James Ellroy and V.

[Ralph Howard]

Diana Writes:

> 
> The _V._ reference, while not entirely tongue in cheek, probably needs a
> gloss for those who are not thinking about the book in the way I am/do.
> Stencil's obsessive quest for his "mother" V., her body, her memory, her
> impact on him, mirrors Ellroy's own quest for his murdered mother's
> history. A friend sent me the Ellroy because I study the prevalence of 
> images of dead women in literature and the visual arts and our
> corresponding social "ignorance" of it--in other words the dead body
> of a woman is so common that it becomes invisible and so acts more as
> a vehicle for the male author's feelings/emotions/aesthetics (and a
> panacea for his own death) than a "literal" (whatever that is)
> representation of the dead woman herself. Ellroy's book certainly fits in
> here--clearly the quest is more about the author than the long-dead
> mother--but she is his obsessive focus and the dead woman who defines
> him, for better or worse, like  Stencil's quest for V. defines him. -Diana
> 

With the idea of a Ellroy <-> Stencil correspondence in mind I
finished reading the last third of _My Dark Places_ last night and
find the correspondence makes a lot of sense.  As anther parallel
Ellroy is just as uneasy as Stencil about the idea of having the quest
come to a definite end.  He throws quite a nice fit on the subject:
"There is no such thing as closure.  Whoever invented the idea of
closure should be tracked down and have a closure trophy shoved up
their ass" (quoted from memory).

Ralph



-- 
Ralph Howard                    Phone:  (803) 777-2913 
Department of Mathematics       Fax:    (803) 777-3783 
University of South Carolina    e-mail: howard at math.sc.edu
Columbia, SC 29208 USA          http://www.math.sc.edu/~howard/