grgr(5) sex and war

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

#3

>From the last page or two of The Secret Integration:

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. He was entirely theirs, their friend and robot, to
cherish, buy
undrunk sodas for, or send into danger, or even, as now, at
last, to banish
from their sight.

The sexual motifs are played by McAfee, a Jazz man
alcoholic, that the boys
have an AA meeting with.

To be continued
.


In TSI, McAfee is arrested during his AA meeting with the
boys in the Berkshires. Remember McClinic heads to the
Berkshires (see Great Barrington) after the cops and Ten
Eyck bust down Winsome’s door and arrest Fu and friends. See
V. “Keep cool but care,” CH 10 for sex and war and
enfetishment (SHOCK and SHROUD) and Malcolm X CH 4 and 5 for
“keep cool” and the army (Jill), Thank you Thomas for
sending me to V. and Nicole for Eliot’s sterile Ark—“womb of
rock” in V..

Carl Barrington, is an early example of Pynchon’s mediator
characters. He becomes more and more an abstract entity as
the story proceeds and he becomes more non-human. Like
Slothrop and V., he is a golem, and he becomes in the end a
total abstraction and a pile of junk, broken, shattered, and
dispersed.  In V., Pynchon’s major themes, fall under the
Enfetishment process, (which is easier and less complex than
what we find in GR, because it is generally space and matter
orientated) and History (which is time orientated). What has
happened to good old lovemaking? Is it the war? The
never-ending war? Chapter 10 of V., brings the war and sex
together. In this chapter, Pynchon’s irony is apparent in
the title—“In which various sets of young people get
together.”

Mafia: “I need a man,” already half out of the skirt,
“fashioned for Heroic Love.” I’ve wanted you ever since we
met.”
Profane sets a can of beer on her soft abdomen. “Sometimes
women remind me of inanimate objects. Young Rachel (see
chapter one), even: half an MG.” Rex in VL.
So characters become inanimate objects disguised as humans,
poor substitutes for humans, yet they are perfectly
fabricated, assembled, produced, erected, to operate and
work in a world that in Fausto’s terms, is “moving toward
non-humanity.”  And Pynchon, uses Enfetishment to drive his
irony and comment satirically on modern cultural “decadence”
and History.

So I see Pynchon following Dickens, for example, Gradgrind
of Hard Times is  very much a figure like Pointsman—a
single-minded overly analytical exploiter of “Hands.”

Terrance