Essential McLuhan 24 And for those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder. Many of the Frankenstein fantasies depend on the horror of a synthetic robot running amok in revenge for its lack of a “soul.” Is this not merely a symbolic way of expressing the actual fact that many people have become so mechanized that they feel a dim resentment at being deprived of full human status? This is a different way of phrasing what is for Wilhelm Reich only a behavioristic fact. Too simply, he thinks of our machine landscape as an environment which makes people incapable of genital satisfaction. Therefore, he says, they break out in fascist violence. Complete and frequent genital satisfaction from the cradle to the grave is the only way, he suggests, to avoid the recurrence of the age-old vicious circle of patriarchal authority and mechanical servitude. Reflection on Moby Dick in his Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H.Lawrence saw deeper: So you see, the sinking of the Pequod was only a metaphysical tragedy, after all. The world goes on just the same. The ship of the soul is sunk. But the machine-manipulating body works just the same: digests, chews gum, admires Botticelli, and aches with amorous love. Was it not the mistake of D.H.Lawrence to overlook the comedy in a situation of this type? The human person who thinks, works, or dreams himself into the role of a machine is as funny an object as the world provides. And, in fact, he can only be freed from this trap by the detaching power of wild laughter. The famous portrait of a “Nude Descending a Staircase,” with its resemblance to an artichoke doing a strip tease, is a cleansing bit of fun intended to free the human robot from his dreamlike fetters. And so with Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God, Picasso’s Doll Women, and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce— the latter especially being a great intellectual effort aimed at rinsing the Augean stables of speech and society with geysers of laughter. It is not a laughter or comedy to be compared with the whimsy-whamsy article of James Thurber or Ogden Nash. For the latter kind is merely a narcotic which confirms the victim in a condition he has neither the energy nor appetite to change. In a story called “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,” by Fritz Leiber, an ad photographer gives a job to a not too promising model. Soon, however, she is “plastered all over the country” because she has the hungriest eyes in the world. “Nothing vulgar, but just the same they’re looking at you with a hunger that’s all sex and something more than sex.” Something similar may be said of the legs on a pedestal. Abstracted from the body that gives them their ordinary meaning, they become “something more than sex,” a metaphysical enticement, a cerebral itch, an abstract torment. Mr. Leiber’s girl hypnotizes the country with her hungry eyes and finally accepts the attentions of the photographer who barely escapes with his life. In this vampire, not of the blood but of spirit, he finds “the horror behind the bright billboard…. She’s the eyes that lead you on and on and then show you death.” She says to him: “I want you. I want your high spots. I want every-thing that’s made you happy and everything that’s hurt you bad. I want your