NP? Frankenstein & the Great Game

[Doug Millison]

http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_aug4.html
August 4, 2002 

George Bush's new imperialism

By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor

The Bush administration's plan to invade Iraq and
install a client regime in Baghdad may be popular in
America, but to the outside world it increasingly
recalls old-fashioned British imperialism. [...] 

To form Iraq, Britain knitted together three utterly
disparate, mutually hostile regions: Kurdish tribal
lands; the Sunni Muslim region around Baghdad, then a
small city with a predominantly Jewish and Christian
population; and the Shia south. The result was an
unstable, artificial, Frankenstein state - a Mideast
Yugoslavia. [...] 


"Alfonso, like Frankenstein's creature, is assembled
from pieces -- sable-plumed helmet, foot, leg, sword,
all of them, like the hand, quite oversized -- which
fall from the sky or just materialize here and there
about the castle grounds, relentless as Freud's slow
return of the repressed. The activating agencies,
again like those in Frankenstein, are non-mechanical.
The final assembly of "the form of Alfonso, dilated to
an immense magnitude," is achieved through
supernatural means: a family curse, and the
intercession of Otranto's patron saint.
The craze for Gothic fiction after The Castle of
Otranto was grounded, I suspect, in deep and religious
yearnings for that earlier mythic time which had come
to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and
less literal, folks in the 18th century believed that
once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible
which were no longer so. Giants, dragons, spells. The
laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated
back then. What had once been true working magic had,
by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery.
Blake's dark Satanic mills represented an old magic
that, like Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion
was being more and more secularized into Deism and
nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of
God and afterlife, for salvation -- bodily
resurrection, if possible -- remained. The Methodist
movement and the American Great Awakening were only
two sectors on a broad front of resistance to the Age
of Reason, a front which included Radicalism and
Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic novel.
Each in its way expressed the same profound
unwillingness to give up elements of faith, however
"irrational," to an emerging technopolitical order
that might or might not know what it was doing.
"Gothic" became code for "medieval," and that has
remained code for "miraculous," on through
Pre-Raphaelites, turn-of-the-century tarot cards,
space opera in the pulps and comics, down to Star Wars
and contemporary tales of sword and sorcery.
To insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine
at least some of its claims on us, to assert the
limited wish that living things, earthly and
otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough
to take part in transcendent doings. By this theory,
for example, King Kong (?-1933) becomes your classic
Luddite saint. The final dialogue in the movie, you
recall, goes, "Well, the airplanes got him." "No. . .
it was Beauty killed the Beast." In which we again
encounter the same Snovian Disjunction, only
different, between the human and the technological.
"
http://www.libyrinth.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html



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