V--2nd, Chap 9 sferics

[alice wellintown]

Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_ is always mentioned but it is _Victory_
that this chapter is most indebted to. Who is Sarah? Well, as with the
other biblical names in _V._ we can look this one up. One thing we
will discover is that, as with Esther's name, God changed  Sarah's.
Esther, as I noted, is a key to unlocking the Adams influence, and
originally named Hadassah or "myrtle" in Hebrew, she also links the
nose job to the valley of ashes and to Myrtle Wilson, the Virgin who,
during her tranmogrification to an American Dynamo is run down by one
in Fitzgerald's _The Great Gatsby_. Back to Sarah and Victory, where
more name changing takes place, we have Alma/Lena. The story, like
this one here in _V._ is influenced by Romance, and the specifically,
the only American Romance Shakespeare wrote, _The Tempest_.
Nabokov? Adam Gillon and Raymond Brebach have proposed that Vladimir
Nabakov's rejection of Conrad's "souvenir-shop style, and bottled
ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches" resulted in Conrad's
Victory being "one of the principal sources of inspiration" for Lolita
through what they call "typical Nabakovian reversal."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_(novel)


> But there also seems to be a touch of the horror show in the proceedings
> here, more than a little bit of Joseph Conrad as well. In earlier Pynchon
> there is more of a concern/obsession with Entropy. I've already suggested
> elsewhere that the author started out with the usual level of fear
> concerning the bomb. By the time he got away from Bomarc News Service, he
> must have just about as freaked out at the prospects of nuclear annihilation
> as anyone on the planet.  Of course, Pynchon already knows that the history
> of Bomarc is intimately tied to the history of young German engineers such
> as Mondaugen -- here lie the seeds of Gravity's Rainbow. The attachment of
> the "Heart of Darknesss" horrorshow with Moundaugen's explorations of songs
> of the upper atmosphere appear as an anarchist miracle. There is a sense
> that another world has already intruded into our own, and the mess that
> results is not good.