HOWTO enter Ctrl-S to BASH from console

[Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org>]

Here is my somewhat OT question since this is not exactly Debian but generic
BASH question...

In order to search command history in BASH, I can use Ctrl-R (reverse
incremental search) but so far am unsuccessful in using Ctrl-S (normal
incremental search).

As I see in BASH manual page bash(1)
...
  reverse-search-history (C-r)
         Search  backward  starting  at  the current line and moving `up'
         through the  history  as  necessary.   This  is  an  incremental
         search.
  forward-search-history (C-s)
         Search  forward  starting  at the current line and moving `down'
         through the  history  as  necessary.   This  is  an  incremental
         search.

If I prepend Ctrl-S with Ctrl-V, I get "^S".

Of course Ctrl-S just freezes screen until I press Ctrl-Q.

Any simple key-sequences to handle this situation?

Osamu