Mondaugen

[Paul Murphy]

Linda H. Segrest wrote:
>         Mondaugen is the uncorrupted Nordic, the (impartial?) witness to
> all the bad-German-romantic decadence at Foppl's, but most importantly
> another male affected powerfully by V.
>         Actually he's none of this and more, just an "impersonation" of
> Herbert Stencil, the high priest/prophet in the wilderness of cabalistic
> gnosticism.
>         What else could he be???

Indeed -- all of the above holds true. My conjectural spin on Mondaugen 
comes from the intertextual associations of the name (always a fun game 
with TRP): moon eyes, lunar eyes in German. This resonates with a 
recurrent figure in the poetry of Georg Trakl: Elis, the 'subject' of 
several poems by the fin-de-siecle Austrian poete maudite, epigone of 
the Hoelderlinian Wirkungsgeschichte (alongside Rilke), who happened to 
have been given a hefty stipend by Wittgenstein (note the Tractatus 
citation at the end of "Mondaugen's Story"), on Rilke's recommendation. 
Wittgenstein even went looking for Trakl in Poland during WWI, only to 
find he had already OD'ed on cocaine in a psychiatric hospital. (Webern 
set a number of Trakl's poems to music, as did the young Adorno). 

Elis is variously described as having lunar eyes, 'mondenen Augen'. He's 
also dead, for a long time it seems, for time immemorial perhaps, a 
looming spectral figure of death (and lunacy) overshadowing Trakl's 
vision of incest, madness and catastrophe. Lunar eyes suggest an 
interruption of the Hegelian specular dialectic of recognition, whereby 
Kurt Mondaugen's scopophilia and passivity collude with the genocide 
under way in Suedwestafrika. Kurt does finally develop a sense of moral 
outrage towards the end of the chapter, but it remains to be elaborated 
where this outrage goes in GR, if anywhere.

This may be too compressed to make any sense, and I'm not exactly saying 
that Trakl is a direct 'influence' in V., but I wouldn't be surprised 
given his affiliations and stature.
PNM