AtDDtA23: A Document Written in Insults

[Dave Monroe]

"In the shower-baths at the end of each shift, the suffering could be
read on each body, as a document written in insults to flesh and bone
..." (AtD, Pt. III, p. 654)


"the suffering could be read on each body"

Cf. ...

sjambok
240; cattle whip

skin
"thousands of freckles, all of which Schoenmaker had done himself."
45; "he was all points," 58; "His skin was hard, as if it were part of
the skull" 59; "beneath the careful shell of hair, skin and fabric"
70; "dead skin," 87; "were the skins of others actually beginning to
show the blotches of disease?" 90; Vheissu, 170-71; "having caressed
the skin of each alien place," 184; "They want only the skin of a
place," 204; "bone of the starved corpse there just under the skin"
244; "bleached their hair white and browned their skins" 257; "her
back, beaded with old sjambok scars" 270; "how clearly the musculature
of her hips stood under the skin, skin with a certain glow," 271; "the
Bondel's scarred back," 279; "Its skin was cellulose acetate
butyrate," 284; "its skin vinyl plastisol," 285; "Satyrs with the skin
of werewolves," 307; "the sky [God's] clear cheek" 339; "knavery of
the skin which could harbour such germs," 339; "the skins of fruits
only highlighted all shiny by light," 380; See also surface;
Lucretius;

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/alpha/s.html
http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/alpha/s.html#skin
http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/alpha/s.html#surface
http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/extra/passages.html#lucretius

>From Robert Holton, "In the Rathouse of History with Thomas Pynchon:
Rereading V.,"  Textual Practice 2, No. 3  (Winter 1988): 324-344:

"The scarred back of the Bondel can be considered a kind of text that
can be read in different ways in different cultural and historical
situations (even as 'smiles' and 'winks'), but the existence of the
scars themselves in not in doubt.  Although 'history is not a text,'
writes Jameson, 'it is
inaccessible to us except in textual form.'  Here the text of history
is inscribed in the scars of the backs of its victims...."

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0103&msg=53719

Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" (1971 [trans. 1984])

"The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and
dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the
illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual
disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated
within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose
a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's
destruction of the body."

http://www.michel-foucault.com/nietzsche.html

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/geneal.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary_history/v031/31.3punday.html


"a document written in insults"

Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History" (1940)

"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a
document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of
barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was
transmitted from one owner to another...."

http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/Theses_on_History.PDF
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm
http://www.leedstrinity.ac.uk/depart/media/staff/ls/WBenjamin/CONCEPT2.html

And cf. ...

Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Colony" (1919)

http://www.kafka.org/index.php?id=162,167,0,0,1,0
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/inthepenalcolony.htm
http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/?id=5&xid=1361&kapitel=1#gb_found


"They knew each other as more comfortable men [...] would not"

Cf. ...

"In the trenches of the First World War, English men came to love one
another decently [...], while Europe died meanly in its own waste, men
loved." (GR, Pt. II, p. 616)

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/love.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=iPDGp7VT8H8C&pg=PA616&lpg=PA616