V. (Ch 3) 'In the Polite Spirit of the Tusculan Disputations'

[jbor]

Talk of (being) an "electro-mechanical doll", and the worth of "humanity",
in the argument between Bongo-Shaftsbury and Porpentine which is overheard
by Waldetar on the Alexandria-Cairo train (80-81) reminds me a little of the
discussion between Pitch and the verbose and obsequious "Philosophical
Intelligence Officer" aboard the Fidèle in Melville's _The Confidence-Man_:

     So saying the bachelor was eying him rather rather sharply, when he
   with the brass plate recalled him to the discussion by a hint, not
   unflattering, that he (the man with the brass plate) was all anxiety
   to hear him further on the subject of servants.
     "About that matter," exclaimed the impulsive bachelor, going off at
   the hint like a rocket, "all thinking minds are, now-a-days, coming to
   the conclusion -- one derived from an immense hereditary experience --
   see what Horace and others of the ancients say of servants -- coming to
   the conclusion, I say, that boy or man, the human animal is, for most
   work-purposes, a lsoing animal. Can't be trusted; less trustworthy than
   oxen; for conscientiousness a turn-spit dog excels him. Hence these
   thousand new inventions -- carding machines, horseshoe machines, tunnel
   -boring machines, reaping-machines, apple-paring machines, boot-
   blacking machines, sewing machines, shaving machines, run-of-errand
   machines, dumb-waiter machines, and the Lord-only-knows-what machines;
   all of which announce the era when that refractory animal, the working
   or serving man, shall be a buried by-gone, a superseded fossil. Shortly
   prior to which glorious time, I doubt not that a price will be put upon
   their peltries as upon the knavish 'possums, especially the boys. Yes,
   sir (ringing his rifle down on the deck), I rejoice to think that the
   day is at hand, when, prompted to it by law, I shall shoulder this gun
   and go out a boy-shooting!" [Ch. 22]

Horace on the horizon indeed! The dawn of an era of the obsolescence of
human labour and servility (and the moral dimensions of same, evinced both
explicitly and implicitly); machines (and inanimacy); the fossil analogy
(cf. Mildred's trilobite rock); Pitch's presentation of the rifle itself (a
killing- machine, cf. the menace of Bongo-S's flick-switch); the inefficacy
of "boys" (cf. Gebrail's rumination about whether the "boy [is] possessed by
a djinn who makes his hands do work wrong" and thereby lets the desert in)
-- there does seem to be a quite definite resonance.

And, as in Melville's novel, I'm not entirely sure that one side of the
dialectic is in fact being promoted over the other by the text: not only in
the Porpentine/ Bongo-Shaftsbury argument, but in the wider context afforded
by the narration of Waldetar, Hanne, Yusef, P. Aeuil et. al.

Plus, I suspect that V in this early guise as Victoria Wren is on a sort of
epistemological quest of her own (see the biog. details about her
Catholicism provided by Maxwell Rowley-Bugge at 72.27), one which parallels
the somewhat more secular seekings of *both* Stencils, père and fils. And,
this sort of aspiration to possess and expound (or, indeed, create) ultimate
meaning or truth has always recalled for me Rev. Casaubon's similarly
pathetic pretension to write 'The Key to All Mythologies' in _Middlemarch_
(which was mentioned earlier today amongst a group novels to cure -- or, as
I rather suspect for a greater majority of readers, *cause* -- insomnia),
satirised mercilessly by G. Eliot as the Stencils (and V) and their quests
are by Pynchon.

best