ATDTDA (5): The American Corporation

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

No doubt about it, gotta give V. another chance. . . .

        Tore:
        "But this is all the impersonation of life. 
        The real movement is not from death 
        to any rebirth. It is from death to 
        death-transfigured. The best you can 
        do is to polymerize a few dead molecules. 
        But polymerizing is not resurrection. I 
        mean your IG, Generaldirektor. [...] You 
        think you'd rather hear about what you 
        call 'life': the growing, organic Kartell. But 
        it's only another illusion. A very clever 
        robot. The more dynamic it seems to you,
        the more deep and dead, in reality, it 
        grows. [...] The persistence, then, of 
        structures favoring death." (GR,166-67)


        . . . .in reality a very clever robot.

>From an online review of:

        Maidens and Machines:
        Notes on Thomas Pynchon's V.

        Stencil even daydreams of V. as 
        machine:

        "---[S]kin radiant with the bloom of some 
        new plastic; both eyes glass but now 
        containing photoelectric cells, connected 
        by silver electrodes to optic nerves of 
        purest copper wire and leading to a brain 
        exquisitely wrought as a diode matrix         
        could ever be. Solenoid relays would be 
        her ganglia, servo-actuators move her 
        flawless nylon limbs, hydraulic fluid be 
        sent by a platinum heart-pump through 
        butyrate veins and arteries…a marvelous 
        vagina of polyethylene…leading to a 
        single silver cable which fed 
        pleasure-voltages direct to the correct 
        register of the digital machine in her skull. 
        And whenever she smiled or grinned in 
        ecstasy there would gleam her crowning 
        feature: Eigenvalue's precious dentures.---"

        If V. were a machine, not only could 
        Stencil understand her but he could 
        also control her just as Profane desires 
        to control a mechanical Rachel. Note 
        also how Stencil replaces each of her 
        parts with ones that are man made. 
        Like Frankenstein, he usurps the female 
        power of reproduction and grants it to 
        males, including himself.

http://www.americanpopularculture.com/archive/bestsellers/pynchon_machines.htm

Don't know what to make of the ending of this excerpt, but I recalled from one 
of my readings of V. how a (the?) central character was replacing living tissue 
with mechanical simulacra, in the process becoming more inert:

From:
Finding V - author Thomas Pynchon's book 'V'
Twentieth Century Literature,  Winter, 1998  by Kenneth Kupsch

V.'s metamorphosis is taken up far less subtly in the later historical episodes 
through the depiction of her "obsession with bodily incorporating little bits of 
inert matter" (488). Actually, Stencil's father, we are told in the epilogue, 
had noticed this characteristic 20 years earlier: "she would never let him touch 
or remove" (488) a five-toothed ivory comb. Roger B. Henkle points out that a 
similar comb was traditionally worn by Venus (100) - information he traces 
through the novel's reference to Robert Graves's The White Goddess. As for 
her more recent incarnation, by 1919 she has added a star sapphire to her
navel, as well as a glass eye which she eagerly displays to Stencil's father 
before pushing off from Malta for Fiume in time to be a part of that city's brief 
seizure by the Italian forces led by Gabriele d'Annunzio. In 1922 Vera 
Meroving, as she next calls herself, appears in South West Africa, where her 
sexuality takes a sadomasochistic turn as part of a group of besieged 
holdovers from the period of Germany's ruthless colonization of that country. 
Ultimately, in her most shadowy guise of all, V. returns to Maim, where she 
appears during World War II as a mysterious figure known simply as the Bad 
Priest. There the full extent of her obsession with replacing body parts with 
artificial ones is revealed when what's left of her dying body is effectively 
disassembled by a band of little children whose own insensitivity to suffering 
is of no small account. One particularly noteworthy detail here is the tattoo 
of the crucifixion of Christ uncovered on the bare skull after V.'s wig is 
cheerfully removed (342). Careful readers will remember that crucifixion was 
also the subject carved into her ivory comb, although in that case the victims 
were five British soldiers executed in 1883 during the successful Mahdist 
rebellion in Khartoum (167). Finally, it should be noted that all this takes place 
in a novel that begins, not accidentally, on Christmas Eve.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_4_44/ai_54370329/pg_7

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_4_44/ai_54370329