by the saying “Loveletter to the Written Word?” Or does this not refer toward lit? S, has its distinct theme, so i assume there must be lots of hints of important 20th Century authors. i have only found Hemingway, so should i only expect for appearances of spy-writers? i would have thought some of these would appear too
Samuel Butler, 1899 Joseph Conrad, 1913 Guillaume Apollinaire, 1913 Alain-Fournier, 1913 D. H. Lawrence, 1916/22 James Joyce, 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 Franz Kafka, 1927 Marcel Proust, 1932 Huxley, 1929 William Faulkner, 1933 André Malraux, 1939 John Steinbeck, 1940 Arthur Koestler, 1940 Hemingway, 1942 Albert Camus, 1943 Sartre, 1946 Jacques Prévert, 1947 Anne Frank,
“S” itself is called by Abrams and Dorst “A love letter to the written word.” They did not say how, and that is part of the mystery of “S.”
I do think James Joyce is referenced, though indirectly with Straka’s book Coriolis.
Hemingway is overt, but we don’t know why.
Kurt Vonnegut is definitely referenced, but again indirectly. I’m sure there are others.
Once we discover S’s name and decipher more clues perhaps the meaning of that love letter will surface.
Ok. So Finnegans Wake is persuasive, and GED and Glasperlenspiel match well thematically. But i don’t see the case for Vonnegut. I think the date on Monde is correct and it refers to the “Monde” before “Le Monde”. In france, everyone would have called the paper le Monde nonethesame. Next S. is not antiwar. Further the best selling Novel should be in the timeframe to be included in the list of 19, ending in 1949. Slaughterhouse 5 was published 1969.
GEB, Glasperlenspiel and Finnegan have one great theme in common: Cryptography, information theory and linking information for intel. Hemingway was approached by the OSS, ONI and FBI to aid in the war effort, and after 1940 unsuccessfully dealt as a double-agent with the soviet NKVD while traveling china. So should this set of 3 rather be called a love letter to the cloak and dagger game?
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol.-56-no.-2/a-spy-who-made-his-own-way-ernest-hemingway-wartime-spy.html
You may be right on Vonnegut. Another reader (Clare) pointed out that both Dorst and Vonnegut attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Maybe just coincidence, but Dorst does seem the type to be a big Vonnegut fan. In “Birds of Negative Space” the newspaper mentions that back in the real world yet another city has been leveled by incendiaries. That and the bombing of El H– with S barely escaping sounds an awful lot like Kurt Vonnegut surviving the bombing of a Dresden in Slaughterhouse #5.
Vonnegut may appear elsewhere in S., i just think that the evidence given is not sufficient to prove it, compared to the almost exact similarities in Coriolis description. The Cordillera mentions a Slaughterhouse Scene, maybe if we discover mention slices of mystery meat etc, that would be already more than a coincidence.
I think we have to distinguish the 19 main works, and the secondaries. If we look at Traven, the Death Ship surely has many seafaring/war/spy/shanghaing descriptions, but it does not reveal much towards S. mysteries. From what i recollect from it, neither does SH5. Don’t you think at least one of the 19 Novels should cover an arctic expedition? I figure even Conan Doyle wrote about his arctic journeys.
The presence of an Agent of Vevoda in B—- does not automatically mean that there was a major prelude to war. We already know that the agents were there to prevent any investigation into the new facility and the disappearance of the Zapadi 3. The agents framed the bomb attack on the protestesters and killed 58 innocents (same number as Vevoda agents) and thereby achieved conformity and submissivenes of the workers. Do you think there has to be a more farreaching event also?
There is also a more farreaching event implied:
S swam away from the ship. He had aspried to destroy it. he found himself under an arch, cursing at senators. could he harm the noisy demons above? (p207). This implies that among the victims, the true targets may have been some senators opposed to Bouchard-Vevoda.
What i find odd is that since this event dates the deaths of the primal rebellion group around Corbeau on 1906. What does it mean that their characters or alter egos die at this time, but reappear all the time until the death of the respective writers? Ekstrom, Feuerbach, Garcia, Corbeau and ass. Pfeiffer die in the caves, but then continue using the names at least for 25-39 more years. Are these deaths only significant in a collaborative sense (maybe the first iteration of the ship or a collaboration with interweaving stories to a single purpose)?
Further, if the date for the events is around 1906, would this make Vaclav perhaps the Sailor shanghaid from the Ghost Ship, the one who still had something to give? He would have been only 15, do you think he could have been with karst at this age?
I am just rereading and found this connection with 1906 in B-. Corbeau and S. leave the house and walk hand in hand. p134. “she is once again just a woman walking with her rather younger beau, a man of 26 or so”.. 1906-26=1880, birthyear of Summersby.