Prosthetic Paradise (was Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1012

[Paranoid]

In response to this message, back in NOV.  Nevertheless, if anyone
subscribes to Harpers, and happened to read 'Brownies' by Z.Z. Packer, one
will see an evolution of this kind of idea, and ideal.  What else is
remarkable about this story is that, while reading it, I had a feeling that,
were Salinger to still be publishing this is the kind of story we would get
from him.
Nevertheless, 'Brownies' takes race relations and switches them around like
little I have ever seen.  And reminded me very much of the Secret
Integration.

Cheers
----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance F. Flaherty" <Lycidas at worldnet.att.net>
To: <rjackson at mail.usyd.edu.au>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 25, 1999 12:26 AM
Subject: Re: Prosthetic Paradise (was Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1012


>
>
> rj wrote:
>  Have you not read *V.*, the parable about the Bad Priest of
> Valetta?
>
>
> Pynchon's most mature short story, "The Secret Integration",
> written after V., is of use here. In the story, the more
> Carl Barrington functions as an as an abstraction,
> representing for example, race relations in America, the
> more inanimate and less human he becomes. At the end of the
> story, Carl represents the discarded black musician, McAfee,
> (the boys name their "imaginary" secretly integrated black
> friend Carl, after Carl McAfee) race relations in America,
> the boy's loss of innocence-"dreams that could never again
> be entirely safe"--- and America's blind embrace of cold war
> technologies (ballistics) and Automation. At the very end of
> the story, Carl Barrington, like Slothrop and V, is
> scattered, and reduced to the junkyard parts and repressed
> dreams he was assembled from, abandoned "with other
> attenuated ghosts. After the boys have lost their innocence
> and given up on Carl Barrington, one boy, Etienne asks
> another, Grover the boy genius, "are we still integrated?"
> "Ask your father," Grover replies. "I don't know anything."
> Etienne's father owns the junkyard, and while all the other
> parents, including the Freudian Dr. Slothrop dump their
> garbage on a childless black couples lawn and terrorize them
> with racist prank phone calls, Etienne's father says they
> should not worry about blacks moving into the neighborhood,
> they should be concerned about Automation.
>
>
> "Carl had been put together out of phrases, images,
> possibilities that grownups had somehow turned away from,
> repudiated, left out at the edges of towns, as if they were
> auto parts in Etienne's father's junkyard-things they could
> or did not want to live with but which the kids, on the
> other hand, could spend endless hours with, piecing
> together, rearranging, feeding, programming, refining."
>
> What are the images, phrases, possibilities that the adults
> have marginalized, repudiated, left at the edges of towns?
> Integration for one and  McAfee, the bass player, who ends
> up stranded on the edge of town and disappears under
> suspicious circumstances, after being arrested for vagrancy.
> McAfee is left in the Berkshires after McClinic Sphere's
> travels their in V., this after another suspicious police
> raid in that novel. What are the images and how are they
> restructured?
>
> In "A Journey Into The Mind of Watts" Pynchon says,
>
> Restructuring of the riot goes on in other ways. All Easter
> week this year, in the spirit of the season, there was a
> "Renaissance of the Arts," a kind of festival in memory of
> Simon Rodia, held at Markham Junior High, in the heart of
> Watts.
>
> Along with theatrical and symphonic events, the festival
> also featured a roomful of sculptures fashioned entirely
> from found objects--found, symbolically enough, and in the
> Simon Rodia tradition, among the wreckage the rioting had
> left. Exploiting textures of charred wood, twisted metal,
> fused glass, many of the works were fine, honest rebirths.
>
> In one corner was this old, busted, hollow TV set with a
> rabbit-ears antenna on top. Inside, where its picture tube
> should have been, gaping out with scorched wiring threaded
> like electronic ivy among its crevices and sockets, was a
> human skull. The name of the piece was "The Late, Late, Late
> Show."
>
>
> When the boys dream, radio signals filter in and mix with
> their memories and the boys listen to Mr. McAfee's delirious
> babble at a practical joke alcohol's anonymous  (AA) meeting
> set up by the townspeople. The boys reduce Carl to a "robot"
> at the end of the story, to an inanimate "robot.to banish
> from their sight." But Carl Barrington is not a robot. He is
> not mechanical. In describing Gothic and Science fiction,
> Pynchon explains what Carl Barrington and the other
> attenuated ghosts are and how they are created.
>
> In "Is It OK to be a Luddite" Pynchon says,
>
> Look, for example, at Victor's account of how he assembles
> and animates his creature. He must, of course, be a little
> vague about the details, but we're left with a procedure
> that seems to include surgery, electricity (though nothing
> like Whale's galvanic extravaganzas), chemistry, even, from
> dark hints about Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, the still
> recently discredited form of magic known as alchemy. What is
> clear, though, despite the commonly depicted Bolt Through
> the Neck, is that neither the method nor the creature that
> results is mechanical.
>
> He says, "Neither the method nor the creature is
> mechanical," so what is the method and what is the creature?
>
> Next ,  in "Is It OK to be a Luddite" Pynchon says,
>
> This is one of several interesting similarities between
> "Frankenstein" and an earlier tale of the Bad and Big, "The
> Castle of Otranto" (1765), by Horace Walpole, usually
> regarded as the first Gothic novel.
>
> AND
>
> THE novels are also of strikingly similar nocturnal origin:
> both resulted from episodes of lucid dreaming. Mary Shelley,
> that ghost-story summer in Geneva, trying to get to sleep
> one midnight, suddenly beheld the creature being brought to
> life, the images arising in her mind "with a vividness far
> beyond the usual bounds of reverie." Walpole had been
> awakened from a dream, "of which, all I could remember was,
> that I had thought myself in an ancient castle... and that
> on the uppermost bannister of a great stair-case I saw a
> gigantic hand in armour."
>
>
> Nocturnal qualities are what Pynchon describes in the
> Introduction to Slow Learner as being so important to his
> maturity as a novelist.
>
> In Walpole's novel, this hand shows up as the hand of
> Alfonso the Good, former Prince of Otranto and, despite his
> epithet, the castle's resident Badass. 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.
>
> A family curse on the house of Pynchon (Pynchon & CO. and
> Hawthorne's House of Pyncheon) Freud's The Return of the
> Repressed is one of the major structural themes of GR. The
> assembly is by means of the supernatural and is non-
> mechanical, as in Carl Barrington, V, Slothrop and the
> "mechanical" duck of M&D
>
>
> TBC with V.
>