VLVL echoes of M&D's Captive's Tale

[Doug Millison]

I haven't gone all the way through the Captive's Tale material in M&D, but
for what it's worth here are some notes I took as I was reading Chapter 53
again, and comparing it to what we've read so far in VL.
-Doug


"They were her Express,-- she was their Message." (513) As Frenesi is the
message passed between Brock Vond and Weed Atman.

Birds again, with strangely human voices -- " 'Tis withal a Snowy Owl
Year,-- the Lemmings have suicided in the North, the Owls are oblig'd to
come further South in search of Food,-- and suddenly white Visitors from
afar are everywhere, arriving in a state of Mistrustful Fatigue, going
about with that perpetual frown that distinguishes 'em from the more
amiably be-Phiz'd white Gyrfalcons. At the peaks of Barns, the Tops of
girdl'd gray Trees, Gleaners of Voles soaring above the harvested Acres,
with none of your ghostly _hoo_, hoo neither, but low embitter'd Croaking,
utter'd in Syllables often at the Verge of Human Speech." (513)

"Her Captors have told her when and where she may perform ev'ry single
action of her life. It is Schooling, tho' she will not discover this till
later." (514)
....Compare to DL's "schooling", on her own as a teenager in Japan, then
with the low-rent Inoshiro Sensei trained as an assassin before she hooks
up with the Kunoichi Attentives in California some years later.

Compare the Kunoichi Retreat...
"Steep walls weather-stained over old whitewash did not so much tower above
the rolling, breaking terrain as almost readably reflect it, as if they
shone at all their different angles like great coarse mirrors, beneath
ancient tile roofs gone darkening and corroded under the elements, with
windows recessed into shadow, and seeming to bear no relation to any set of
levels that might be inside. As they got closer, Prairie saw archways, a
bell tower, an interpenetration with the tall lime surfaces of cypresses,
pepper trees, a fruit orchard [...] gates outer and inner [...] a small
tiled courtyard with a fountain. Owls called and swooped. Women lay naked
in the moonlight. Others, all in black, stood together in the gallery
shadows." (108)

...with the Jesuit College in Quebec that is the Captive's destination:
"Palace enough [...] ascending three stories, with a Garret above,
enclosing a broad central courtyard,-- tho' were she ask'd to confirm this,
she could swear to nothing. (Perhaps there are more Levels. Perhaps there
is a courtyard-with-a-courtyard, or beneath it. Perhaps a Crypto-Porticus,
or several, leading to other buildings in parts of the City quite remov'd.)
Here arrival here passes too quickly for her to take much of it in, so deep
in the Night, in the snow, with the black nidor of the Torches for her
first Incense, their Light sending shadows lunging from corners and
crevices and window-reveals, the distant choiring like tuned shouts, the
open looks of the men.... (514)

Compare the Kunoichi kitchen scene with M&D's "cooks already have begun  to
quarrel over details of the noon meal" (515).

"Pere de la Tube" (515) -- the Tube in VL

mechanism of the Jesuit Telegraphy (515-517) and the Punctutron's "ebonite
and brushed-gold apparatus"  (163-165)

"His Widow. A novice in Las Viudas de Cristo." (518)
 -- Kunoichi Retreat "Originally, in the days of the missions, built to
house Las Hermanas de Neustra Denora de los Pepinares -- one of those
ladies' auxiliaries that kept springing up around the Jesuits in
seventeenth-century Spain, never recognized by Rome nor even by the
Society, but persisting with grace and stamina there in California for
hundred of years" (107)

I don't recall TRP mentioning it specifically in VL, but Yakuza are famous
for their tattoos; in M&D, the Captive talks of her strange attraction to
the tattoos of her Indian captors (519-520).