V-2nd C4 Allografts

[Dave Monroe]

"His name was Halidom and he favored allografts ..." (V., Ch. 4, p. 101)


AEF

American Expeditionary Forces

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Expeditionary_Forces


Halidom

"The word signifies something held sacred, perhaps referring to the
young doctor's 'ideas of his own.'"

--Grant, p. 63


allografts

"The more accurate word would be 'xenograft.'  An allograft is a graft
from a donor of the same species of the recipient, which in fact is
what Schoenmaker offers."

--Grant, p. 63

http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/companion_to_v/
http://books.google.com/books?id=JZyY6bmfaJ0C


"the introduction of inert substances"

Cf. ...

"bodily incorporating little bits of inert matter" (V., Epilogue, Sec.
III, p. 542)


"ivory ... silver ... paraffin and celluloid"

Colonialism, capitalism, plastics, cinema ...


"This mineral period"

I.e., of "believing himself no more animate than ..." ...


"alignment with the inanimate"

IS this necessarily "the mark of a Bad Guy"?  Hm ...


"Others ... carried on wars ... condemned his patients ..."

It's not so much "the culture's failure to heal its wounded" (Grant,
p. 63; see previous note) as "the culture's" failure NOT to wound its
own (and others) ...


"a conservative laziness"

Cf. ...

"This is America, you live in it, you let it happen.  Let it unfurl."
(Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 150)


>From Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American
Novel in the Age of Television (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2006),
Ch. 2, "Machine," pp. 58-97:

"This melding of the human and the inanimate .... has two practical
effects.  The first is the destruction of the human element of the
cyborg body: Godolphin's face is ravaged by a 'foreign-body reaction'
that causes his immune system to attack the 'inert substances'
implanted in his flesh.  The second ... is the rise of modern cosmetic
surgery.  Schoenmaker ('beauty maker') ... dedicated to 'prevent[ing]
a takeover of the profession by its unnatural and traitorous Halidoms'
... imagine he would promote the natural, the human.  'If alignment
with the inanimate is the mark of a Bad Guy,' the reader is told,
'Schoenmaker at least made a sympathetic beginning' [V., Ch. 4, p.
103].
   "This beginning does not last, however, as the technologies of
plastic surgery, the subordination of the human form to a kind of
fleshy engineering, lead Schoenmaker further and further down the road
toward the inanimate.  He is ultimately inspire not to fight such
implantations as Godolphin suffered but to find ways of ensuringtheir
acceptance by the body, of subduing the body's responses to such
technological infiltrations....  he has suffered a clear
'deterioration of purpose; a decay' [V., Ch. 4, p. 104] that
unmistakably connects him to the Whole Sick Crew's decadent
alienation." (pp. 82-3)

http://www.anxietyofobsolescence.com/
http://www.anxietyofobsolescence.com/2006/04/chapter-2/
http://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/books/11/the-anxiety-of-obsolescence
http://books.google.com/books?id=pdkDXNbPPuUC