V-2 - Chapter 9 - Clockwork Eye

[Mark Kohut]

Very short first response....notice to the ironwork and more...

I say yes, some of GR was already in Thomas's Third Eye...

notice also 'courtyard'...key motif for a theme in Against the Day, i say, 
already being seen here...

I suggest TRP had worked out conceptually AN AWFUL LOT---to use that precise 
literary criticism term---
of his vision for V....while V....inbetween writing V......


----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sat, October 16, 2010 11:30:29 AM
Subject: V-2 - Chapter 9 - Clockwork Eye

    And now you find you fit this identikit completely
    You say you have no secrets
    then leave discreetly

A free-form rant today.

Open your hymnals to page 248 -- I've got the Harper Perennial Modern Classics 
edition -- it's about seven pages into "Mondaugen's Story."

This is the morning after Kurt has moved into Foppl's Baroque mansion. The young 
engineer is stringing his antennas "along the iron fanciwork that topped the 
villa's highest gable."

Curious word selection there . . .

He's looking deep into the eastward view, to eventual wastes of the Kalahari, 
"north to a distant yellow exhalation that rose from far under the horizon and 
seemed to hang eternally over the Tropic of Capricorn. . ."

A:     Were Gottfried and Weismann already a gleam in the proud Papa's eye?

B:     In 1649
    To St. George’s Hill,
    A ragged band they called the Diggers
    Came to show the people’s will
    They defied the landlords
    They defied the laws
    They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs

    We come in peace they said
    To dig and sow
    We come to work the lands in common
    And to make the waste ground grow
    This earth divided
    We will make whole
    So it will be
    A common treasury for all

    The sin of property
    We do disdain
    No man has any right to buy and sell
    The earth for private gain
    By theft and murder
    They took the land
    Now everywhere the walls
    Spring up at their command

    They make the laws
    To chain us well
    The clergy dazzle us with heaven
    Or they damn us into hell
    We will not worship
    The God they serve
    The God of greed who feed the rich
    While poor folk starve

    We work we eat together
    We need no swords
    We will not bow to the masters
    Or pay rent to the lords
    Still we are free
    Though we are poor
    You Diggers all stand up for glory
    Stand up now

    From the men of property
    The orders came
    They sent the hired men and troopers
    To wipe out the Diggers’ claim
    Tear down their cottages
    Destroy their corn
    They were dispersed
    But still the vision lingers on

    You poor take courage
    You rich take care
    This earth was made a common treasury
    For everyone to share
    All things in common
    All people one
    We come in peace
    The orders came to cut them down

C:    So in this almost empty gin palace
    Through a two-way looking glass
    You see your Alice

Moundagen the gargoyle is perched high enough where he stands to look down as 
well. He's looking into the courtyard. The angles of light, the refractions and 
reflections of the courtyard's light all seem to conspire, to direct Kurt's 
attention "to illuminate a patch or pool of deep red. Twin tendrils of it 
extended to a nearby doorway."

First he sees the blood, the blood then forms into a bright, red, serpent's 
tongue, then the Sun's motion, by the great, quaternion flow of the greater 
spheres, directs Kurt's attention to another window swinging open, revealing;

    " . . . a woman of indeterminate age in a negligee of peacock
    blues and greens squint into the sun. Her left hand rose to
    her left eye, fumbled there as if positioning a monocle. . . "

Her clockwork eye.

Move forward a page or two:

    As the distance between them gradually diminished Mondaugen saw
    that her left eye was artificial: she, noticing his curiosity, obligingly
    removed the eye and held it out to him in the hollow of her hand. A
    bubble blown translucent, its "white" would show up when in the socket
    as a half-lit sea green. A fine network of nearly microscopic fractures
    covered its surface. Inside were the delicately-wrought wheels, springs,
    ratchets of a watch, wound by a gold key which Fraulein Meroving wore
    on a slender chain round her neck. Darker green and flecks of gold had
    been fused into twelve vaguely wdiacal shapes, placed annular on the
    surface of the bubble to represent the iris and also the face of the
    watch.

Odd how such concepts worm their way into Popcult:

http://amygrindhouse.com/christina-aguilera-bionic-album-booklet.html

Of course, and with a script written just two years later:

    The year 1927 witnessed the appearance in Germany of the most
    significant utopian film of the silent era— Metropolis . In the film,
    director Fritz Lang achieves the realization of his ideas about the
    possible future organization of society. The introductory sequences
    present this social organization in a very attractive light. In a
    magnificent, gigantic city with gleaming skyscrapers, suspension
    bridges, and bustling street, people live in comfort and plenty, with
    every possibility for intellectual and physical development. However,
    Metropolis is not a city of freedom and equality. Below ground, working
    for the chosen elite, are masses of nameless workers who have no
    more value within the social order than a cog in a machine or a tool or
    production. It is for this reason that the workers revolt and almost
    destroy the city; only then is there a reconciliation and an equalization
    of rights for the two strata, the elite and the workers. Lang honestly
    believed in this idea of reconciliation, and his attitude to a certain 
extent
    reflected the German reality, in which there were growing indications of
    stabilization and attempts to resolve social problems. But Lang's views
    on these questions, conveyed finally in the reconciliation of the two
    classes under the slogan "the heart must serve as intermediary
    between the brain and the hands," did not sound convincingly
    progressive, either when the film was made or in the years that
    followed. Lang himself acknowledged this when, after the Nazi Putsch ,
    Propaganda Minister Goebbels had him summoned: "(Goebbels) told
    me that years before, he and Hitler had seen my film Metropolis in
    some small town and that at that time Hitler declared that he would like
    me to make Nazi films." (Siegfried Kracauer: From Caligari to Hitler: A
    Psychological History of the German Film .)

http://www.filmreference.com/Films-Ma-Me/Metropolis.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film)

Stencil is tracking his absent womb, this pure child of modernity creates via 
historical fabrication his absent mother and in so doing creates a Great 
Monster, a Kali present at the creation of a series of catastrophes.     


But this Mother/Monster is an early Cyborg. The Man/Machine barrier has been 
crossed. Welcome to the stainless steel womb.

Moundagen's nothing if not a voyeur:

    "Mondaugen crouched behind curlicues of wrought iron,
    astonished not so much at anything in her appearance
    as at his own latent desire to see and not be seen. He
    waited for the sun or her chance movement to show
    him nipples, navel, pubic hair."

And this particular "V." fits Kurt's identikit completely -- note earlier, how 
the young engineer is described -- "More voluptuous than fat, with fair hair, 
long eyelashes and a shy smile that enchanted older woman . . ." And 'enchanted' 
is the perfect word for what Vera does to Kurt, though this enchantment is 
decidedly not sprinkled with fairy dust.

    I've got a feeling
    I'm going to get a lot of grief
    Once this seemed so appealing
    Now I am beyond belief

===========================

    I do want to thank you, I want to
    thank Studs TurKAL. I want to
    thank Mr. Knopf who just ran
    through the auditorium and I want
    to thank Breshnev, Kissinger –
    acting President of the Unites
    States – and also want to thank
    Truman Capote and thank you.