VV(12): Planetarium

[Dave Monroe]

"a circular room with a great wooden sun, overlaid
with gold leaf, burning cold in the very center and
round it the nine planets and their moons ..." (V.,
Ch. 9, Sec. ii, p. 239)

>From Robert Holton, "V: In the Rathouse of History wit
Thomas Pynchon," here, Chapter 7 of Jarring Witnesses:
Modern Fiction and the Representation of History
(Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, UK: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1994), pp. 217-45 ...

While Pynchon may sometimes seem to accept a
relativist position, he has not rejected the
possibility of moral judgement--difficult, relative
and tentative though it may be,  Mondaugen, at one
point during the siege party, sets off in search of
the power generator so that he can tap some of the
electricity for his experiments.  The generator he
actually finds is of a more symbolic nature than he
had intended, however: it is a planetarium ... (231-2)

[and here Holton cites the passage on p. 239 of V.
beginning from "a circular room" through "now
unoccupied"]

Ignoring the reference to slavery, one might argue
that the epistemological metaphor here concerns the
way we construct our reality, our universe,a nd
suggests that our constructions are, like Stencil's,
rather clumsy at times.  Mondaugen has, odd though it
may seem, danced into a room with a young woman whose
declared "purpose on earth is to tantalize and send
raving the race of men" ([p.] 239).  The rhythm of the
music they had been dancing to is transformed into a
kind of cosmic rhythm ... (232)

[and, here, from p. 239, "skipped to the treadmill" to
"a generation of slaves"]

Again, it is possible to read this as a demonstration
that love (or at least desire) makes the world go
round.  And Pynchon with his fine sense of cliche
perhaps intends this.  But the final allusion once
again is to slavery, oppression.  Without knowing it,
Mondaugen has found the generator, although not the
one he was looking for.  So 'breathing heavily', he
'staggered off the treadmill to carry on his descent
and search for the generator' ([p.] 240).  For the
reader, at least, there should be less ambiguity
surrounding the power generator and the generation of
slaves as Mondaugen reaches bottom in his descent and
finds, perhaps, the very slave whose place as
generator on the planetary treadmill had been
unoccupied. (232)

[here, from V., p. 240, "As if the entire day" through
"one long opening"]

The seemingly incongruous images that accompany this
scene, of smiles and a wink, underscore with a grim
irony the power of metaphorical representation. (233)

[Holton notes here that "The idea that wounds and
mouths have a certain similarity is not original to
Pynchon: 'Mouths are often likened to wounds in
Shakespeare.  The image may derive from their
appearance, and from the idea that they could speak as
witnesses to what caused them' ([M.H.] Abrams et al.,
[The Norton Anthology of English Literature (5th ed.),
p.] 515, n. 9). Pynchon's use of one wound as an eye
and another as a mouth thus combines with both
witnessing and testifying possibilities" (278, n. 8)]

The wounds that Mondaugen sees from the point of view
of the white community as smiles and winks can, of
course, also be read as the literal inscription of the
desire and power of the oppressor on the body of the
slave.  Eventually he decides to leave the white
enclave whose perspective he has until now passively
accepted: 'Mondaugen this time withdrew, preferring at
last neither to watch nor to listen' ([V., p.] 278). 
The absence of a strong moral statement in relation to
Mondaugen's departure is notable, and this is one of
the moments that has led critics to comment on the
novel's postmodern inability to establish sufficiently
a position of resistance. (233)

Nevertheless, his dramatic crossing of the ravine
separating the siege party from the rest of the world
is highly symbolic--the siege is, in V., political and
epistemological as well as military.... The ravine
represents a significant epistemological gap with
overt moral consequences....  he makes his way through
the scrubland until he meets a Bondel on a donkey. 
The man has lost his right arm--presumably in colonial
resistance of some kind--and is a (jarring) witness to
the violence of imperialism. (233)

[here, "'All over'" to "Mondaugen couldn't understand
it (V., p. 279).  Ellipses above are brief
descriptions of Mondaugen's crossing on pp. 278-9]

Disoriented and in many ways uncomprehending after the
literal bridging of a sublime abyss, a 'magic
frointier', an 'invisible forcefield': he has arrived
at the conditions of possibility of another state of
mind, beyond the siege mentality.  His
noncomprehension of the alien Bondel language is no
longer passively allied with a genocidal threat to the
existence of that language.  The scarred back of this
Bondel can itself be considered a kind of text that is
readable in different ways in different cultural and
historical situations (even as 'smiles' and 'winks'),
but the existence of the scars themselves is not in
doubt.  Although 'history is not a text' writes
[Fredric] Jameson, 'it is inaccescible to us except in
textual form' ([Anders Stephanson, "Regarding
Postmodernism--a Conversation with Fredric Jameson,"
Social Text 17, p.] 35).  Here the text of history is
inscribed on the backs of its victims.  (234)

["every document of civilization is also a document of
barbarism"? (Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the
Philosophy of History").  Holton does cite Michel de
Certeau here, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, p.
227].

There is a clear moral and historical imperative
governing Pynchon's representation of 'real'
historical events and their apparently repetitive
pattern. (234)

... and I've posted much of the rest in either
direction at length under the heading "(VV(11):
Rathouse" et al.  Reminds me, note how the libidinal
interpretation of history segues here into a seemingly
Marxian, certainly postcolonialist, and, avant la
lettre, Foucauldian take on labor, power, and the
technologization and inscription thereof (and note,
again, "generator").  Also, always tricky not only to
hold Pynchon to the tenets of "realism," but also to
write off anything as unrealistic, unusual, and/or
aberrant in his texts, e.g., a slave-powered
planetarium generator in the hinterlands of interwar
South Africa ...

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