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

[Michael Bailey]

 Robin Landseadel  wrote:
>
> "Psychodontist" says as much about the poor boy's state of despair over his
> front choppers as anything else.

I was gonna say, he seems quite taken with the notion.  Stencil,
Roony, Rachel, all refer to it.

It's done matter-of-factly, slyly even; it ties in with the book's
themes, and it is - by virtue of being both clever and something I'd
never think of on my own - the type of stuff I read novels in search
of...

> 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 . . .
>

wait, isn't a lot of that Foppl too?  I mean, the part about leaving
the service and moving inland to found the household that was 18 years
later to host the party, that was Foppl, right?

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

Is this what is being referred to in that one clause of the Long Sentence:

"the bleak, abstracted and for him rather meaningless
hanging on which he now turned his back"?

Probably not...

>                The first clear instance of it he could remember came one day
>        during a trek from Warmbad to Keetmanshoop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keetmanshoop
evidently the Rhenish Missionary Society
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhenish_Missionary_Society
founded a mission there in 1860

Keetman himself, a wealthy German industrialist, never went there but
supported it financially.  Keetman's hope - which appears in the Long
Sentence as well, as something that Weissmann/Foppl/Mondaugen can't
quite completely fit into his picture of the Kingdom of Death...

"where the single line of
track still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no conceivable
iconology be any part of the Kingdom of Death"

the idealistic part of colonialism - the end that supposedly justifies the means


>        drunken sergeant in a wideawake hat who carried a Mauser.

there's that wideawake hat again