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

[Mark Kohut]

If Love is in and thru the eye, then its becoming mechanical 
makes love artificial or half-so and on the way to full blindness

A Voyeur....another almost literal metaphor for being mostly a bystander,
a functionary in the evils of Empire murder, appropriation and destruction
of indigenous peoples.....................

And, this read, maybe because I'm dreaming every night like I need an analyst,
I find the poignance of not even having one's own dreams that is a line herein.


----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Mon, October 25, 2010 9:38:09 AM
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.