Prosthetic Paradise(2) Enfetishment&MS

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

David Morris wrote:
> 
> >From: Michael Perez
> >Terrance wrote:
> >"This non-humanity is not, as so many have argued, simply Pynchon's
> >Borgs or Terminators,human/machines, humans with plastic parts.  The
> >process is not mechanical and the humans are not machines, but are
> >humans in a world that no longer recognizes their humanity."
> >
> >When Pynchon does introduce us to "humans with plastic parts," like the
> >Bad Priest, some humanity manifests itself.
> >[snip]After the characters and the reader
> >reestablish the humanity of humans given up for inanimate and realize
> >the lack of humanity in the inanimate, all are faced with a
> >considerable moral dilemma.  This is not, I believe a readers' trap, as
> >Terrance asks about (or a writers' trap), but a presentation of a major
> >philosophical question, there does not appear to be conscious deception
> >or dangerous ambiguity.  The dialectics regarding this issue are left,
> >for the most part, to the readers.
> >
> 
> That's what keeps us comming back for more.  These are not "traps" but
> conditions viewed from many angles and metaphors.  One of the difficulties
> of delimnas is the simultaneous rightness and wrongness of all solutions,
> and thus a challenge to dig deeper.
> 
> David Morris


I agree, dig deep, or as Melville would "insist" dive
deeply. I've been comparing Pynchon's irony and narrative
voices to Melville's of late. Melville never wrote a
"novel," he insists that he didn't know how. His narratives
are every bit as complex, self conscious, sometimes
paranoid, ironic, apocalyptic, black with humor, in your
face with satire, YOU want cause and effect, profane
inverted sacred, jump skip hop streaming in and out of
consciousness as Pynchon's. Satirists have always subverted
"traditional" "conventions" in literature. Is Pynchon, as
Weisenburger argues, a satirist that simply delights or as
Wood would have it, an allagorist that only calls attention
to himself, or in Pynchon's own metaphor, a novelist that
has sailed through the pillars of Hercules into the abyss of
indeterminacy, or North to the pole where the moral compass
simply spins on a relativist's axis in all directions
without discrimination of what is good and what is evil? 
Are mindless pleasure equal to mindless hours? Are we all
voyeurs, tourists, buying trinkets of Nazi genocide, taking
the trip through the mad carnival of the night towards the
promise of space travel in a moraless future where one can
not know who is on trial at Nuremberg and why?

Are there no spells left that can protect us against falling
objects? 

TF