Slow return & Parts

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

"When I was wounded by those children and sacrificed my
sight in one eye, so clearly a gratuitous sacrifice, I had
been endowed, if for only an instant, with the power to
perceive a creature that had descended from the heights of
my sky."
					"AGHWEE THE SKY MONSTER," Kenzaburo Oe 

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

Even if we could prove that all or some of the Wanda stuff
was written by TRP, we would still have precious little to
study outside of his intense, complex novels and dense short
fictions. What's more, what little we have in prose can
prove tough going for schlemiels like me.  Nevertheless, I
want to take a look at his Luddite essay, and comment on his
continuous interest in parts-missing or added, and sort of
think out loud about "oversized" characters "assembled from
pieces," "that fall from the sky," "materialize,"
relentlessly as "Freud's slow return of the repressed," and
the "non-mechanical" "agencies," the "supernatural," "family
curses," and "patron saints." 

Always timely with his prose and fiction, in 1984, on the
25th anniversary of C.P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture, Thomas
Pynchon published his essay, "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?"
Pynchon rejects Snow's "polarized" (literary versus
scientific) view of intellectual life in the west.  He says,
"Today nobody could get away with such a distinction." Neil
Postman tries to get away with it by shifting the dispute
from "art versus science" to "Technology versus everybody
else."  In Technopoly (1993), Neil Postman also rejects
Snow's  "implacable hostility between literary intellectuals
(sometimes called humanists) and physical scientists," but
Postman simply shifts the polarized view, so that the
opposition for Postman, is no longer simply between art and
science, but rather "between technology and everybody else."
Pynchon notes that what Snow sought to identify were "not
only two kinds of education but also two kinds of
personality." He dismisses Snow's polarized personalities
and he dismisses Snow's use of the term  "luddite." For Snow
and Company, "luddite" was merely  "a way to call those with
whom they (Snow and those like him) disagreed, both
politically reactionary and anti-capitalist at the same
time." Contrasting Pynchon's use of  Snow's opposition with
Postman's, we can clearly recognize a difference in method.
Postman's method rejects one conflict and replaces it with
another, while Pynchon views the problem as one of multiple
perspectives or cultures and specialization and education. 
So with "demystification" being "the order of our day," 
"there are now so many more than two cultures that the
problem has really become how to find the time to read
anything outside one's own specialty." Pynchon asks if
"there is something about reading and thinking that would
cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite?" 
As readers of his fiction, we are not surprised that Pynchon
turns to his trusty OED and Encyclopedia Britannica for
information on Luddites. He also comments on the phrase
"Industrial Revolution," distinguishing it from the violent
struggles of the French and American Revolutions-- "It was
smoother, less conclusive, more like an accelerated passage
in a long evolution." So Henry Adams falls off the shelf and
Pynchon's essay begins to sound like an addendum to Henry
Adams's "Dynamic Theory of History" and "A Law of
Acceleration," which are found in the last few chapters of
'The Education: A Study of Twentieth Century Multiplicity."
Pynchon tells of the Rev. William Lee inventing a machine so
he can woo a woman and we get old King or Captain Ludd,
mythologized.  "Lud was now all mystery, resonance and dark
fun: a more-than-human presence, out in the night, roaming
the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a single
comic shtick." Moreover, when Pynchon considers Lud's two
basic virtues-big and bad-old Lud becomes a Pynchon
"Badass," and doesn't he seem rather familiar? In fact
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." 

TBC
TF