Copellia

[Martha Rooster-Singh]

In the great author's latest novel he sends his brave protagonist out to
Montauk  where, in the middle of protected wildlife sanctuaries, in and
around, and even under Camp Hero, Gabriel Ice has a castle under
construction.  As she makes her way down a confidential space that resists
analysis, her antennas, now stiff with the hairspray that Oedipa never put
on or took off, are filled with radio traffic, numerals and NATO phonetic
letters. More Mondaugen's sferics? The ghosts of murdered Africans? A
poetry he can't comprehend. Not literally. Grover with his ham radio? The
cries of his robot boy, the Black boy Carl Barrington, constructed from the
car parts and junk that the society wastes and piles in the junk yard, the
garbage tossed on the lawns to terrorize the childless Black couple, the
Jazz man's nightmares and the the desperate schemes of the boys who try to
save themselves from the bomb plots and fallout shelters their  parents
have given them. Here, Maxine is a double fallout shelter. One, the Cold
War shelter, now a tourist attraction, MAD in the new frontier, the other,
Ice's Castle under construction. Privacy for the billionaire plutocrat
welcoming the Void.

 page 193

P drops the clue: Bluebeard's Castle. Not a tip of the cap to Kurt Vonnegut
here, but an Opera.  So the psycho-sexual journey.

The other opera, always connected with this one, has to do with a wooden
prince, made of flesh, made wood, then flesh again.

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




On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 10:59 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm always interested by how damn often in the human (at least
> western) imagination we imagine our creations will rebel against us
> eventually. Robots, especially - it's as if we're sure they'll try to
> kill us all as soon as they're smart enough to think like us. Really
> neurotic of humans to project that onto something that doesn't even
> exist yet, I reckon.
>
> Has extra connotations for the US, given that it's a creation that did
> (successfully) rebel against its creator.
>
> On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 2:55 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I guess the most important aspect of all of this neo-human engineering is
> > that deus ex machina. Even so benign a being as Slothrup might cost you
> your
> > balls.  The Creation often confounds The Creator, but only because of the
> > Creator's willfulness.  This is also the story of Faust:  willful self
> > creation via artificial means.  Both the same cautionary tale.
> >
> > David Morris
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tuesday, December 31, 2013, David Morris wrote:
> >>
> >> P knows his Freud, and he knows opera.  He is well versed in automata
> and
> >> Frankenstein, as well as the golem,  He hasn't done clones yet...
> >>
> >> Clone Returns Home (2008)
> >>
> >>
> http://variety.com/2008/film/reviews/the-clone-returns-home-2-1200472620/
> >>
> >> Trailer:
> >> HKAIFF 2009 - 複製人懷鄉曲 The Clone Returns Home - trailer
> >>
> >>
> >> On Tuesday, December 31, 2013, John Bailey wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Yeah, Coppelia is based on ETA Hoffmann's short story The Sandman,
> >>> which was the major text Freud used to explore his theory of The
> >>> Uncanny (and good stuff on voyeurism and castration). Very influential
> >>> story and essay. Dunno if P read either but I've never been able to
> >>> read V. without seeing them everywhere in the novel. V is the human
> >>> who transforms themselves into an object, and makes real the horror
> >>> implicit in the ballet (it's more obvious in the story, which doesn't
> >>> have a happy ending.)
> >>>
> >>> On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 9:12 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>> > Watching the movie Tetro, a scene from the ballet Copellia, the
> broken
> >>> > doll,
> >>> > is portrayed. I'd never heard anyone mention the ballet in V. In
> light
> >>> > of
> >>> > Copellia, which seems so obvious to be its reference.
> >>> >
> >>> >  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copp%C3%A9lia
> >>> >
> >>> > Coppélia concerns an inventor, Dr Coppelius, who has made a life-size
> >>> > dancing doll. It is so lifelike that Franz, a village swain, becomes
> >>> > infatuated with it and sets aside his true heart's desire, Swanhilde.
> >>> > She
> >>> > shows him his folly by dressing as the doll, pretending to make it
> come
> >>> > to
> >>> > life and ultimately saving him from an untimely end at the hands of
> the
> >>> > inventor.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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