V-2 - Chapter 9 - Natural Concentration Camps

[Mark Kohut]

Wikipedia adds this: Abraham hid Sarah in a chest when they had
to travel....When powers-that-were demanded the chest be open
to assess duty due, a bright light was emitted.......
"light, the secret ingredient of history"---TRP in AtD (do I have that quote 
right?)

She was allowed to speak directly to God, as Robin quotes below
and look what happens to her..............to THAT!.................

The direct feminine approach to the Godhead, defiled, but with
strength enough to flee....but who drowns in the sea.

A kind of backward telling, huge Judeo-Christian Western World meaning, 
 that is a dying into the sea, of the She story of H. Rider Haggard?  She who 
famously
comes out of the sea? She is alluded to in Against the Day,
I believe. Haggard was a South African
 and the novel is full of religious but mostly non-Christian
overtones says The Annotated She, which is online in Google Books.

Ending of Gregory Corso's poem "Marriage": 
Like SHE in her lonely alien garb waiting her Egyptian lover
so i wait bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life





----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Thu, October 28, 2010 10:09:42 AM
Subject: V-2 - Chapter 9 - Natural Concentration Camps

    . . . The barren islets off Ltideritzbucht were natural concentration camps 
. . .

On Oct 28, 2010, at 5:50 AM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> Robin Landseadel wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> yes, true, he's recounting or confessing this to Eigenvalue.
> And I suppose it's not necessary to stress the idea that according to
> his old roommate, the author was a frequent confessor himself, but
> it's the kind of thing I like to do...

You Catholic?

> the idea that some of the urgent propulsion of Stencil's narrative,
> or, heck, of V. itself, comes from the form of expression where one's
> soul is at stake

Whenever I read Pynchon, I'm looking for the spoor of heresy. It's always there 
in one form or another.

> Without unduly taxing my interpretive capacities, maybe I can attach
> some more significance to Sarah's name: as the progenitor of the line
> from which Rachel and Esther are later to spring, her situation is
> more primitively oppressed than theirs

If nothing else, she represents an earlier stage of development of her tribe.

I'm nobody's idea of a biblical scholar, I've got an aversion to all things 
biblical, so I never made clear passage through the Old Testament. I posted the 
"Sarah" story from Genesis in the hope that it might ring the bells of others. I 

suspect that there is an older layer in the development of the story that became 

Genesis 11 through 23, older myths. Note that in the Bible story, Abraham is 
afraid that Sarah's beauty is so great, that if his true relation as husband to 
Sarah was known, his life would be in danger. So, Abe pretends that Sarah is his 

sister. The couple is driven by famine to Eygpt. The Pharaoh takes a liking to 
Sarah. The Bible doesn't refer to "Abe the Pimp", but for all intents and 
purposes Abraham is exchanging his life for his wife's sexuality.

Foppl [?] is afraid that his Sarah would be discovered by his mates, it is her 
life that is put at risk. And his fear was more than justified:

        Yet how long could he have had her to himself? During
    the day he manacled her to the bed, and he continued to use
    the woman-pool at night so he wouldn't arouse suspicion.
    Sarah might have cooked, cleaned, comforted, been the
    closest thing to a wife he'd ever had. But on that foggy,
    sweating, sterile coast there were no owners, nothing
    owned. Community may have been the only solution
    possible against such an assertion of the Inanimate. Soon
    enough his neighbor the pederast had discovered her and
    become enchanted. He requested Sarah; this was answered
    by the lie that she'd come from the pool and the pederast
    could wait his turn. But it could only get them a reprieve. The
    neighbor visited his house during the day, found her
    manacled and helpless, took her his own way and then        
    decided, like a thoughtful sergeant, to share this good    
    fortune with his platoon. Between noon and suppertime, as
    the fog's glare shifted in the sky, they took out an abnormal
    distribution of sexual preferences on her, poor Sarah, "his"
    Sarah only in a way that poisonous strand could never
    support.

        He came home to find her drooling, her eyes drained for
    good of all weather. Not thinking, probably not having taken
    it all in, he unlocked her shackles and it was as if like a
    spring she'd been storing the additive force that convivial
    platoon had expended in amusing themselves; for with an
    incredible strength she broke out of his embrace and fled,
    and that was how he saw her, alive, for the last time.
    V., 289, HPMC

I keep coming back to the notion that Sarah, a Princess, knows in her heart that 

she is one of the elect. Her horrible fate is that much darker thanks to her 
distinction.

        Named Iscah.
        —In Rabbinical Literature:

        Sarah was the niece of Abraham, being the daughter
     of his brother Haran. She was called also "Iscah" (Gen. xi. 29),
    because her beauty attracted general attention and admiration
    (Meg. 14a). She was so beautiful that all other persons seemed
    apes in comparison (B. B. 58a). Even the hardships of her journey
    with Abraham did not affect her beauty (Gen. R. xi. 4). According
    to another explanation, she was called Iscah because she had
    prophetic vision (Meg.l.c.). She was superior to Abraham in the
    gift of prophecy (Ex. R. i. 1.). She was the "crown" of her husband;
    and he obeyed her words because he recognized this superiority
    on her part (Gen. R. xlvii. 1). She was the only woman whom God
    deemed worthy to be addressed by Him directly, all the other
    prophetesses receiving their revelations through angels
    (ib.xlv. 14). On their journeys Abraham converted the men, and
     Sarah the women (ib.xxxix. 21). She was called originally
    "Sarai,"i.e., "my princess," because she was the princess of
    her house and of her tribe; later she was called "Sarah" =
    "princess," because she was recognized generally as such

    (Ber. 13a; Gen. R. xlvii. 1).

:http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=245&letter=S#ixzz13f2lhy68

        The next day her body was washed up on the beach.
    She had perished in a sea they would perhaps never
    succeed in calming any part of. Jackals had eaten her
    breasts.
    V., 289, HPMC

> - Andrea Dworkin's thesis being the conceptual line (rather than
> progenitive) connecting them?

Are you talking Matriarchal contra Patriarchal? I'll go for that, and it is the 
Jewish way after all, inheritance running through mothers.

> They are hauling stones by hand and plopping them in the water to make
> this thing!  the old scars bearing testimony to how much coercion has
> been required, and even still she doesn't snap to, the way he'd like
> 
>>               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.

Note the echo of "Clouds moved across those eyes; whether reflected or 
transmitted he'd never know" in "He came home to find her drooling, her eyes 
drained for good of all weather."

> another harsh Line created by man, patriarchy and slavery!  Perhaps
> the worst of the lot!

See "Mason & Dixon" for more details.

> and even in Foppl himself, the Christ who I'd
> argue isn't dismissed at all in V.

In a way, Pynchon is exploring a world that G-d has abandoned in "V."

The author returns to the haunts of "V.", or at least the Stencilized sections, 
later in his career and seems to come to different conclusions. There seems to 
be more room for G-d, or at least the Lord over lunch, in "Against the Day."

> exists in any potential verbal
> encounter to draw them away from their endeavor - and yet, what
> they've been building makes following that prompting a major hazard, a
> turning away like Roger and Jessica's from the harsh War-mother
> symbolized in V. by the various incarnations of V.?

I guess you'll have to expand on those thoughts before I'll comprehend them. I 
do see a lot of the ideas in chapter 9 expand in Gravity's Rainbow, no question 
of that, particularly as regards sick, anti-human sex.

--------------------------------------------------------------

     Oh – fortunately the prize has only been
    given to authors – unlike the Academy
    Award which is given to a female and a
    male, indicating the derision of the
    human specie – God damn it!