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

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

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.