V-2 - Chapter 9 - Pynchon's Story of Stencil's Story of Mondaugen's Story of Weissman's Story

[Robin Landseadel]

		(Here Eigenvalue made his single interruption: ''They spoke in
	German? English? Did Mondaugen know English then?" Forestalling
	a nervous outburst by Stencil: "I only think it strange that he should
	remember an unremarkable conversation, let alone in that much
	detail, thirty-four years later. A conversation meaning nothing to
	Mondaugen but everything to Stencil."

		Stencil, silenced, puffed his pipe and watched the psychodontist,
	a quirk to one side of his mouth revealed now and again, enigmatic,
	through the white fumes. Finally: "Stencil called it serendipity, not  
he.
	Do you understand? Of course you do. But you want to hear him say
	it."

	"I understand only," Eigenvalue drawled, "that your attitude toward V.
	must have more sides to it than you're ready to admit. It's what the
	psychoanalysts used to call ambivalence, what we now call simply a
	heterodont configuration."

	Stencil made no answer; Eigenvalue shrugged and let him continue.)

I suppose that if anyone was running a "Center of "V." contest, this  
passage certainly should be allowed on the dais along with Bert Parks  
and Bristol Palin wearing a gorilla suit as featured on "Dancing With  
the Stars."  It's like the Missus always sez in the midst of some CGI- 
laden big-budget Hollywood Mid-Summer monstrosity -- "This ain't a  
Documentary!" This story is told in a most highly stylized fashion.

"From the Ground Up: The Evolution of the South-West Africa Chapter in  
Pynchon’s V." by Luc Herman and John M. Krafft documents the  
development of "Mondaugen's Story" via correspondence between Pynchon  
and the J. B. Lippincott editor Corlies (“Cork”) Smith in the spring  
of 1962. Our young hero was on the clock:

  	On April 26, 1962, Smith encouraged Pynchon “[b]y all means” to “go
	ahead and screw around with Mondaugen’s Southwest Africa
	adventure” but pleaded for delivery by May 10 “at the outside.”
	The correspondence we have does not indicate when Pynchon
	delivered the chapter, but on May 28, Smith wrote, rather laconi-
	cally, “I think the chapter is fine.” Fine, indeed. “Mondaugen’s
	Story” is arguably the finest chapter in V. This essay describes the
	parallels and differences between an earlier, typescript version of
	that chapter and the revised, published version, and thereby shows
	just how fast a learner Pynchon was at the outset of his literary
	career. By better integrating the chapter with the rest of the novel,
	he achieved a balance between historical accuracy and creative fic-
	tionalization that turned Mondaugen’s story as retold by Stencil
	into a disconcertingly bleak and compelling narrative about twen-
	tieth-century dehumanization. Through its development of the
	dream as a vehicle of (historical) truth, the narrative also suggests
	a commitment, at this early stage in Pynchon’s career, to the power
	of modernist representation.

"Psychodontist" says as much about the poor boy's state of despair  
over his front choppers as anything else. At the same time, this  
little scene reminds us of how much of this tale sounds like the work  
of a sick fabulist, particularly as the nightmare of 1904 finely comes  
into clear focus as Stencil tells us of Mondaugen's Dream, only it's  
really Weissmann's dream and it's really history, mostly . . .

		With the Weimar Republic's bitter breed of humor (but none of
	his own) Mondaugen stood at his stained-glass window

The one with the Christian martyrs being devoured by wild beasts?

	and asked that evening's veld: was I being that successful a voyeur?
	As his days at the siege party became less current and more
	numbered (though not by him) he was to wonder with exponential
	frequency who in fact had seen him. Anyone at all? Being cowardly
	and thus a gourmet of fear, Mondaugen prepared himself for an
	unprecedented, exquisite treat. This unglimpsed item on his menu of
	anxieties took the form of a very German question: if no one has seen
	me then am I really here at all; and as a sort of savory, if I am not
	here then where are all these dreams coming from, if dreams is what
	they are.

	He was given a lovely mare named Firelily: how he adored that
	animal! You couldn't keep her from prancing and posturing; she was a
	typical woman. How her deep sorrel flanks and hindquarters would
	flash in the sun! He was careful to have his Bastard servant keep her
	always curried and clean. He believed the first time the General ever
	addressed him directly was to compliment him on Firelily.

	He rode her all over the territory. From the coastal desert to the
	Kalahari, from Warmbad to the Portuguese frontier, Firelily and he,
	and his good comrades Schwach and Fleische, they dashed madcap
	over sand, rock, bush; forded streams that could go from a trickle to a
	mile-wide flood in half an hour. Always, no matter which region it was,
	through those ever-dwindling her~ of blacks. What were they
	chasing? What youthful dream?

Later -- or is it earlier? -- in this scene we see Hedwig ride to  
Kurt's sickbed on a Bondel she re-names "Firelily", wearing nothing  
but tights. There's a mixing up of the mind's "I" in the scenes that  
flashback to 1904, the route of consciousness that enables us to  
witness the hangings, the shootings, the dances of death, the  
systematic de-humanization of a people. -- "Just whose consciousness  
is this anyway?

You probably don't have recollections of the peak years of the civil  
rights movement, but I suspect that 1963 readers of "V." were more  
likely to be, or know, participants in The Good Rev. King's "Strides  
Towards Freedom." Think of the players in "Positively Fourth Street,  
The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina &  
Richard Farina" by David Hajdu, the connection of the "Great Folk  
Scare" of the sixties and the civil rights movement.
	No more auction block for me
	No more, no more
	No more auction block for me
	Many thousands gone

	No more driver's lash for me
	No more, no more
	No more driver's lash for me
	Many thousands gone

	No more whip lash for me
	No more, no more
	No more pint of salt for me
	Many thousands gone

	No more auction block for me
	No more, no more
	No more auction block for me
	Many thousands gone

I have rather specific memories of the civil rights movement. My  
parents were in C.O.R.E., N.A.A.C.P., other organizations. They were  
regularly involved in demonstrations, sit-ins, petitions, community  
organizing. At one demonstration, potatoes with razor blades were  
thrown at them, at another, they were sprayed with water and then had  
manure thrown at them. My parents told us about men with shotguns,  
circling their demonstrations in cars. This was a big deal in 1963, it  
was kinda dangerous and more than just a hobby. All of Pynchon's books  
are grounded, in some way, in the time that the book is issued.  
"Mondaugen's Story" is the last part of "V." to be worked on, the most  
polished and focused chapter of the novel. It is also the one chapter  
that has the most to say about civil rights --  if by no other means  
than showing us the least and the worst of civil rights:

	. . . Often, under the hazed-out sun, he'd daydream; remembering
	water holes filled to the brim with black corpses, their ears, nostrils
	and mouths bejeweled green, white, black, iridescent with flies and
	their offspring; human pyres whose flames seemed to leap high as the
	Southern Cross; the frangibility of bone, the splitting-open of body
	sacs, the sudden heaviness of even a frail child. But here there could
	be none of that: they were organized, made to perform en masse-
	you'd have to supervise not a chained trek but a long double line of
	women, carrying rails with iron ties attached; if one woman fell it
	meant only a fractional increase in the force required per carrier, not
	the confusion and paralysis resulting from a single failure in one of  
the
	old treks . . .

Of course, Mondaugen's been hearing some rather unearthly, or perhaps  
anti-earthly dreams as of late, what with his scurvy, his voyeurism  
and a general ease around transmissions outside the usual bands. Seems  
he's picking up the dreams of others, as of late . . .

  		. . . One could as well have been a stonemason. It dawned on
	you slowly, but the conclusion was irresistible: you were in no sense
	killing. The voluptuous feeling of safety, the delicious lassitude you
	went into the extermination with was sooner or later replaced by a
	very curious-not emotion because part of it was obviously a lack of
	what we commonly call "feeling" -- "functional agreement" would
	come closer to it; operational sympathy.

		The first clear instance of it he could remember came one day
	during a trek from Warmbad to Keetmanshoop. His outfit were
	moving consignments upper echelons. It was 140 miles and took
	generally a week or ten days to do, and none of them liked the detail
	much. A lot of prisoners died on route, and that meant stopping the
	whole trek, finding the sergeant with the keys, who it seemed was
	always miles back under a kameel-doorn  tree, dead drunk or well on
	the way, then riding back, unlocking the neck-ring of the fellow who'd
	died; sometimes rearranging the line so the weight of the extra chain
	would be more evenly distributed. Not to make it easier on them,
	exactly, but so one wouldn't wear out any more blacks than one had
	to.

		It was a glorious day, December and hot, a bird somewhere
	gone mad with the season. Firelily, under him, seemed sexually
	aroused, she curveted and frolicked so about the line of march,
	covering five miles to the prisoners' one. From the side it always
	looked medieval, the way the chain hung down in bights between
	their neck-rings, the way the weight pulled them constantly toward
	earth, the force only just overcome as long as they managed to keep
	their legs moving. Behind them came army oxcarts, driven by loyal
	Rehoboth Bastards. How many can understand the resemblance he
	saw? In his village church in the Palatinate was a mural of the Dance
	of Death, led by a rather sinuous, effeminate Death in his black cloak,
	carrying his scythe and followed by all ranks of society from prince to
	peasant. Their own African progress was hardly so elegant: they
	could only boast a homogeneous string of suffering Negroes and a
	drunken sergeant in a wideawake hat who carried a Mauser. Yet that
	association, which most of them shared, was enough to give the
	unpopular chore an atmosphere of ceremony. . .

It really wasn't like "war," but for someone like Weissmann it was a  
start. Kraft and Herman point out specific changes between the earlier  
version of this chapter -- "A Siege Party" -- and "Mondaugen's Story:

	Pynchon clearly felt the original version of the chapter was not good
	enough and needed major improvement in technique and content.
	In the time granted by Smith, he worked out a variety of changes.
	Most notable among them are the expansion of Vera Meroving, the
	chapter’s main version of the novel’s title figure, to underscore the
	connection between femininity and destruction that V. embodies
	throughout the book; the representation of the 1904–7 African geno-
	cide in much greater and more sordid detail than in the chapter’s
	original version, where it is only briefly touched on; and the thema-
	tization of historical imagination (also foregrounded in the new
	introduction to chapter 3) by having Mondaugen dream the genocide
	in a state of nightmarish fever that implies a comment on Stencil’s
	historiographic procedures throughout the novel. In rewriting his
	historical novel, Pynchon may well have become more fully aware of
	the virtues of the historical imagination. Crowning the revision with
	a new version of the South-West Africa chapter, a chapter he twice
	seemed half-ready to eliminate, Pynchon produced not a “wild and
	wonderful” but a truly harrowing conclusion.

And at the same time, Pynchon is laying the groundwork for what will  
turn out to be his most important novel.

	". . . you know self-criticism's an amazing technique,
	it shouldn't work but it does. . . . "

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	And you sit there bewildered, and Pinter who went
	further said “It is not the lack of communication but
	fear of communication.”

	THAT’S WHAT THE GODDAMN THING IS
	that we fear – communication.