help re:V

[Bonnie Surfus (ENG)]

On Tue, 15 Aug 1995 LOT64 at aol.com wrote:

> 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.

As you point out, the point of view shifts.  This could, and I guess, is 
read literally as representative of these characters.  But the point of 
view does indicate an objective observation of a cast of unknowns.  I was 
thinking about the man with the white blotched face, still white but 
tattered,a  transformation, male displacement of the Goddess--this, still 
fairly new in my thoughts.> 
> 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.
> 
Again, the shift in p.o.v. suggests something other than that vantage 
point you mention.  And it was not "the functionaries of Baedecker land" 
who dropped the first bomb.  So if the passage does allude to a bomb 
scenario, it would call for just such a shift.  I can't be precise about 
the man at the end of the hall--but the body that is subsumed by the 
image of the man with the white-tissued face?  that may indicate the 
victory of mastery over mystery, God over the Goddess.  Unfortunately, 
the result is death.  Without the whole cycle, half remains supreme and 
this half emerges due to the domination of mastery, in this case mastery 
of our knowledge of all aspects of mystery (in particular, the atom.)
> 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.
> Yes, she is made up more and more of parts following this 
merger--foreshadowed as "the stain had fissioned, and transferred like an 
overlay to each of her retinae" (91)--that's Hanne's retinae.  The very 
next chapter features Esther's nose job, all bound up in the rise and 
fall of the Third Reich.  In the waiting room, "a bald woman without ears 
contemplated the gold imp-clock, skin flush and shiny from temples to 
occiput.  BEsider her sat a younger girl, whose skull was fissured such 
that three separate peaks, paraboloid in shape, protruded about the hair, 
which continued down either side of a densely acned face like a skipper's 
beard. . .an aged gentleman in a moss-green gabardine suit, who possessed 
three nostrils, . . ." (102).  These three's coincide with that "roughly 
triangular" shape on the dish in Hanne's kitchen (90).  Schoemaker 
"snipped off a triangular wedge of septum" (108).  What happens to her 
then?  ". . . never before had she been so passive with any male" (108). 
She's also sexually turned on, "as if Schoenmaker had located and flipped 
a secret switch or clitoris somewhere insider her nasal cavity" (109).  
This last is an interesting play on the assertion that a clitoris is a 
penis in reverse, as we also read earlier that 'To none of them did it 
occur that the retrousse nose too is an aesthetic misfit:  a Jew nose in 
reverse, is all" (103).  Just an aside.  Anyhow, I was straying too far 
with thte triangles.  Judith Chambers writes of them more specifically.  

Would you say the suppression of the Goddess through history is paralleled by
> the suppression of all of our humanity in this century?
Yes, if you mean "humanity" as a holistic term that finds, somehow, a 
balance between death and life, hatred and love, etc.  > 
> And what about my conjecture that V. is Stencil's mother.  How does  that fit
> with the Goddess theory?
> I think it does.  I had never considered it so specifically.  Naturally 
she would be his "mother" in one sense.  But literally?  I'll need to 
think it over more.  Right now I'm tempted to think about Her abuse and 
neglect in terms of the bomb, bondel torture, etc. (mastery, dominion.)  
And so Stencil's characterization seems almost appropriately aligned with 
your theory--searching for V., not really knowing but sensing the 
importance.  His dream, in which he discovers that "V. was merely a 
scholarly quest after all, an adventure of the mind, in the tradition of 
The Golden Bough or The White Goddess" puts him in the position of a Don 
Quixote--is there a dragon?  or is it just a windmill, heavy on the 
representation?  Is V. literal?  Or is it merely his sense of something 
larger, darker?  a plot?  a religion?  Certainly, on Malta there is 
such a sensibility.  We read: "V.'s is a country of coincidence, rulted  
by a ministry of myth,. Whose emissaries haunt this city's streets.  
Porcepic, Mondaugen, Stencil pere, this Majistral, Stencil fils.  Could 
any of them create a coincidence? Only Providence creates.  If the 
coincidences are real then Stencil has never encountered history at all, 
but something far more appalling" (450).  Later:  "I am the twentieth 
century,' she read.  Profane rolled away AND STARED AT THE PATTERN IN THE 
RUG" (454).  Brenda says "I am . . .clean geometry. . . " (454)  I could 
go on with all the apparent "witchcraft" (they'll always want to call it 
that) in the epilogue.  this, all bound in talk of "history," its 
subjecitve nature cleverly detailed as : "Short of examining the entire 
history of each individual participating,'Stencil wrote,'short of 
anatomizing each soul, what hope has anyone of understanding a 
Situation?  It may be that the civil servants of the future will not be 
accredited unless they first receive a degree in brain surgery" (470).  
And I do wonder about a merging between Stencil and Veronica Manganese, 
who "had kept him only as long as she had to."  Later, Stencil "raised 
his hand; waved with a curiously sentimental, feminine motion of the 
wrist" (492).  I've also wondered about the "line from Malta to 
Lampedusa.  Call it a radius.  Somewehre in that circle, on the evening 
of the tenth, a waterspout appeared and lasted for fifteen minutes."  we 
know the rest.  If you look back to Fausto's Confessions, you'll see tha 
tthe room is described in terms of the positions on the compass--in a 
circle.  

Oh, I realize I've rambled.  Hopefully, you can pick up what you like to 
run with.  If I can clarify any of what I appear to imply (not too vague, 
eh?) I will try.

Bonnie