V-2 - Chapter 9 - Constructing

[Mark Kohut]

Forgot this link

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----- Original Message ----
From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: kelber at mindspring.com; pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Mon, October 25, 2010 6:20:38 PM
Subject: Re: V-2 - Chapter 9 - Constructing

Not really Pynchon, just mind-boggling,  bringing to mind "time and 
reverse-time, co-existing, canceling one another exactly 
out...................all this via 'beautiful math'.............................


----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Mon, October 25, 2010 3:55:16 PM
Subject: Re: V-2 - Chapter 9 - Constructing

The novel's full of clocks, mirrors and clocks reflected in mirrors.  So what 
happens when Vera, with her clock-eye, looks in a mirror?

Reiterating from Chapter 2:

"here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly 
out.  Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, 
perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the 
imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal 
zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose?"

Does her clock-eye cancel itself out, cancel herself out?  So maybe V., in her 
Vera incarnation, doesn't have the power of self-reflection, and ceases to exist 

when she reflects on herself.  Like the march of technology, she can't be 
appealed to or changed or stopped.  Just riffing here, but recall that in P, 
mirrors invite us into other realms, clocks trap us where we are, a clock 
disappears in the mirror world.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
>Sent: Oct 25, 2010 9:38 AM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: V-2 - Chapter 9 - Constructing "V."
>
>    . . . 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.