V-2 - Chapter 9 - Constructing "V."

[Robin Landseadel]

	. . . He looked up, saw the window opposite complete its
	swing open and 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.

	V., 249 HPMC

 From Luc Herman & John M.  Krafft's invaluable: "From the Ground Up:  
The Evolution of the South-West Africa Chapter in Pynchon’s V."

		. . . In his letter to Smith of March 24, 1962, Pynchon calls the
	typescript chapter “a bitch” for two reasons. First, he has doubts con-
	cerning his method of presenting the native rebellion that provides
	the background (and briefly even the foreground) to the story.
	Second, he has misgivings about the relevance of the chapter to the
	plot of the novel as a whole. Yet he “like[s] it too much to want to  
cut
	it.” Time permitting, he would “like to rework the chapter, cut the
	Munich flashback entirely and put V. directly into the action.” . . .

	. . . 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 . . .


		''How pretty he is." The woman, dressed now in
	jodhpurs and an army shirt, leaned against the wall,
	smoking a cigarette. All at once, as he'd been half-
	expecting, cries of pain lanced a morning quiet that had
	known only visiting kites and wind, and the dry rustling
	of the exterior veld. Mondaugen knew, without having
	to run to see, that the cries had come
	from the courtyard where he'd seen the crimson stain.
	Neither he nor the woman moved. It somehow having
	become part of a mutual constraint that neither of them
	show curiosity. Voila: conspiracy already, without a
	dozen words having passed between them.

	V., 250 HPMC

Chapter 10 introduces us to SHROUD, a further extension of the  
mechanical and inanimate colonizing the living. Some how the main  
parallel I can see is Rotwang's creation from Metropolis [1927]:

http://www.todony.net/storage/metropolis.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1273376053572

. . . with SHROUD being one aspect, Vera's eyeball being another of  
this scary mechanical bride. Pynchon probably sweated more over the  
details of "V." as Vera Meroving in chapter nine than anywhere else in  
the book, and she went through major revision in the final form of  
"Mondaugen's Story."

More specifics from "From the Ground Up: The Evolution of the South- 
West Africa Chapter in Pynchon’s V." :

	Both introductions of the character zoom in on Vera’s artificial eye,  
suggesting a
	stage in her evolution toward the inanimate that takes shape in the
	novel’s historical chapters. In the typescript, Pynchon makes an
	effort to anchor the eye in verisimilitude before the narrator men-
	tions that Vera has shown it to Mondaugen “in a moment of appar-
	ent well-being”: “Her most fascinating feature was her glass eye,
	which ritually she would remove each morning at breakfast, polish
	and replace. This did not upset the other lodgers who were used to
	seeing much worse in the street’s depression-starved and war-
	maimed bodies” (ts 348–49). In the novel, Vera simply takes out her
	eye for the engineer because she notices his curiosity about it. The
	extended description of the object itself is almost the same in the
	two versions, except for its beginning and end. In the typescript,
	Pynchon mentions, obtrusively, that the eye “must have been the
	work of an inhumanly skilled artisan” before continuing, “It was
	hollow” (ts 349). In the novel, the artisan disappears, and the word
	“hollow” is used for the hand in which Vera holds her eye. The
	novel passage ends with the reference to the “iris and also the face
	of the watch” (V. 237), but the typescript goes on to make Vera’s role
	in the novel as a whole quite explicit: “Two hands radiated from the
	pupil, which reflected only enough light to reveal itself as a simple
	black V-shaped overlay on a black circle. He’d asked playfully what
	the V stood for and she had told him Vera, her first name” (ts 349).
	All in all, both eyes call for a slight effort on the part of the  
reader,
	who must connect them to the motif of the inanimate, but the
	novel’s description is much tighter.

	In the novel, the description of the eye follows immediately after
	Vera has been the subject of Mondaugen’s voyeurism, a functional
	plot element absent from the typescript. Vera’s introduction in the
	typescript is preceded by a long description of the boarding house,
	the woman who runs it, and yet another lodger, a theological stu-
	dent named Mäler (who, like Luther, “threw things at the wall” [ts
	348]). These details exemplify the kind of trite realism Pynchon
	could do without in the revised version, where Munich is reduced
	to its essence as “a city dying of abandon, venality, a mark swollen
	with fiscal cancer” (V. 236), an impressive formulation not yet
	achieved in the typescript. What is more, the introduction of Vera
	Meroving in the typescript immediately and perhaps too quickly
	turns her into a perfect fit for the series of V.’s in the novel as
	a whole:

		She might have been French. Her age
		was somewhere in the middle 40’s.
		Her clothes, which Mondaugen
		decided from studying illustrated maga-
		zines bore the unmistakeable Parisian
		touch, were very fine, made from
		rare—perhaps now unpurchaseable—
		fabrics, cut and sewn by skilled—
		perhaps now dead—hands. She
		hardly spoke at table.
		(ts 348)

	Herman & Krafft

The way we are introduced to the false eye is packed with small  
details, but considering all that goes into the passage, remarkably  
compact and allusive as well:

	Her name proved to be Vera Meroving, her companion a
	Lieutenant Weissmann, her city Munich.

	"Perhaps we even met one Fasching," she said, "masked and
	strangers."

	Mondaugen doubted, but had they met: were there any least basis
	for that "conspiracy" a moment ago: it would surely have been
	somewhere like Munich, a city dying of abandon, venality, a mark
	swollen with fiscal cancer. . .

Note that this:

	  ". . . a city dying of abandon, venality, a mark swollen with fiscal
	cancer. . ."

. . . is all that left of a flashback to Munich that was in the  
earlier manuscript.

	. . . 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 zodiacal shapes, placed annular on the surface of
	the bubble to represent the iris and also the face of the watch.

	"What was it like outside?"

	He told her the little he knew. Her hands had begun to tremble: he
	noticed it when she went to replace the eye. He could scarcely
	hear her when she said:

	"It could be 1904 again." "

	Curious: van Wijk had said that. What was 1904 to these people?
	He was about to ask her when Lieutenant Weissmann appeared in
	mufti from behind an unwholesome-looking palm and pulled her by 	
	the hand, back into the depths of the house.

	V., 250 HPMC

The clockworks in the eye also correspond to the signs of the zodiac,  
suggesting that Vera is conscious of larger motions of time, and is  
perhaps of an astrological or otherwise occult frame of mind. Her  
pronouncement that ". . . It could be 1904 again . . ." gives me a  
sinister chill as I imagine Vera cooking up astrological forecasts for  
wars.

The main connective thread in "V." is V. Herself, but the main  
connective thread between "V." and the rest of Pynchon's oeuvre is  
Weissmann, whose presence is established just as Vera Meroving's  
identity is established. The re-writing and expansion of "V."'s role  
in chapter nine leads directly to Gravity's Rainbow. I find this  
fascinating, as Pynchon must have been working under intense pressure  
considering the time constraints imposed by the publisher.

Much of "Mondaugen's Story" comes to us in dream, with loose  
connections and transitions of time and place. Actions in some  
sections of "Mondaugen's Story" appear to be initiated, somehow, by  
the presence of Vera. This passage starts as one of Mondaugen's  
dreams, then expands into daylight to fill in context and details:

	. . . Vera Meroving appeared (why Vera? her black
	mask covered the entire head) in black sweater and
	black dancer's tights. "Come," she whispered; led him
	by the hand through narrow streets, hardly lit but
	thronged with celebrants who sang and cheered in
	tubercular voices. White faces, like diseased blooms,
	bobbed along in the dark as if moved by other forces
	toward some graveyard, to pay homage at an
	important burial.

	At dawn she came in through the stained-glass
	window to tell him that another Bondel had been
	executed, this time by hanging.

	"Come and see," she urged him. "In the garden."

	''No, no." It had been a popular form of killing during
	the Great Rebellion of 1904-07, when the Hereros and
	Hottentots, who usually fought one another, staged a
	simultaneous but uncoordinated rising against an
	incompetent German administration. General Lothar
	von Trotha, having demonstrated to Berlin during his
	Chinese and East African campaigns a certain
	expertise at suppressing pigmented populations, was
	brought in to deal with the Hereros. In August 1904,
	von Trotha issued his "Vernichtungs Befehl," whereby
	the German forces were ordered to exterminate
	systematically every Herero man, woman and child
	they could find. He was about 80 per cent successful.
	Out of the estimated 80,000 Hereros living in the
	territory in 1904, an official German census taken
	seven years later set the Herero population at only
	15,130, this being a decrease of 64,870. Similarly the
	Hottentots were reduced in the same period by about
	10,000, the Berg-Damaras by 17,000. Allowing for
	natural causes during those unnatural years, von
	Trotha, who stayed for only one of them, is reckoned
	to have done away with about 60,000 people. This is
	only 1 per cent of six million, but still pretty good.
	V., 258/259 HPMC

Here the arrows point to the Jewish Holocaust, with 1904 and 1922 as  
dress rehearsals. Themes reflecting back on the regional inflections  
of diasporas and NYC as a melting pot of depravity are given a  
grounding here. Only 1 per cent of six million is an awesome, brutal  
and almost unimaginable thing coming from the crazed will of a single  
man. Much of this chapter is given over to providing the specifics,  
what sort of folks would find working for that sort of boss an doing  
that kind of work interesting . . . .

Note how this sudden appearance of Vera is in a dream, then we are  
told how Vera comes back in through the stained glass window of  
Mondaugen's turret terrace. We are not told that Mondaugen woke up but  
the image of a woman in her forties climbing through a stained glass  
sounds more like dream than daylit reality. And then we transition to  
a conversation between Mondaugen and Foppl:

	. . . Foppl had first come to Stidwestafrika as a young
	Army recruit. It didn't take him long to find out how
	much he enjoyed it all. He'd ridden out with von Trotha
	that August, that inverted spring. "You'd find them
	wounded, or sick, by the side of the road," he told
	Mondaugen, "but you didn't want to waste the
	ammunition. Logistics at the time were sluggish.
	Some you bayoneted, others you hanged. Procedure
	was simple: one led the fellow or woman to the
	nearest tree, stood him on an ammunition box,
	fashioned a noose of rope (failing that, telegraph or
	fencing wire), slipped it round his neck, ran the rope
	through a fork in the tree and secured it to the trunk,
	kicked the box away. It was slow strangulation, but
	then these were summary courts-martial. Field
	expedients had to be used when you couldn't put up a
	scaffold each time."

	"Of course not," said Mondaugen in his nit-picking
	engineer's way, "but with so much telegraph wire and
	so many ammunition boxes lying around, logistics
	couldn't have been all that sluggish."

	"Oh," Foppl said. "Well. You're busy."
	V., 259/260 HPMC

Everything revolves back to "V.", she is some sort of center of evil  
--  baritonal 1940's radio voice: "Eeeee-vile!" -- though more as  
catalyst or muse than actor.