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

[David Morris]

>From: "Terrance F. Flaherty"
>
[snip]
>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.[snip]
>
>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?
>
[snip,snip]
>
>In Walpole's novel, [snip] 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
>

It's ALIVE, Igor! A L I V E !!!!
Nice assembly above, too, Terrance.

I agree that this animation of an assembly is not mechanical.  Somehow, by 
magic or spirit, that breath of life is given to a pile of parts.  But this 
fact comes full circle from where this thread began:  Is my hand a tool?  Or 
is it distinct from all things made, somehow sacred, like all those sperm in 
my nut-sack.  And when I die, are my spare parts still "me" when they get 
divied-up to those who need them.

Nope.  They're just parts, well-crafted, but dead once "I've" departed, just 
as Alfonso requires the "non-mechanical" to make those pieces more than 
machine.  It's the "I" that makes the difference.

David Morris

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