VV(12): Foppl

[Dave Monroe]

And again from W.T. Llhamon, Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a 
Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian 
Institution Press, 1990), Ch. 6, "'Keep Cool, But Care,'" pp. 193-251 ...

"It is important that, until its end, 'Mondaugen's Story' is not really 
Mondaugen's, but Foppl's.  Rather, Mondaugen has been aurally and visually a 
voyeur, as the literal rendering of his name suggests: moon eyes....  Foppl, 
mainly, but also others educate this young man in the genocidal colonialism 
they have thrived on during South West African history.  Foppl's legends of 
the concentration camps, rapes, carnage, and forced concubinage that 
accompanied extreme power unchecked by conscience--these have made up the 
chapter's content." (213)

"Foppl's case had led the Europeans to expect everywhere the same 
transparent language, everywhere a mutual sluaghter between whites and 
blacks, and everywhere a death-hastening Fasching.  Mondaugen found instead 
a song he could not understand, a hand to lift him, a scarred back to sleep 
on, and purposeful motion toward release.... the world was not all what 
someone else's case was." (216)

[and, of course, note the echo of "fascism" in "Fasching," the latter nigh 
unto the verb/gerund form of the former]

"'Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to 
stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that 
was imperiling them all.'" (216, citing Joseph Heller, Catch-22 [NY: Simon 
and Schuster, 1961], p. 414)

"Mondaugen's independent action shows an alternative principle struggling 
with the modernist certainty of universal undeeerlying order.  Breaking out 
of the case to real help from the purported enemy, Mondaugen puts the lie to 
the governing logic within Foppl's fortress.  Breaking out of that casse, 
snuggling the Bondel's back, Mondaugen exemplifies the existence not of 
finagled logic, but of root cross-purposes." (216)

"The zigzag progress and criss-cross persistence of Philosophical 
Investigations, its quick sketches arranged and rearranged ... --these are 
Robert Frank's and Jackson Pollock's hallmarks as much as Wittgenstein's.... 
Kerouac ....  Wittgenstein's thorough reliance on everyday tools and 
rejection of professional argot, his direct address to the audience and 
supposition of dialogue are all parallel to techniques Nabokov, Ellison, 
Coleman, and Ginsberg favor." (203)

"All the historical chapters are aggressively negative.  Pynchon has 
organized them all around specific, celebrated texts.  He shows all these 
modern actions--most of them high modern--to be foolish, negligent of 
consequences, or worse--misogynist, racist, and genocidal.  V. is an 
activist novel.  It resists and talks back.  It makes definite points." 
(206)

Much in here, will post as needed ...



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