help re:V

[LOT64 at aol.com]

Bonnie,

You have selected a passage (93-94) in V. that I am quite unclear about.  If
I understand the passage correctly "The man with the white blotched face" and
its"masses of white skin" is Porpentine, who has been suffering from a
worsening sunburn.  Lespius is the man with the blue spectacles.  "The other
is fat..." is Goodfellow.

My reconstruction goes: Lespius enters the second box.  Goodfellow and
Porpentine enter the box next to Lespius together.  Victoria enters
Goodfellow and Porpentine's box and minutes later leaves crying followed by
Goodfellow.  Porpentine comes out of the box with a smoking gun and goes
after Lespius in the next box.  They struggle and Porpentine breaks Lespius'
glasses, blinding him.  "The man at the end of the corridor..." shoots
Porpentine.

Who is "the man at the end of the corridor"?  Is it Bongo-Shaftsbury?  I lose
track of the plot.  Of course, we the readers, only view the plot through the
reporting of others who don't really know the players and are just guessing
or fantasizing what they are up to (in the same way that we,the readers do).
 P.Aieul the cafe waiter, Yusef the factotum and anarchist spy, Rowley-Bugge
the moocher off fellow tourists, Waldetar the conductor, Gebrail the cab
driver, Girgis the hotel thief,  and Hanne the waitress, the functionaries of
Baedeker land.  Every section of that chapter is told from the point of view
of a person serving and observing tourists.  All except the finale, part
VIII, from which you quote.

Bongo-Shaftsbury who displays the switch on his arm is starting to become
less human and more inanimate.  As time progresses in the novel's flashbacks
V. becomes more and more inanimate.  She is made up of more artificial parts,
clock work-eye, artificial foot, false teeth, a sapphire implanted in the
navel. Evan Godolphin is ruined by the clumsy incorporation of inanimate
objects into his body.  He eventually ends up taking care of V. This
progressive transformation of  human being into  inanimate object is the
unique evil of the twentieth century.  V. is suffering this fate as a
foreshadowing of what might befall all of us in this century.

Would you say the suppression of the Goddess through history is paralleled by
the suppression of all of our humanity in this century?

And what about my conjecture that V. is Stencil's mother.  How does  that fit
with the Goddess theory?


Ron Churgin