VV(13): Enters Weismann

[jbor]

      Soon, padding down a narrow, sloping corridor, he was brought to
    attention by a mirror hung some twenty feet ahead, angled to reflect
    the interior of a room around the next corner. Framed for him there
    were Vera Meroving  and her lieutenant in profile, she striking at his
    chest with what appeared to be a small riding crop, he twisting a
    gloved hand into her hair and talking to her all the while, so precisely
    that the voyeur Mindaugen could lip-read each obscenity. The geometry of
    the corridors somehow baffled all sound: Mondaugen, with the queer
    excitement he'd felt watching her at the window that morning, expected
    captions explaining it all to flash on to the mirror. But she finally
    released Weissmann; he reached out with the curiously gloved hand and
    closed the door, and it was as if Mondaugen had dreamed them. (238)

In this earlier scene when Kurt is watching them in the mirror Pynchon very
deliberately places Vera in the position of control: she "released"
Weissmann, rather than vice versa, and even though he is holding her by the
hair. Maybe it's all part of an elaborate act which Weissmann has set up for
Kurt's voyeuristic benefit, because Weissmann is then the one who closes the
door on Kurt's view, but then again maybe it's not. The ambiguity is
deliberate imo.

best


----------
>From: Michel Ryckx <michel.ryckx at freebel.net>


> 236.20 Vera Meroving, presented like an Amazone: 'jodhpurs and
> army-shirt, smoking'.  In the background 'cries of pain lanced...'
> (236.22).  Mondaugen notices her hands trembling (237.13)  A few moments
> later, ...'Weissmann appeared in mufti from behind an
> unwholesome-looking palm and pulled her by the hand, back into the
> depths of the house'. (237.18-20)
>
> Note he 'pulled', and not 'took'.
> 'From behind': was he watching them?
>
> That is the way Weissmann is introduced: in the middle of or just after
> cries of pain, a woman trembling, she not knowing what it was like
> outside
> (237.12).
>
> 238.  Mondaugen sees the both of them through a mirror.  She, 'striking
> at his chest with what appeared a riding crop' (238.4-5), he talking so
> that 'the voyeur Mondaugen could lip-read each obscenity' (238.7).
>
> And why is Weissmann's hand 'curiously gloved'  (238.12)?
>
> Enters Weissmann amidst terror and pain.
>
> Michel.