V where ever we be

[Dave Monroe]

John Dugdale, Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of
Power (London: Macmillan, 1990) ...

"The principal literary echoes are of Der Zauberberg
[The Magic Mountain] (1924) (the engineer arriving at
an enclosed community of the sick, and becoming
sexually bewitched) and Der Steppenwolf [er,
Steppenwolf] (1927) (the two women, the assimilation
of the studious hero with decadence), with Hesse's
carnival scene a point of overlap with with Poe ['The
Masque of the Red Death']." (p. 92)

This is essentially J. Kerry Grant's (A Companion to
V.) gloss as well, though Dugdale also notes Vera
Meroving's resemblance to Marlene Dietrich (Morocco,
Shanghai Express) and Hedwig Vogelsang's to Frank
Wedekind's/Alban Berg's Lulu.  Also notes that the
later "dream-narrative" "draws on" Melville and Eliot
(The Waste'Land, "The Hollow Men"), and, perhaps,
Camus (La Chute/The Fall) ...


--- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Mondaugen waits for the sun to come up. 
> 
> The sun rose and van Wijk appeared in his doorway
> like a two
> dimensional figure jerked suddenly onstage by hidden
> pulleys...Mondaugen himself acquired motion...
> 
> Like Fergus, like several of P's characters,
> Mondaugen has
> "conditioned himself to awake instantaneously..."
> 
> The balloon's gone up. 
> 
> Mondaugen is concerned about his antennas, as if,
> they
> sprouted from his forehead." 
> 
> May you be as the moose and grow long antlers. 
> 
> History, for the civil servant, is what he wakes up
> to, it's
> on paper on his desk, in  the "IN basket. And he is
> a weight
> hung from the chains, forged by the System, keeping
> order,
> time, a papered history against the chaos of the
> night. 
> 
> The sun is hot. The sun was nearly down.
> 
> Twilight. 
> 
> The sun set. 
> 
> Whistles and laughter. 
> 
> Early morning, blackness, Fopple's lights blazed in
> the
> early morning darkness. 
> 
> A party:
> http://www.bragi.com/classics/p/eap1809/masque.shtml


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