V--2nd, Chap 9..thoughts requested

[Robin Landseadel]

Hi! I'm Jimmy Carl Black and I'm the Indian of the group.

On Oct 29, 2010, at 7:14 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> How do you, I mean YOU and Robin, understand these lines inside
> the Sarah story?:
>
> p. 289 "But on the foggy, sweating, sterile coast there were no  
> owners,
> nothing owned. Communit may have been the only solution possible
> against such an assertion of the Inanimate."

"You" has already spoken, I suspect that "We" will have a better answer.

I'm considering certain ideas not necessarily on this page, but very  
much a part of the author's condition as of the time the novel was  
being written. I'm also looking at the surrounding context.

		Yet how long could he have had her to himself?

Sarah as possession.

		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.

Hiding the jewel, imprisonment of the Princess. Old fairy stories come  
to mind, which reminds me . . .

	    Dream tonight of peacock tails,
             Diamond fields and spouter whales.
             Ills are many, blessings few,
             But dreams tonight will shelter you.

             Let the vampire's creaking wing
             Hide the stars while banshees sing;
             Let the ghouls gorge all night long;
             Dreams will keep you safe and strong.

             Skeletons with poison teeth,
             Risen from the world beneath,
             Ogre, troll, and loup-garou,
             Bloody wraith who looks like you,

             Shadow on the window shade,
             Harpies in a midnight raid,
             Goblins seeking tender prey,
             Dreams will chase them all away.

             Dreams are like a magic cloak
             Woven by the fairy folk,
             Covering from top to toe,
             Keeping you from winds and woe.

             And should the Angel come this night
             To fetch your soul away from light,
             Cross yourself, and face the wall:
             Dreams will help you not at all.

But Sarah's is a compacted, quite Grimm tale;

		Sarah might have cooked, cleaned, comforted,
	been the closest thing to a wife he'd ever had.

These are the arrangements for children of the War. Marriage is simply  
not possible under these conditions, so it becomes a form of play.  
Like most of the games in old German Southwest Africa, things go  
haywire, and fast.

		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.

Pynchon looks at entropy/death from a number of angles. I suspect that  
the Boeing/Bomarc experience shaped his vision as much as anything in  
his life. This "natural concentration camp" is painted in lunar light,  
thoughts of the race to the moon and what we might find there must  
have been on the young author's mind. This chapter, after all, is the  
seedbed of Gravity's Rainbow. Polker's story is analogous to Sarah's  
tale, coming from a different but related angle. Pynchon was working  
in the rocket division of Boeing between 1960 and 1962, the same time  
he was writing "V." It was a race to the moon. Surely life's  
inherently faulty interaction with the encroaching sterility and  
lifelessness of the modern condition is central to "V." The  
associative subtext here is the rise of Fascism, a community arising  
as a paranoiac counterstroke to their surrounding "enemies," creating  
a group mind like a hive, or in this case, a pack of jackals.

		Soon enough his neighbor the pederast had
	discovered her and become enchanted.

You could have seen this one coming from a mile away, but what a great  
distance for the Princess to fall from the lap of the Pharaoh.

		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.

So the end of this paragraph reinforces the sense that this "Strand"  
is a waste land, from which nothing can grow or flourish, Foppl's  
(more likely Stencil's) dearest canvas.

This paragraph also underscores rape as a war-crime, as atrocity, as a  
key element of the holocaust. Above all, it's a painting of German  
South-west Africa 1904 as an anti-earth. Pynchon's spiritual vision  
builds on the notion of earth as conscious living entity, the "Strand"  
is a kind of "counter-earth," a continuation of and variation on "The  
Waste Land."

		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.

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	Just then the wind came squalling through the door
	But who can the weather command?