grgr(5) war and sex

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Enfetishment is an ironic process because it invests the
inanimate with human characteristics and inanimates human
subtly, by first divesting them of human characteristics
through reification and then re-investing them with pseudo-
human characteristics, turning them into fetishes.

We know of Pynchon's debt to T.S. Eliot, and Swift on this
account, Conrad, but for me, it is Dickens that really rings
a bell. Some excerpts from Dickens' Hard Times. I think
Pynchon takes this to another level and can use the sexual
motifs as Dicken's could not. Also, for Dickens there is A
Way Out, but for Pynchon well, ...



CHAPTER II - MURDERING THE INNOCENTS

THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir.  A man of realities.  A man of facts
and

calculations.  A man who proceeds upon the principle that
two and

two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked
into

allowing for anything over.  Thomas Gradgrind, sir -
peremptorily

Thomas - Thomas Gradgrind.  With a rule and a pair of
scales, and

the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to
weigh

and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly
what

it comes to.  It is a mere question of figures, a case of
simple

arithmetic.  You might hope to get some other nonsensical
belief

into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or
John

Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious,
non-existent

persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind - no, sir!



In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced
himself,

whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the
public in

general.  In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words
'boys and

girls,' for 'sir,' Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas
Gradgrind

to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so
full of

facts.



Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage
before

mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle
with

facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of

childhood at one discharge.  He seemed a galvanizing
apparatus,

too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the
tender young

imaginations that were to be stormed away.

            XI  NO WAY OUT

THE Fairy palaces burst into illumination, before pale
morning

showed the monstrous serpents of smoke trailing themselves
over

Coketown.  A clattering of clogs upon the pavement; a rapid
ringing

of bells; and all the melancholy mad elephants, polished and
oiled

up for the day's monotony, were at their heavy exercise
again.



Stephen bent over his loom, quiet, watchful, and steady.  A
special

contrast, as every man was in the forest of looms where
Stephen

worked, to the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of
mechanism at

which he laboured.  Never fear, good people of an anxious
turn of

mind, that Art will consign Nature to oblivion.  Set
anywhere, side

by side, the work of GOD and the work of man; and the
former, even

though it be a troop of Hands of very small account, will
gain in

dignity from the comparison.



So many hundred Hands in this Mill; so many hundred horse
Steam

Power.  It is known, to the force of a single pound weight,
what

the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the
National

Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or
hatred,

for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of
virtue into

vice, or the reverse, at any single moment in the soul of
one of

these its quiet servants, with the composed faces and the
regulated

actions.  There is no mystery in it; there is an
unfathomable

mystery in the meanest of them, for ever. - Supposing we
were to

reverse our arithmetic for material objects, and to govern
these

awful unknown quantities by other means!