V-2nd - 2: At the V-Note

[alice wellintown]

Pynchon's best short story, "The Secret Integration", written after
V., is of use here.

Critics may speculate about P's development as a writer, even disagree
with P's assessment of his development as he describes it in his SL
Intro..

TSI is an excellent source for such speculations and yet, it has been
largely ignored as a source of speculations of this kind. Under the
Rose and Entropy and even MMV and other slow learners tales have been
the focus.

 In the story, the more Carl Barrington functions as an as an abstraction,
Representing, for example, race relations in America, the
more inanimate and less human he becomes. He's never quite a character
in the traditional sense. He is a collective return of the
repressed--a ghost. Though a minir figure in a short tale, he
functions as Pearl does in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Only Pearl,
who is figuratively, ALL that the Scarlet Letter represents,
including, of course, ART (Hester's and, more importantly to our
concern with Pynchon's characters, Hawthorne's Art).


At the end of the story, Carl represents the discarded black musician,
Carl McAfee,
(the boys name their "imaginary" secretly integrated African-American
friend Carl, after Carl McAfee) race relations in America,
the boys’ loss of innocence-- "dreams that could never again
be entirely safe"--- and America's blind embrace of cold war military
industrial complex
technologies (including nukes), automation, and the manufactured
consent of consumption.

 At the very end of the story, Carl Barrington, like Slothrop and V, is
scattered. How is he like Slothrop and how is he different from V.?
For these two figures are quite important to our understanding of how
characters work in P's fiction and how two major forces, the Dynamo
and the Virgin function in his works as well.

At the end of TSI, Carl is reduced to the junkyard parts and repressed
dreams he was assembled from, abandoned "with other
attenuated ghosts.”  After the boys have lost their innocence
and given up on Carl Barrington, one boy, Etienne asks
Grover, the boy genius, "are we still integrated?"
"Ask your father," Grover replies. "I don't know anything."

Grover seems to know a lot; he knows that integration is a term of
mathematics and he knows that it is being resisted by the white
families in his community. He knows about Spartacus (the man, the
legend, the book, the film), he knows that Dr, Slothrop’s methods of
curing Tim’s wart (an ironic allusion to Twain’s Huck) is mumbo-jumbo
and mechanical duck. He knows that the books he is addicted to, the
Tom Swift books, are racist.

In his Companion, Grant describes Pynchon as an author who knows a
great deal. Like Grover, he knows more than most people his age and a
great deal more than his elders. And, he is willing to investigate, to
look up words like “integration”, and to question the status quo.
Grover argues with his old man about cold war politics, but he gives
up because the generation gap—what Grover and his old man care
about—is too wide to close. This is a theme P continues to develop in
AGTD. Fathers and Sons—work and education.  Education! This is one of
the golden screws that holds P's works together. Not just Adams, but
the education itself.


Why does Grover claim he knows nothing? What has he learned that has
undermined all he has learned? Smart kid. Not a slow learner like
Orwell's 1984 protagonist. Not a slow learner like Adams or Pynchon.
The Catskill Eagle! There is a wisdom that is madness and woe!


Etienne's father owns the junkyard, and while all the other
parents, including Dr. Slothrop, dump their
garbage on a childless black couples lawn and terrorize them
with racist prank phone calls, Etienne's father says they
should not worry about blacks moving into the neighborhood,
they should be concerned about Automation.


"Carl had been put together out of phrases, images,
possibilities that grownups had somehow turned away from,
repudiated, left out at the edges of towns, as if they were
auto parts in Etienne's father's junkyard-things they could
or did not want to live with but which the kids, on the
other hand, could spend endless hours with, piecing
together, rearranging, feeding, programming, refining."

What are the images, phrases, possibilities that the adults
have marginalized, repudiated, left at the edges of towns?
Integration: McAfee, the bass player, who ends
up stranded on the edge of town and disappears under
suspicious circumstances, after being arrested for vagrancy.

McAfee is left in the Berkshires after Sphere
travels their in V., this after another suspicious police
raid in that novel. What are the images and how are they
restructured?

In "A Journey Into The Mind of Watts" Pynchon says,

Restructuring of the riot goes on in other ways. All Easter
week this year, in the spirit of the season, there was a
"Renaissance of the Arts," a kind of festival in memory of
Simon Rodia, held at Markham Junior High, in the heart of
Watts.

Along with theatrical and symphonic events, the festival
also featured a roomful of sculptures fashioned entirely
from found objects--found, symbolically enough, and in the
Simon Rodia tradition, among the wreckage the rioting had
left. Exploiting textures of charred wood, twisted metal,
fused glass, many of the works were fine, honest rebirths.

In one corner was this old, busted, hollow TV set with a
rabbit-ears antenna on top. Inside, where its picture tube
should have been, gaping out with scorched wiring threaded
like electronic ivy among its crevices and sockets, was a
human skull. The name of the piece was "The Late, Late, Late
Show."


When the boys dream, radio signals filter in and mix with
their memories and the boys listen to Mr. McAfee's delirious
babble at a practical joke alcohol's anonymous  (AA) meeting
set up by the townspeople. The boys reduce Carl to a "robot"
at the end of the story, to an inanimate "robot…to banish
from their sight." But Carl Barrington is not a robot. He is
not mechanical.

In describing Gothic and Science fiction,
Pynchon explains what Carl Barrington and the other
attenuated ghosts are and how they are created.

In "Is It OK to be a Luddite" Pynchon says,

Look, for example, at Victor's account of how he assembles
and animates his creature. He must, of course, be a little
vague about the details, but we're left with a procedure
that seems to include surgery, electricity (though nothing
like Whale's galvanic extravaganzas), chemistry, even, from
dark hints about Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, the still
recently discredited form of magic known as alchemy. What is
clear, though, despite the commonly depicted Bolt Through
the Neck, is that neither the method nor the creature that
results is mechanical.

He says, "Neither the method nor the creature is
mechanical," so what is the method and what is the creature?

Next ,  in "Is It OK to be a Luddite" Pynchon says,

This is one of several interesting similarities between
"Frankenstein" and an earlier tale of the Bad and Big, "The
Castle of Otranto" (1765), by Horace Walpole, usually
regarded as the first Gothic novel.

AND

THE novels are also of strikingly similar nocturnal origin:
both resulted from episodes of lucid dreaming. Mary Shelley,
that ghost-story summer in Geneva, trying to get to sleep
one midnight, suddenly beheld the creature being brought to
life, the images arising in her mind "with a vividness far
beyond the usual bounds of reverie." Walpole had been
awakened from a dream, "of which, all I could remember was,
that I had thought myself in an ancient castle... and that
on the uppermost bannister of a great stair-case I saw a
gigantic hand in armour."


Nocturnal qualities are what Pynchon describes in the
Introduction to Slow Learner as being so important to his
maturity as a novelist.

In Walpole's novel, this hand shows up as the hand of
Alfonso the Good, former Prince of Otranto and, despite his
epithet, the castle's resident Badass. 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.

A family curse on the house of Pynchon (Pynchon & CO. and
Hawthorne's House of Pyncheon).   The Return of the
Repressed. The assembly is by means of the supernatural and is non-
Mechanical.   P's Characters are romantic.