V-2nd C4 Foreign Body Reaction

[Dave Monroe]

"'Foreign-body reaction, they call it.'" (V., Ch. 4, p. 102)


Foreign-body reaction

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

http://www.uweb.engr.washington.edu/research/tutorials/woundhealing.html


"Before they melted it down it was one of a set of pastoral figurines
[...].  Lord know where they're originally from--"

?  But cf. the "two golden imps" @ p. 98 ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1008&msg=150750


CP = command post (Grant, Companion, p. 63)


... and, again, 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 ensuring their
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