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

[alice wellintown]

WE extend to Him our Blessing.

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 7:33 AM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> 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.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>        Just then the wind came squalling through the door
>        But who can the weather command?
>