Medoro/Fitzpatrick and writerly anxiety

[Paul Nightingale]

In Anxiety of Obsolescence there are no references to Medoro's book,
although I think there are interesting connections, not least in the light
of a certain upcoming publication (and its title's biblical connotations).

As I have already indicated, Fitzpatrick describes anxiety to do with the
marginalisation of the white male Author as a result of technological change
(the perceived obsolescence of literature/the literary novel): "The rise of
the machine as a figure of literary concern during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries ... signals a deep cultural ambivalence about the
processes of modernisation, a simultaneous fascination and revulsion" (28).
Hence the "simultaneous cultural rejection of the Romantic dominant and a
longing for the return of that dominant in response to the machine" (29).
This is not dissimilar to Medoro's description of anxiety to do with new
beginnings, death and rebirth in "the second site of Eden ... under the
prospect of God's punishing wrath" (BA, 2).

Medoro bases her argument on the frequent appearance of the word "blood",
which "alternately functions as a powerful metonymy of the agony and waste
of war, a signifier of kinship and descent, an image of defilement and
sacrifice" (10).

On V.: "As scapegoat and fetish, V. bears the burden of evil as it is
delineated in Pynchon's text. She occurs at the thematic nexus between
sexuality and death, embodying the masculine fear of the body's fragility
and of what cannot be known. Her incorporation of metallic matter (her gold
feet, her silver teeth, for instance) reflects the extension of this fear
towards corporeality and decay" (21).

Cf Fitzpatrick: "Not simply a product of the mechanical parts with which she
couples, [V.] is a product of Herbert Stencil's mechanized reading process.
As Stencil dislocates himself into alternate historical personalities, he
gathers the textual pieces of which V. is composed". [...] V. ... has never
been allowed human integrity, human unity, but has always been a
technological assemblage. V., the signifier of parted thighs, the ultimate
coupling-uncoupling machine, the lesbian fetish best able to 'stack' with
its like, is prevented throughout the novel from achieving genuine
subjectivity, instead remaining trapped within the realm of objects" (AO,
86-87, 87).