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

[Mark Kohut]

Another terrif, so full, so suggestive a post....

Let me ask, before being the first one to thank for the Tony the Tiger 
hosting....GRREEEAAAT!
if you think you are finished with this chapter?...

If you have more to post through all the looping to the end, I beseech
the court to spare Robin another week...............

Mark




----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sat, October 30, 2010 7:33:30 AM
Subject: Re: V--2nd, Chap 9..thoughts requested

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?