Madsen, "Verbal Vivification in V."

[Dave Monroe]

>From Deborah L. Madsen, The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon 
(Leicester, UK: Leicester UP, 1991), Chapter 2, "Vacillating in the Void?  
Verbal Vivification in V.," pp. 29-53 ...

Stencil's account of the progress of V, and her temporal design, in 
Southwest Africa, in 1922, exemplifies the function of the narrative as 
historical, cultural interpretation.  Mondaugen is the single witness to and 
reporter of the action, but the reliability of his account is seriously 
undermined by the progressive interiorization of his point of view, as the 
story shifts from an objective first person narrative concerned with the 
facts of the situation, to a gradual predominance of impressions and then 
fantasy and imaginative speculation.  His professional function, to record 
'sferics', further threatens his reliability by suggesting a tendency to 
seek pattern where they may be none.  But Mondaugen's story reveals the 
effects of v in the South-West Protectorate through the pretextual 
interpretation of the V-metaphysic. (41)

[duly noted here that Madsen does not 'til a nod later account for the 
redoubling of all these effects by Stencil, by "stencilization," not to 
mention by Pynchon, "pynchonization," but ...]

V appears here in the guise of Vera Meroving; Victoria Wren's desire to 
shape historical events to the form of her own choosing now reified in 
Vera's elaborate clock eye.  This reification embodies the shift in V's 
activities, from here Florentian interlude where violence was the 
predominating V-quality of events, to the centrality here of one of V's more 
'historical' characteristics: the 'hothouse' conception of time. (41-2)

[by the way, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs is set in florence, 
and do note repeated references to Wanda von Dunajew's green eyes therein. 
I'd go so far as to suggest a loosely parodic analogy, here, Mondaugen = 
Severin, Vera = Wanda, and Weissmann = the Greek]

... the centre of activity in Foppl's 'siege party' is the reconstruction 
'in words and perhaps in deed' on von Trotha's genocidal campaign of 1904.  
But as Mondaugen also discovers, the distinction between word and deed is 
one difficult to sustain within the context of this decadence--a dissolution 
of distinctions which is characteristically V's as is the deflection of 
reality into 'hothouse' dreams of the past.  The decadence of the siege 
party defines itself for Mondaugen as and analogy with Munich at Fasching, 
'a city dying of abandon, venality'.  He dreams of being led through 
Munich's streets by Vera Meroving ... 'white faces, like diseased blooms, 
bobbed along in the dark ...' ([V.,] p. 244).  It is, however, this dreaming 
which casts doubt upon his entire account.  (42)

[again, note "venality," which, despite its etymological derivation from the 
Latin "venalis," from "venum," "sale," nonetheless ...; "Fasching" and 
"fascism"; Munich we know; and, again, cf. Ezra Pound, "In the Station of 
the Metro," "The apparition of these faces in the crowd/ Petals on a wet, 
black bough"]

Mondaugen conceives of himself, in the role of a witness to the siege party, 
as a voyeur; subsequently it occurs to him 'that if dreams are only waking 
sensations first stored and later operated on, then the dreams of a voyeur 
can never be his own' ([V.,] p. 255).  Here, Mondaugen's subjectivity begins 
to merge with the pretextual discourse that is the basis of his 
interpretation.  The determination of subjectivity by powerful cultural 
values, that is so graphically illustrated by the psychology of genocide, 
taints Mondaugen's relation to the society he is describing.  As the subject 
and object of the narration are merged, he find himself increasingly unable 
to distinguish either between the actors in this drama (the sources of his 
information) or to distinguish internal from external reality, thereby 
confusing the respective 'hothouses' of Foppl and Hugh Godolphin. The 
reappearance of old Godolphin and the resumption of his relationship with 
Vera/Victoria is the major link between the two V-personae, and the 
'conspiracy' that Mondaugen has suspected .... (42)

She operates on the tentative distinction between memory and present 
reality, a distinction rapidly declining as the siege party goes on. (42)

It is in the account of von Trotha's genocidal campaign against the Herero 
and the Hottentot tribes that the practical consequences of the V-metaphysic 
are set out at length.  Here, pivotal pretextual values intersect to produce 
a situation in which humanity is defeated and replaced by the inhuman.  The 
values, associated with V as [allegorical] figura, that dominate all of the 
historical episodes ... are shown here to be elements of a 'mastering' 
cultural discourse that determines individual subjectivity on a mass scale.  
The process of dehumanization is represented as taking the initial form of 
'liberation' from the constraints of moral imperatives, though it entails 
absolute subjection to the tyranny of ideologically determined meaning.  
This freedom is quickly translated into the practical value terms of 
'functional agreement' or 'operational sympathy', the attitude that 'you 
were in no sense killing' ([V.,] p. 261).  With this attitude the natives 
are reduced to objects, automata, in the act of perception which conceives 
of them only in terms of an ideologically inscribed function: the function 
of the victim. (43)

The narrative describes an awareness of a kind of natural order that takes 
over when the ideological hegemony of the V-metaphysic is complete, so that 
the act of killing assumes a new significance: 'It had only to do with the 
destroyer and the destroyed, and the act which united them' ({V.,] p. 
264).... it is the point at which a coherent moral order is finally and 
irrevocably replaced with a totalitarian cultural discourse, a metaphoric 
explanation of reality, in which 'soul and soul' become 'victimizers and 
victims, screwers and screwees' ([V.,] p. 49)

[again, cf. Samuel Beckett, How it Is ...]

The 'touristic' mode of perception, with violence as a catalyst, produces a 
set of decadent, inanimate relationships, a 'symmetry' where meaninglessness 
triumphs over intrinsic value. (43)

The reliability of Mondaugen's account is, however, highly ambiguous.  His 
scurvy-induced fever suggests the possibility that it is all simply 
hallucination ... (43)

[and here, of course, cf. Joseph Conrad, the Heart of Darkness,a s well as 
The Secret Sharer ...]

... yet if his source is in fact Foppl, then the interpretation Mondaugen 
makes of his account is open to question--Mondaugen does, after all, leave 
the siege party with 'those first tentative glandular pressures that one day 
develop into moral outrage' ([V.,] p. 277).  Together with the ambiguous 
role of Hugh Godolphin as a source of information, they form multiple points 
of view ... but further internalized, located within the single mind of 
Mondaugen rather than in the narrative itself, which earlier shifted among 
the minds of the characters involved in the action. (43-4)

... further complicated when Mondaugen's entire story is 'Stencilized'. (44)

[which is, of course, the way in which we receive it ...]

... V remains ambivalent ... (44)

The prophecy that Profane receives from SHROUD is an explicit statement of 
the V-metaphysic ....  In these terms, SHOCK and SHROUD represent early 
prototypes of what humanity will become.  Von Trotha's extermination of the 
Herero and Hottentot tribes foreshadows the Nazi extermination of Jews.  
That both are based on the perception of a race of men as essentially 
inanimate is revealed in SHROUD's analogy: 'Thousands of Jewish corpses, 
stacked up like those poor car-bodies.  Schlemihl: It's already started' 
([V.,] p. 295). (44)

... by the way, all the chapter titles here are alliterative, though not 
nearly  so relentlessly as this one ...
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