Chapter 45: The Duck and Slothrop

[David Morris]

>Very Good Stuff from Terrance:
>The duck, we could say, starts off as a bunch of parts assembled, but there 
>is more to the assembly than parts, so like Slothrop and V and Barrington, 
>the more the duck comes to function as an abstract entity (and a golem, and 
>I'll have to define the golem because I know this term has many meanings, 
>including several in M&D) the more inanimate and non-human it becomes. The 
>duck, has become an angel, for example. ANd has taken on abstractions like 
>angels after the  "the death of god" as Otto noted  and abstractions of 
>time/space. The two processes (functioning as abstract entity and becoming 
>inanimate an non-human) are coextensive. V’s changing identity drives some 
>of the major themes of the novel, such as history, politics, race, manifest 
>destiny, and so on and the same is true of both Slothrop and Barrington. 
>So, being Pynchon, it should not suprize us to see sex and religion in the 
>mix. Do Angels have sex?

It would seem that part of Pynchon's message is that if they don't, they 
should.

>Or are they only an Enfetishment? Are angels, like the Octopus in GR, named 
>after an the Angels who only "stand and wait" or watch, now, neither male 
>nor female or both id you don't mind, history ass Voyeurism?

http://eserver.org/bs/41/wray.html

If today's critical theorists have a fetish, it is probably fetishism 
itself. Clearly, we derive a certain perverse pleasure from using the term, 
enjoying its cachet and the way it wryly suggests a sexual, libidinal energy 
at work in everything from shopping to sport, from celebrity worship to 
public humiliations. For these reasons and others I'll explain in a moment, 
fetishism as an analytical concept has enjoyed great favor among cultural 
critics. It is generally understood as a potent -- I'm tempted to say 
magical -- weapon of analysis for a wide range of culturally informed 
activities, most of them having to do with how we learn to want stuff, how 
we come to desire objects and things.

But, like any term that enjoys great popularity, it has been so widely used 
and abused that it has come to mean quite different things to many different 
people. For the purposes of keeping this essay brief, I want to focus on 
just three different meanings of the word as it is used in different arenas: 
in everyday speech, in the psycho-sexual realm, and in the economic, 
material realm




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