V.V. (13) 1904

[jbor]

William T. Lhamon Jr.:

> "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)

Lhamon's reading neglects the dream aspects of Mondaugen's story (eg. that
important excursus to proto-Depression Munich in the text) as well as the
mention of Mondaugen's "increasing inability to distinguish Godolphin from
Foppl" and how the related events "may or may not have been helped along by
Vera Meroving ... " (255.3) Pynchon foregrounds these variables right up
front in Section III of the chapter, so it's odd that Lhamon Jr has missed
them. Of the origin of the first part of the story of what went on in 1904
Mondaugen conjectures:

      Foppl, perhaps.
      Except that the shape of Mondaugen's "conspiracy" with Vera Meroving
    was finally beginning to come clear to him. She apparently wanted
    Godolphin, for reasons he could only guess at, though her desire seemed
    to arise out of a nostalgic sensuality whose appetite knew nothing at
    all of nerves, or heat, but instead belonged to the barren touchlessness
    of memory. She had obviously needed Mondaugen only to be called (he
    might assume cruelly)  a long ago son, to weaken her prey.
      Not unreasonably then she would have used Foppl, perhaps to replace
    the father as she thought she had replaced the son, Foppl the siege
    party's demon, who was in fact coming more and more to define his guests
    assembled, to prescribe their common dreams. Possibly Mondaugen alone
    among them was escaping it, because of his peculiar habits of
    observation. So in a passage (memory, nightmare, yarn, maundering,
    anything) ostensibly his host's Mondaugen could at least note that
    though the events were Foppl's, the humanity could easily have been
    Godolphin's. (255)

It seems to me that V-era is pulling some, if not all, of the strings here
(Weissmann's, Godolphin's, Foppl's and Mondaugen's: she seems to be leading
each of them around the villa at one point or another). Kurt's father "had
died not so many years ago, somehow involved in the Kiel revolt" (260.11,
which is why Vera is perhaps trying to use Foppl to "replace the father"),
and Godolphin had been involved in the siege at Port Arthur back in 1904.
(147.2) V seems to thrive on these siege-times: Vera apparently played
Eleonora Duse to D'Annunzio at Fiume (247.30), and mentions that "Lieutenant
Weissmann and Herr Foppl have given me my 1904" (247.9). But back in the
earlier chapters also Godolphin had replayed the Siege at Khartoum with
General Gordon for V-ictoria's benefit (171.22, it is this siege which her
ivory comb of five crucified British soldiers likewise commemorates 167.2),
and there's that chilling image of her turning "away to gaze, placid, at the
rioting" in Florence at the end of that chapter. (209.3) And even back in
Egypt Victoria at age 18 is embroiled in the lead-up to the Fashoda crisis,
yet another siege.

So, I'm not sure what the "definite points" which Lhamon sees the novel as
making might be, except to say that these sieges happened (Fashoda, the 1904
Rebellion, Port Arthur, Kiel, Fiume, the Depression in Munich, the 1922
Revolt); and I'm not sure that they *are* all "high modern", or what that
descriptor applied to an historical event might be supposed to signify, (and
I don't know that the representations are in fact "organized around
specific, celebrated texts" as Lhamon conjectures about the structural
organisation of Pynchon's novel). I think Pynchon is more interested in the
psychological response of the European within, or to, these siege-times, the
"siege-mentality" as it were, and that it is this which nourishes V (all
that sentimental nostalgia and "the barren touchlessness of memory") and
expedites her "growth" to inanimacy/inhumanity. I guess the point that
Lhamon seems to be neglecting is whether or not, in the symbolic role or
function of V within these sequences, there is a hint of causality, or
whether she/it is merely a symptom.

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