V-2 - Chapter Nine - Fasching/False Time

[alice wellintown]

Snodd is a radio ham (SL.148). "There's something funny with the sky
today...these mountains...(Magic Mountain Mann, Geli, Snodd's,
Leopoldo Lugones (GR.263.18), and so on...Mason...Tesla...that Magic
Mountain, where Geli takes Slothrop, is quite important to GR, but
Mann's _The Magic Mountain_, as several critics have argued, is a key
inter textual here in "Monduagen's Story." How ambitious is young
Pynchon? Is Mondaugen's Story his attempt to climb Mann's Mountain?
The parallels are too important to ignore.


Grover's room fills "with disembodied voices" and he keeps a road map
with pins in it, recording the voices and their frequencies; he never
sleeps. This is key. He never sleeps, he is in contact with
disembodied voices, he records their frequencies. Of course, Pynchon
will recycle this bit of Magic Mountain again and again. And, as I
noted, the romantic elements here are fundamental to any serious
reading of Pynchon. When Tim puts on the headset and listens, he nods,
and like so many romantic figures (including the speaker in Poe's
Raven), the dream data mixes with the data from the sky and the data
from books of lore or reading material or even, as in CL49, cartoons.
This trope is, again, basic romance (Pynchon's parody includes the
colonial romance, Heart of Darkness, and, as noted, the parody of the
bildungsroman – a "novel of education" or "novel of formation" (magic
Mountain and Henry Adams).

Yes, that argument about politics, about education and work, that
problem persists in P's works and is a central theme of AGTD and,
though Grover is a bit young even if he is a member of the whole sick
crew of "kids" who are obviously not kids but a counter culture that
is dysfunctional, is, to use Ralph Ellison's phrase, "The Battle
Royal." Ellison and Mann have more in common with Pynchon than has
been discussed in the critical literature. Not sure why Ellison has
not been a big part of the Pynchon Industry's work on Pynchon, but the
influence is huge.

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 12:53 AM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 10:41 PM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Also obvious, I suppose, is that Mondaugen is "related to" Grover Snodd.
>>
>
> Warte mal - who dat?
>
> http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pages_329-336
>    oh.
> So within the similarly flawed societies, Grover plays the Mondaugen role -
> where Grover "has a disagreement with his father about Berlin"
> Mondaugen tries to reject Weissmann when he realizes, "Scheiss - I'm
> working for you"
>
> interesting insight, alice - the normally positive force of love leads
> them to accept the shortcomings in their society and stop rebelling,
> and start conforming in the prevalent evils...
> Mondaugen's path a little more tortuous
>