V-2 - Chapter 9 - Sarah's Story & the Story of Isaac

[Robin Landseadel]

	Flow, my tears, fall from your springs!
	Exiled for ever, let me mourn;
	Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings,
	There let me live forlorn.

	Down vain lights, shine you no more!
	No nights are dark enough for those
	That in despair their lost fortunes deplore.
	Light doth but shame disclose.

	Never may my woes be relieved,
	Since pity is fled;
	And tears and sighs and groans my weary days
	Of all joys have deprived.

On Oct 26, 2010, at 10:35 PM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> I don't see any working out or recapping or eigenvalues of any part of
> the Sara/Sarah Bible story (nor do I feel the need for one here,
> there's plenty going on in the chapter as it is)

Just as Terri keeps revolving back around to American Romance --  
Hawthorne, Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Pynchon's "American  
Experience" and the all important question of "What sort of a writer  
is this anyway?" while providing us with quotations from authors who  
are clear influences -- I keep coming coming around to Pynchon's  
Spirituality and Weird Cults in large part because Pynchon spends so  
much time in his novels writing about the spiritual experiences of  
outliers. Terri is following one set of breadcrumbs, I'm following  
another. We meet somewhere in the Gnosis/Heresy isle, shopping carts  
full of cat food, frozen bob-bons and toothpaste all spilling to the  
floor. I say that a great deal of these themes are in Pynchon's books  
because a lot of what the author is concerned with points back to  
family history. I'd say there's a concern for heresy qua heresy  
because of "Meritorious Price." And my brand has fewer calories and is  
less filling.

Terri, Literature Instructor that he is, points out strong stylistic  
similarities to Poe and Hawthorne in the overall sound and vibe of  
Chapter 9. Audio Engineer that I am, I pick up other sounds. Audio  
engineering at the monitoring level is the sort of work Kurt Mondaugen  
is being paid to do during this chapter, his machines continue to  
print out data while Kurt is dreaming the dreams of others and  
Weissmann continues to steal the printouts. If you do work that  
requires hard listening focus, like Audio Engineering for a commercial  
CD, your ears reach out for anything that is out of the ordinary, like  
an oncoming jet or the unannounced appearance of the lawn crew.  The  
only one really attuned to what's going on with the sferic equipment  
is Mondaugen. It seems like everybody's psychic transmission is  
flowing through Kurt in his delirium while the radio equipment  
continues to do its work. What can I say, them Germans did some mighty  
fine electronics engineering back around 1922, made some remarkably  
sensitive stuff.

Sarah is introduced to Foppl in this scene. I guess it's Foppl that  
doing the fucker/fuckee twist, but I'm not really sure, seeing as he  
refers to himself as "Himself," further confusing the narrator's voice  
with Stencil's.

	Himself, he could have been happy in that new
	corporative life; could have made a career out of construction
	work, except for one of his concubines, a Herero child named
	Sarah. She brought his discontent to a focus; perhaps even
	became one reason finally why he quit it all and headed
	inland to try to regain a little of the luxury and abundance that
	had vanished (he feared) with von Trotha.

		He found her first a mile out in the Atlantic, on a
	breakwater they were building of sleek dark rocks that the
	women carried out by hand, deep-sixed and slowly, painfully
	stacked into a tentacle crawling along the sea. That day gray
	sheets were tacked to the sky, and a black cloud remained all
	day at the western horizon. It was her eyes he saw first,
	whites reflecting something of the sea's slow turbulence; then
	her back, beaded with old sjambok scars. He supposed it was
	simple lust that made him go over and motion to her to put
	down the rock she'd begun to lift: scribble and give her a note
	for her compound supervisor. "Give it to him," he warned her,
	"or-" and he made the sjambok whistle in the salt wind. In
	earlier days you hadn't had to warn them: somehow, because
	of that "operational sympathy," they always delivered notes,
	even when they knew the note might well be a death warrant.

		She looked at the chit, then at him. Clouds moved
	across those eyes; whether reflected or transmitted he'd
	never know. Brine slapped at their feet, carrion birds wheeled
	in the sky. The breakwater stretched behind them back to
	land and safety; but it could take only a word; any, the most
	inconsequential, to implant in each of them the perverse
	notion that their own path lay the other way, on the invisible
	mole not yet built; as if the sea were pavement for them, as
	for our Redeemer.

		Here was another like the woman pinned under the rail,
	another piece of those soldiering days. He knew he didn't
	want to share this girl; he was feeling again the pleasure of
	making a choice whose consequences, even the most
	terrible, he could ignore.

		He asked her name, she answered Sarah, eyes never
	having left him. A squall, cold as Antarctica, came rushing
	across the water, drenched them, continued on toward the
	north, though it would die without ever seeing the Congo's
	mouth or the Bight of Benin. She shivered, his hand in
	apparent reflex went to touch her but she avoided it and
	stooped to pick up the rock. He tapped her lightly on the rear
	with his sjambok and the moment, whatever it had meant,
	was over.

	V., 287/288 HPMC

> chiefly the significance of the name Sarah is to stress this woman's
> "created equal" status to Rachel and Esther, isn't it?
> Or to position her in the same tradition anyway - to include her in
> the same continuum

I think there is significance in Sarah being capable of communicating  
directly with G-d. While Gnosis can refer very specifically to an  
early Christian sect most devout and strange, Pynchon uses the term in  
many other ways. That's his working M.O. anyway -- to somehow tease  
out all the alternative meanings of words we thought we were familiar  
with. Like the word "Lot." I'm sure others more equipped to speak  
about Roman Catholic heresies could come up with a roadmap for "V."  
"Gnosis", in the sense of the event of being touched by G-d [or having  
convinced oneself that one was] and in the process becoming  
Illuminated [or De-Luminated, as the case may be out there in Gnostic  
country] is all over Pynchon's novels.

One can say that in her moment of death, Sarah knew things that only G- 
d should know.

> Just happenstance of birth making the only difference...
> pointing up the injustice

Pynchon uses all the tools at his disposal for this chapter -- turns  
out he found some new ones in the process:

		That night she didn't come. Next morning he caught her
	on the breakwater, made her kneel, placed his boot on her
	nape and pushed her head under the sea until his sense of
	timing told him to let her up for air. He noticed then how long
	and snakelike her thighs were; how clearly the musculature
	of her hips stood under the skin, skin with a certain glow, but
	finely striated because of her long fast in the bush. That day
	he'd sjambok her on any least pretense. At dusk he wrote out
	another chit and handed it to her. "You have an hour." She
	watched him, nothing about her at all of the animal he'd seen
	in other nigger women. Only eyes giving back the red sun,
	and the white stalks of fog that had already begun to rise off
	the water.

		He didn't eat supper. He waited alone in his house near
	the barbed-wire compound, listening to the drunks selecting
	their mates for the night. He couldn't stay off his feet and
	perhaps he'd caught a chill. The hour passed; she didn't
	come. He walked out without a coat into low clouds and
	made his way to her thorn compound. It was pitch-black out.
	Wet gusts slapped his cheeks, he stumbled. Once at the
	enclosure he took up a torch and went looking for her.
	Perhaps they thought he was mad, perhaps he was. He
	didn't know how long he looked. He couldn't find her. They all
	looked alike.

		The next morning she appeared as usual. He chose two
	strong women, bent her back over a rock and while they held 	
	her; he first sjamboked, then took her. She lay in a cold rigor; 	
	and when it was over he was astonished to find that at some 	
	point during it the women had, like good-natured duennas, 	
	released her and gone about their morning's labor.

		And that night, long after he'd turned in, she came to his
  	house and slid into the bed next to him. Woman's perversity!
	She was his.

	V., 288/289 HPMC


	From the highest spire of contentment
	My fortune is thrown;
	And fear and grief and pain for my deserts
	Are my hopes, since hope is gone.

	Hark! you shadows that in darkness dwell,
	Learn to condemn light
	Happy, happy they that in hell
	Feel not the world's despite.

	John Dowland: "Flow My Tears"