Reading Lucifer’s Hammer, and noting the centrality of media to the plot (first half anyways), I am struck by the fact that the book conducts itself more in the aesthetic of a film than a novel. There is a strong emphasis on spectacle, which a few decades of summer movies has told us is predominantly the realm of film. Surfers ride apocalyptic tidal waves into the faces of skyscrapers. Violence is exaggerated and gratuitous – Fred Lauren’s mutilation of Colleen, the shotgun blasted corpse of Loretta and the decapitated dog, etc. The large cast of characters is also atypical for a novel (excluding an author like Tolstoy, if you want to nitpick).
Regardless, one of the reasons I wanted to bring up this aesthetic approach is because there’s a point in the dialogue of the novel which jarringly operates on a written pun. Mark makes a joke to Joanna fairly early in the novel, saying, “’Hey, did you know that Hot Fudge Sundae falls on a Tuesdae this month?’” (142). This pun couldn’t work spoken, or at least it wouldn’t be funny at all (not that it is anyways). Given the generally “cinematic” nature of the book, I feel that the reader is more inclined to experience it in the way one would experience a film, as opposed to a novel / literature. This joke reminds the reader that the narrative is not in fact “cinematic,” because to understand the pun requires an examination of the words, not just their sounds. At the same time the joke is problematic within the conventions of a written narrative, also – it breaks the fourth wall by requiring that examination of the words themselves as they are written, not spoken. I feel like this piece of dialogue is symptomatic of way the novel situates itself aesthetically, predominantly along the traditions of disaster film, but still struggling with its status as written fiction.
This is a great observation about the recurring “Tuesdae” and you offer a convincing explanation of its appearance. The book really is indebted to the cinema — most obvious in the pages where we see flashes of total strangers (on a plane over New York, surfing in the Pacific, and hiking on a Mediterranean isle) as the comet strikes. Yet, the novel has a curious relationship with books, which we begin to see with Forrester’s character.
Thanks to Google Books, we can easily see that “Tuesdae” is used ten times in the novel. What’s intriguing is that three of these times it’s used as a chapter heading (e.g. Hot Fudge Tuesdae: One). It’s as if the storytellers were borrowing organically from their own characters — using the characters’ running joke as inspiration for their own narrative structure (rather than being the puppeteers who put the phrase in their characters’ mouths in the first place).