Missing parts

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

JULIUS RAPER wrote:
> 
> Sorry, Terrance, with classes starting up here I haven't been following
> the GRGR thread, to my regret.
>         As much as I admire Yeats (and TRP), the only artifice I find in
> the books that merits the sort of adulation Yeats directs to Byzantium
> must be the books themselves, esp. V., which remains my favorite.  On V.
> and this thread I've about had my say for the present, both in e-space and
> in print.
>                                 Best, Jack
> 

Yes, the books themselves and the assembly of the Badass. In
his Luddite essay, Pynchon argues that old Lud the Badass is
not put together by a simple and unreasonable public
horrified by machines, but is something "more complex: the
love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery." 
This relationship can place humans in a frightful
predicament and when confronted by an amplified, multiplied,
more-than- human force, humans "in seeking some equalizer,
turn if only in imagination, in WISH (my caps), to the
Badass-the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero-who
will resist what other wise would overwhelm us." 

Alfonso, like Frankenstein's creature, is assembled from
pieces - sable-plumed helmet, foot, leg, sword, all of them,
like the hand, quite oversized - which fall from the sky or
just materialize here and there about the castle grounds,
relentless as Freud's slow return of the repressed. The
activating agencies, again like those in Frankenstein, are
non-mechanical. The final assembly of "the form of Alfonso,
dilated to an immense magnitude," is achieved through
supernatural means: a family curse, and the intercession of
Otranto's patron saint. 
						"Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?" TRP