Sferics and Tachtsachen

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Kevin Troy wrote:
> 
> Kathleen Fitzpatrick said:
> > Foppl's Siege Party takes place in 1922, the same year the Tractatus was
> > published, and Mondaugen's response to Weissman's translation is "I've
> > heard that somewhere before."
> 
> Would Mondaugen have heard it before?  When in 1922 was Tractatus
> published?  He arrives in Sudwest "one May morning in 1922."
> 
> Did he bring a copy with him?  Did he find it at Foppl's -- perhaps sent
> from home by a friend?  Or did Kurt actually _hear_ it somewhere before?


"The world is all that the case is," Mondaugen said. "I've
heard that somewhere before." (V.295 may be V.258 in your
copy) 

This is a good example of Pynchon's irony. Where has
Mondaugen heard this before? 

 "From Munich and never heard of Hitler," said Weissmann.
V.256

The decoded message foreshadows and thus undermines
Stencil's quest for some transcendent meaning in "plot",
"symbolism", and "metaphor", but it is also savagely ironic
in that the statement brings with it a case that the world
is Sudan, Florence, South-West Africa, Europe--genocide by
Inanimate Annihilation. 

See "Mondaugen's Story" in the novel V. 


"Mondaugen's Story" deals with the German postcolonial
activities in South-West Africa. Mondaugen goes there, May
1922, to decode the "sferics" (atmospheric radio
disturbances, his latitude 28 degrees S.  A native rebellion
(irony) threatens the  White "history and time prevailing
against chaos" and so Mondaugen reluctantly leaves his
outpost and goes to Fopple's party, a perpetual "Siege
Party" that parallels
the symbolically decadent perpetual party of the Whole Sick
Crew in the Benny Profane narrative. "A state of siege"
being her  "natural habitat,"  the party is attended by V.,
"Her name proved to be Vera Meroving, her companion a
Lieutenant Weissmann, her city
Munich.  V., now Vera, a Profane Nostalgic Virgin and
Beatrice turned dynamo of inanimate violence and death,
longs to return to the genocide (only a mere 10% of that
Jewish one, you know) of an earlier time (1904-1907) when
von Trotha slaughtered sixty thousand Hereros (a warm up
drill) during the Hottentot's Rebellion. Pynchon's outrage
is
obvious, his sarcasm biting, his associations historical. 
V. here is Greta of GR. She is the queen of the night, her
king is Weissmann, the party is an orgy against entropy and
forward time. With profane Nostalgia they long to turn the
clock back to 1904, to escape being human, comfortably
dehumanizes, safe in a luxurious world without values and
human dignity. Like our sick crew here in GR, the want to
redefine humanity in terms of amoral power-dynamo, escape
from a history of moral value. 

As is his model, Pynchon will add the fantastic to the
parodic.  Mondaugen gets scurvy and like so many of
Pynchon's characters (not his readers), Mondaugen is a
voyeur. His scurvy causes delirium. Like Dorothy, many of
Pynchon's characters, either under the influence of drugs,
illness, withdrawal from addiction, dreams, dream states
mixed with radio, film, TV, etc., move easily through
dream/real time/spaces. Mondaugen being a voyeur ("voyeur's
dreams are never their own" (this is often caused by War and
Systems in Pynchon's fiction), dreams the dreams of a
soldier.  The
soldier's attitude towards killing is changed during the
dream from inanimate indifference to some sort of eros /
thanatos  unity with the one he kills. 

"It dawned on you slowly, but the conclusion was
irresistible; you were in no sense killing. The voluptuous
feeling of safety, the delicious lassitude you went into the
extermination which was sooner or later replaced by a very
curious--not emotion because part of it was obviously a lack
of what we commonly call "feeling"--"functional agreement"
would come closer to it; operational sympathy."

Victim and victimizer, "the long daisy chain", the
"destroyer and destroyed."