V-2 - Chapter 9 - More voluptuous than fat

[Robin Landseadel]

	. . . More voluptuous than fat, with fair hair, long eyelashes and a  
shy smile that enchanted older women . . .

On Oct 13, 2010, at 11:46 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

> Are you a man or a fish? The Tempest tossed on Poe's Red Masque.

	But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. . .

	. . . It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade.

http://www.enotes.com/masque-red-death-text/the-masque-of-the-red-death

	Modern readers will be, at least, put off by an unacceptable level of  
racist, sexist and
	proto-Fascist talk throughout this story. I wish I could say that  
this is only Pig Bodine's
	voice, but, sad to say, it was also my own at the time. The best I  
can say for it now is 	
	that, for its time, it is probably authentic enough. John Kennedy's  
role model James
	Bond was about to make his name by kicking third-world people around,  
another
	extension of the boy's adventure tales a lot of us grew up reading.  
There had prevailed
	for a while a set of assumptions and distinctions, unvoiced and  
unquestioned, best
	captured years later in the '70's television character Archie Bunker.

	It may yet turn out that racial differences are not as basic as  
questions of money and
	power, but have served a useful purpose, often in the interest of  
those who deplore
	them most, in keeping us divided and so relatively poor and  
powerless. This having
	been said, however, the narrative voice in this story here remains  
that of a smart-assed
	jerk who didn't know any better, and I apologize for it.
	SL

There are certain forms of homophobia that appear in early Pynchon.  
Some Rubicon gets crossed in Gravity's Rainbow, some broadening of  
acceptance of gender difference. But in all of "V." Queer is "Other",  
it's consistently portrayed as diseased, though it's only fair to note  
that all sexual liaisons in chapter nine are profoundly dis-eased.   
Again, "Against the Day" takes many of the ideas expressed in "V." and  
flips them, in the process further humanizing his characters. Cyprian  
Latewood may be the most sympathetic of all of Pynchon's cartoons,  
he's certainly one of the Queerest.

Pynchon really did develop a much greater ability to round out  
characters as he grew up. They may still be cartoons, but they are far  
more interesting cartoons. In the context of "V.", Kurt does show  
signs of life. In comparison to the other characters we have  
encountered so far in "V.", Kurt and his Sick Crew stand out in bold  
relief. He really isn't an actor, he's more of a listener. Laura made  
an excellent point about Kurt being a person with psychic gifts who  
follows a different life path than -- say --  Pirate Prentice.  
Certainly, being a young engineer making a living by listening to  
strange new sounds sounds like interesting work. And I imagine that  
the young author with the engineer's mind was listening to plenty of  
Spheric sounds at the time, like Ornette and Monk and who knows, maybe  
even Sun Ra.

Consider Proust's portraits of the decky-dance in the context of  
Moundagen's story. Proust's long, long, long novel unfolds in extended  
conversations from great and nobel figures in French Society,  
including figures in the military establishment, characters that  
everyone knows are Queer, everyone plays along, everyone living in a  
closed, luxurious, perfumed & isolated society. It's DADT, always was,  
least since the Roman party was shut down. I also detect the scent of  
Buddenbrooks as well as floral notes from Bill Burroughs. I haven't  
read anything by the two Henry's yet, but the excerpts I've absorbed  
have a similar language, a similar woeful awareness that "time is  
passing, our order is declining."

In Pynchon's Paranoid Decky-Dance perversions are best served jumbled  
up, he's a bit of a maximalist in most regards anyway, a Post-Bop  
Hieronymus Bosch.

	. . . Two things made Foppl's a fortunate place to be carrying on  
sferic
	research. First, the farmer had given Mondaugen a room to himself in  
a turret
	at one corner of the house; a little enclave of scientific endeavor,  
buffered by
	number of empty storage rooms and with access to the roof through a
	stained-glass window portraying an early Christian martyr being  
devoured by
	wild beasts.

Again, Terri is right about the quality of the scene-painting in this  
chapter being derived from Poe's Masque of the Red Death":

	The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries  
that
	hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds  
upon a
	carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the  
color of the
	windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were
	scarlet—a deep blood color.

Foppl's name is obviously derived from "Fop", the chapter goes to some  
effort to represent Weissman and Foppl as Iconographic Drag Queens,  
with Masquerades requiring more than the usual amount of attention  
granted to eye liner issues. The moral black hole of "V." is Queer at  
the center.

This essential Queerness as Perversion is underlined in Kurt's first  
meeting with "V.", "V." in this case being "Vera Meroving, her  
companion a Lieutenant Weissmann, her city Munich."

Munich's a code words, see -- like catsup.

	. . . Psychoanalytic literature also recognizes the paranoid  
personality.
	Following Freud's formulation, largely based on the Schreber case,
	analytical writers have related paranoid tendencies to the  
repudiation of
	latent homosexuality through projection as the common denominator of
	this disorder (Ahktar, 1990). Others, like Frosch (19850 contend that  
the
	common denominator may be humiliating at the hands of significant  
others
	of the same sex, which engender in the patient a feeling of having  
been a
	helpless victim.

http://tinyurl.com/2dt8wot

Kurt's a bit of a voyeur, and his his initial glimpse of "V." is  
quite  voyeuristic:

	Soon, padding down a narrow, sloping corridor, he was brought to  
attention
	by a mirror hung some twenty feet ahead, angled to reflect the  
interior of a
	room around the next corner.  Framed for him there were Vera Meroving  
and
	her lieutenant in profile, she striking at his chest with what  
appeared to be a
	small riding crop, he twisting a gloved hand into her hair and  
talking to her all
	the while, so precisely that the voyeur Mondaugen could lip-read each
	obscenity. The geometry of the corridors somehow baffled all sound:
	Mondaugen, with the queer excitement he'd felt watching her at her  
window
	that morning, expected captions explaining it all to flash on to the  
mirror. But
	she finally released Weissmann; he reached out with the curiously  
gloved
	hand and closed the door, and it was as if Mondaugen had dreamed  
them. . .

Flash Forward:

	Kurt Mondaugen found Pölker lying on her cot breathing what he  
imagined were odors
	of her hair on the pillow. For a while then he went a little insane,  
talked of killing
	Weissmann, sabotaging the rocket program, quitting his job and  
seeking asylum in
	England .... Mondaugen sat, and listened to all of it, touched Pölker  
once or twice,
	smoked his pipe, till at last, at two or three in the morning, Pölker  
had talked through a
	number of unreal options, cried, cursed, punched a hole into his  
neighbor's cubicle,
	through which he heard the man snoring on oblivious. Cooled by then  
to a vexed
	engineer-elitism -- "They are fools, they don't even know what sine  
and cosine are and
	they're trying to tell me"-he agreed that yes, he must wait, and let  
them do what they
	would do ....

	"If I set up a meeting with Weissmann," Mondaugen did suggest, "could  
you be
	graceful? calm?"

	"No. Not with him .... Not yet."

	"When you think you are ready, let me know. When you're ready, you'll  
know how to 	
	handle it." Had he allowed himself a tone of command? He must have  
seen how much
	Pölker needed to be at someone's command. Leni had learned to subdue  
her
	husband with her face, knew what cruel lines he expected of her  
mouth" what tones of
	voice he needed ... when she left him she left an unemployed servant  
who'd go with
	the first master that called, just a

			VICTIM IN A VACUUM!

		Nur ... ein ... Op-fer!
		Sehr ins Vakuum,

	("Won't somebody take advantage of me?")
		Wird niemand ausnut-zen mich, auch?
	("Just a slave with nobody to slave for,")
		Nur ein Sldave, ohne Her-rin, (ya-ta ta-ta)
	("A-and who th' heck wants ta be, free?")
		Wer zum Teufel die Freiheit, braucht?

	(All together now, all you masochists out there, specially those of  
you don't have a 	
	partner tonight, alone with those fantasies that don't look like  
they'll ever come true-
	won't you just to join in here with your brothers and sisters, let  
each other know you're
	alive and sincere, try to break through the silences, try to reach  
through and connect .... )

	Aw, the sodium lights-aren't, so bright in Berlin,
	I go to the bars dear, but nobody's in!
	Oh, I'd much rather bee
	In a Greek trage-dee,
	Than be a VICTIM IN A VACUUM to-nite!

A bit of the history of Nazi prosecution of Homosexuals within the S.S.:

http://tinyurl.com/278xd38
=====================================

	Now Gravity’s Rainbow is a token of this
	man’s genius…he told me so himself…
	that he could…in other words, have been
	more specific, but rather than to allude
	the mundane, he has come to the
	conclusion that brevity is the importance
	of our shallow existence.
	
	God damn.