VV(12): Her Left Eye

Wed Apr 11 19:12:16 CDT 2001

"As the distance between them gradually diminished Mondaugen saw that her 
left eye was artificial: she, noticing, his curiosity, obligingly removed 
the eye and held it out to him in the hollow of her hand.  A bubble blown 
translucent, its 'white' would show up when in the socket as a half-lit sea 
green.  A fine network of nearly microscopic fractures covered its surface.  
Inside were the delicately-wrought wheels, springs, ratchets of a watch, 
wound by a gold key which Fraulein Meroving wore on a slender chain round 
her neck.  Darker green and flecks of gold had been fused into twelve 
vaguely zodiacal shapes, placed annular on the surface of the bubble to 
represent the iris and also the face of the watch."  (V., Ch. 9, Sec. ii, p. 
237)

[1936]), Appendix I, "Swinburne and 'Le Vice Anglais,'" pp. 415-33.  Pardon 
my lack of diacritical marks, but those who know, know, so ...

"The mixture of flowers and instruments of torture is to be found also in O. 
Mirbeau's Jardin des supplices (written in 1898-9); but in this the English 
sadist is a woman instead of a man, a woman with eyes 'verts, pailletes 
d'or', like here 'diabolical' sister described by Barbey d'Aurevilly in the 
Dessous de cartes, the Comtesse de Stasseville ('ces deux emeraudes, striees 
de jaune ...').  Eyes of this type seem to be a regular characteristic of 
the sadists in the works we are discussing." (425)

A couple of loose translations here. "Green, sequined with gold" and "two 
emeralds, streaked with yellow."  I've found this site particularly helpful, 
particularly forgiving ...

http://www.french-linguistics.co.uk/dictionary/

And a note.  Octave Mirbeau's Jardin des supplices is available in English 
translation as The Torture Garden from Re/Search in the U.S.  warning, here 
be extracts ...

http://www.researchpubs.com/books/tortprod.shtml

... and the book itself is photographically (albeit without so much 
"graphically") illustrated to some extent.  But the Dedalus Press ed. in the 
U.K. has a nifty Catherine Deneuve all tied up in Belle de Jour cover, so 
... and recall the "Batman" episode where the Joker disguised himself as the 
eccentric artist, Octave Marbeau.  But at this point, an asterisk in Praz's 
text redirects us momentarily to an "Addenda" at pp. 476-7, wherein, among 
other things, one finds ...

"... in Leandro's (Giustino Ferri's) L'Ultima Notte (see addition to note 81 
of chap. iv) we find a Russian woman, Vera, who is a sadist and a worshipper 
of the devil." (477)

And seeing "the addition to note 81 of chap. iv" (reading this book is not 
unlike reading Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, by the way, and/or one of those 
"Choose Your Own Adventure" books; and keep in mind, Pynchon could very well 
have read this himself, made use of it as he did Robert Graves' The White 
Goddess, as a source of imagery, themes, no doubt this labyrinthine aspect 
might have appealed as well), yields ...

"That the atmosphere was ripe for D'Annunzio may be shown by third-rate 
novels like L'Ultima Notte by Leandro (Giustino Ferri), Rome, Sommaruga, 
1884, where we find a 'demoniacal' Russian lady, Vera, who persuades herself 
that she is worshipping Satan in the person of Alexander Nogoroff, and cries 
to him in an orgasm: 'Love me,  because you are a murderer; love me, because 
you are a prisoner....' 'She had a kind of foam on her parched and bitten 
lips, and her eyes spoke of monstrous fantasies, of sanguinary orgies, of 
tortures, spasms, nameless sins, &c.'" (461)

I'll get to whence this came from, but, in the meantime, as background here, 
Praz notes earlier that "It was Merimee who localized in Spain the type of 
Fatal Woman which towards the end of the century came to be placed more 
generally in Russia" (197).  Here, Praz is referring to  Prosper Merimee's 
(in)famous Carmen, but note as well that PM's "The Venus of Ille" features a 
sinister, feminine copper idol whose jeweled eyes are particularly 
noteworthy ...

But the "Appendix" here begins, tongue dryly in cheek, "It seems to be an 
assured fact that sexual flagellation has been practiced in England with 
greater frequency than elsewhere" (415), and goes on to discuss "the type of 
English algolagnic fixed ... in the person of George Augustus Selwyn 
(1719-91)" (ibid.).  "In him also a morbid attraction for sights of 
suffering went hand in hand with a pronounced affection for children" 
(ibid.) ...

Continuing, then, in the "Swinburne" chapter ...

"Eyes of this type seem to be a regular characteristic of the sadists 
described in the works we are discussing.  Baudelaire, in the poem Le 
Poison, saw in green eyes an indication of cruelty:

   Tout cela ne vaut pas le poison qui decoule
      De tes yuex, de tes yeux verts,
   Lacs ou min ame tremble et se voit a l'envers....
      Mes songes viennent en foule
   Pour se desalterer a ces gouffres amers.

   Tout cela ne vaut pas le terrible prodige
      De ta salive qui mord,
   Qui plonge dans l'oubli mon ame sans remord,
      Et, charrant le vertige,
   La roule defaillante aux rives de la mort!

Major Ydow, too, in Barbey d' Aurevilly's A un diner d'athees, has green 
eyes which bring to mind the emerald eyes set in the head of a certain bust 
of Antinous." (425-6)

Google (?!) translated these verses from Baudeliare's "Poison" for me as ...

All that is not worth the poison which rises
   Of your eyes, your green eyes,
Lakes where my heart trembles and is seen with back...
   My dreams come as a crowd
To be refreshed with these bitter pits.

All that is not worth the terrible wonder
   Of your saliva which bites,
Who plunges in the lapse of memory my heart without remord,
   And, carting the giddiness,
Rolls failing to banks of death!

http://poetes.com/baud/BPoison.htm

But, on "the emerald eyes set in the head of a certain bust of Antinous," 
Praz writes earlier that ...

"there is a certain Major Ydow who looks like one of the busts of 
Antinous--the one in which, through the caprice or the bad taste of the 
sculptor (says d'Aurevilly), two emeralds are set in the marble of the 
eyeballs.  This detail, too, became later a cliche of popular Romanticism: 
Antinous and the emeralds are to be found, for instance, in Lorrain's 
Monsieur de Phocas." (314)

I think Antinous here is not the first suitor of Penelope to whom 
Odysseus/Ulysseus gives the shaft upon his return and uncloaking, but, 
rather, the Ganymede to Hadrian's Zeus, as this site puts it ...

http://ladyhedgehog.hedgie.com/antinous.html

Note also, on the Duc de Freneuse of Claude Lorrain's ...

"Dorian Gray, like des Esseintes, was a collector of jewels; Freneuse is 
obsessed by jewels ... for which he searches in vain, both in precious 
stones and in the eyes of human beings.  It is the limpid, green clearness 
of the aquamarine in the eyes of Astarte 'qui est le Demon de la Luxure et 
aussi le Demon de la Mer', of which he catches a glimpse in 'la dolente 
emeraude embusquee comme une lueur dans les orbites d'yeux des statues 
d'Herculaneum', in the liquid green eyes of certain busts of Antinous ... in 
the glance of the infernal bride in the picture called 'The Three Brides' by 
the turbid Catholic painter Toorop, and in the eyes of the tortured, 'la 
divine extase effaree, suppliante, la volupte epouvantee des yeux des sainte 
Agnes, des sainte Catherine de Sienne et des saint Sebastien' ..." (346)

I'll leave it to someone else to provide whatever translations might be 
needed here, but I think y'all get the gist here.  For Jan Toorop (Dutch, 
1858-1928), "The Three Brides," see ...

http://www.artmagick.com/paintings/toorop/toorop3.jpg

An endnote here mentions as well that "Thin lips are another characteristic" 
and that "The female sadists portrayed in the works of the decadents are 
generally blondes" (432, n. 15).  Also ...

"themes which make up the repertory of the Decadent Movement--green eyes, 
cruel faces of Amazons and Bacchantes, seductive corpses of women who have 
been strangled or drowned, scenes of the Black Mass ... the Gioconda smile 
... the charm of the Androgyne." (374)

Honore Balzac's La Fille au yeux d'or ("The Girl with the Golden Eyes") also 
comes up, but ... but, well, much hassle here today, have already had to key 
in much of this a couple of times.  will mention this, however, lest I 
forget.  On Gabriele D'Annunzio's Troionfo della Moret (1894), on "Ippolita 
Sanzio, who represents obstinate sexual will-power becoming a sort of carnal 
doom" (253) ...

"On another occasion Ippolita seems no more than a brutal love-machine, like 
Swinburne's Faustine; she also is 'the pale, voracious Roman, unexcelled in 
the art of breaking the loins of men.'
   You seem a thing that hinges hold,
      A love-machine
   With clockwork joints of supple gold--
      No more, Faustine." (254)

Recall that it is Paola (daughter of Fausto) Maijstral with whom V.'s ivory 
comb resides after the dismantling of the Bad Priest (V., Ch. 16, Sec. i, p. 
443) ...

By the way, "Le Vice Anglais" ("Le Sadisme Anglais," as Villiers de 
l'Isle-Adam put in in an article thereupon, apparently) is what Praz 
generally refers to as algolagnia ...

>From the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, http://m-w.com/ ...

Main Entry: al·go·lag·nia
Pronunciation: "al-gO-'lag-nE-&
Function: noun
Etymology: New Latin, from Greek algos pain + lagneia lust, from lagnos 
lustful -- more at SLACK
Date: circa 1900
: a perversion (as sadism or masochism) characterized by pleasure and 
especially sexual gratification in inflicting or suffering pain              
        - al·go·lag·ni·ac /-'lag-nE-"ak/ noun

... which seems as well largely to be what Praz writes of as "the romantic 
agony."  A very useful book, indeed, as I hope to continue to show.  People 
have been wondering why I'm carrying around my library o' sadomasochism 
these days.  See also Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of 
Feminine Evil in the Fin-de-Siecle (New York: Oxford UP, 1986) ...

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