animate objects, monsters

[Dave Monroe]

Whilst making my way in, around and through Gravity's Rainbow once
again, I find I'd forgotten a few of those "animate objects" that abound
in Pynchon's texts.  Not only the V-2, Byron the Bulb, maybe even that
Schwartzgerat, at least until we find out what it really is (and do we?
and even then ...), but am thinking here of Marcel of the Floundering
Four (V675/B787 ff.), "actually built a century ago for the" very real
"great conjuror Robert-Houdin," a reference to R-H's (mis)interpretation
of Wolfagng von Kempelen's "chess-playing Turk," which also inspired
Edgar Allen Poe's "Maelzel's Chess-Player."  (Nice website on this @
http://www.rampling.net/kempelen/ .)  Note the description: "funny
haircut with the ears perfectly outlined in hair that starts abruptly a
quarter-inch of bare plastic skin away, black patent-shiny hair, hornrim
glasses, a rather remote manner."  T.S. Eliot, anyone?  "Unfortunately
much to literal with humans"--Commander Data, albeit avant la lettre, as
well. "Still, his exquisite 19th-century brainwork"--note Marcel's "long
discourse[s]"--"the human art it took to build which has been flat lost,
lost as the dodo bird"--another dodo ref., oddly enough (or maybe not
...) ...

But also that Happyville guide, a "kind of squat robot, dark gray
plastic with rolling heat-lamp eyes" ("dacoit-faced" like that 1937
Ford? V645/B751 ff., at any rate).  "It is shaped something like a
crab.  'That's Cancer in Latin,' sez teh robot, 'and in Kenosha, too!'"
And in Happyville as well, apparently, but ... that Cancer thing again,
recall Leni @ V415/B484, "Pluto is in my sign now, held tight in its
claws."   What's up with Cancer, crabs here?  I'm not astronomically
inclined, myself, but I know a few of you are, so ... reminds me as
well, what's up in general with the monsters in Gravity's Rainbow?  The
Adenoid  (and cf. V754/B881, Richard M. Zhlubb, "Friends and detractors
alike think of him as 'the Adenoid'), Grigori the Octopus, the
Moss-Monster (and recall Dale Carter's take thereupon in The Final
Frontier).  Just saw Godzilla 2000 (speaking of which, note the
"translations," "Gott in Himmel," "Great Caesar's Ghost," and I wonder
what the Japanese is for "bitching" or "bite me" or "asshole" (?!)),
figurations of disaster(s), apocalypse (hm ... speaking of the
monstrous, the sublime, see
http://www.frankensteinmonster.com/Criticism/KantMonster.html) ...