McCintic McClintoc

[Dave Monroe]

... keep wanting to add that missing "l," but ... but a quick question
for the class here: is there any character, any event, anything (maybe
even any thing) whatsoever in V. that doesn't somehow partake of what
we're calling, what V. calls, the "inanimate," despite the fact that
said "inanimate" is often quite animate indeed, in the sense of "in
motion," if not necessarily, say, "having a spirit," an anima (= pneuma
= breath = wind?  But tres cybernetique nonetheless ...).  Everybody and
so forth seems nigh unto inevitably to be subjected to some sort of
mechanistic trope, tropology, tropism, even (which remind me, Nathalie
Sarraute, Tropisms, The Planetarium, et al.), starting with that simple
(or not so simple) harmonic yoyomotion factor, starting with Benny
Profane, but hardly ending there.  That "(in)human use of (in)human
beings" pervades the novel (and recall that perhaps implied nostalgia
for the so-called organic, the pre-cybernetic, in "Is it O.K to be a
Luddite?") ...