V-2nd C4 A Generation of Freaks and Pariahs

[Dave Monroe]

"The techniques that worked were adopted and passed on quickly to the
younger medics.  Those that failed produced a generation of freaks and
pariahs ..." (V., Ch. 4, p. 101)


"Profane would see some of them under the street"

"The realm beneath the street is the refuge of only some of these
victims of the culoture's failure to heal its wounded. The street
itself--the Street of the twentieth century?--is populated by others.
Again Pynchon's sympathy for and interest in the passed-over members
surfaces in a passage of marked poignancy."

--Grant, p. 63

http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/companion_to_v/
http://books.google.com/books?id=JZyY6bmfaJ0C


"crossroad ... right-angles ..."

Forming Vs?


"a brocade or bas-relief of scar tissue ... cicatrix ..."

Cf. ...

"her back, beaded with old sjambok scars" (V., Ch. 9, p. 294)

"the Bondel's scarred back' (V., Ch. 9, p. 304)

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
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0103&msg=54158

"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)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0711&msg=123228

>From 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/trans/ngh.html