VV(12): Her Left Eye

[Terrance]

Dave Monroe wrote:


> --- Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe@[omitted]> wrote:
> 
> > "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)


This eye resembles the "Birth of Venus" and strengthens V's
association with the goddess.  The water in the "Birth of
Venus" is a translucent sea green with gold-flecked dark
green near the scallop shell. Though the painting does not
contain zodiacal signs, as found in V.'s clock-eye,  the
flutes of the shell number twelve and form a ring. Like the
eye, the painting is covered with minute fractures due to
aging. The eye, then, associates V. with Venus who was the
adulterous consort of Mars, just as V. is
the unseen spirit motivating and being present during riot
and war. Venus was the wife of Vulcan, the artisan. While
V.'s spirit is warlike, her body becomes progressively
artificial. The progressive change from Vera Meroving to
Veronica Manganese is perhaps indicated by the change of the
first name from the meaning "truth" to that of 
"image of truth" and the surname of the latter indicating a
rock. Not her sister's rock or the rock that is Malta, but
maybe, just maybe, the Rocket. 



Is this a Christian parable? 

Victoria does provides a lesson, even for those downright
hostile to the idea: she is incapable of differentiating the
stage, the theatre/theater and the world. Victoria confuses
her uncle and God. Her view of God is personified and fused
with that of her uncle who is fighting skirmishes "with an
aboriginal Satan out at the antipodes of the firmament, in
the name and for the safekeeping of any Victoria. This
confusion is a
symptom of "Paranoia", a delusion of grandeur.  Victoria is
a fallen RC, and her idiosyncratic and rather peculiar
religious belief is created and sustained by moral slippage
and collapse.  She is unable to distinguish spirit from
Eros; for Victoria, it was as if she felt that Christ were
her husband and that the marriage's physical consummation
must be achieved through imperfect, mortal versions of
himself
it was easy enough to see where such an attitude
might lead: in Paris similarly minded ladies were attending
Black Masses,
in Italy they lived in Pre- Raphaelite splendor as the
mistresses of
archbishops or cardinals. It happened that Victoria was not
so exclusive. 

Victoria's inability to make moral judgments foreshadows her
future involvement with riot, with sadism, most
importantly,  with voyeurism and  lesbianism, and of course
Murder. Victoria's lacks all religious morality but is full
of a passionate intensity that is evident  in her
reasoning, her motivation to help Godolphin. She "felt that
skill or any
virtue  was a desirable and lovely thing purely for its own
sake; and it was more effective the further divorced it was
from moral intention." 



Victoria's concern for the superficial effect or shape of
events blinds her to human significance and experience. 
Victoria's view of herself and her place in the world is
bound up in her  religiosity. So during the riots in
Florence, she "stood as still as she had at the cross roads
waiting for Evan. It was as if she saw herself embodying a
female principle, acting as a complement to all this
bursting, explosive male energy.
Inviolate and calm, she watched the spasm of wounded bodies,
the fair of  violent  death, framed and staged, it seemed
for her alone in this tiny square. From her hair the heads
of five crucified also looked on, no more expressive than
she.   Victoria abstracts and sexually analogizes herself to
the
extreme, making herself unnatural and demoniac. She is also
fascinated by pain and destruction which mesmerizes her.
Her egotism regards the scene as a play put on for her
alone, just like her vision of a colonial god fighting
aborigines for her security. Unable to separate the real
world from the stage, she is already becoming the voyeur
who will live on reflections and fetishism. Later we will
read of  her affair with Melanie. Victoria's expressionless
response to the carnage she sees shows her to be something
of a
zombie, controlled by non-human interests, who will later
use
what active energy she has to increase passivity and
destructive tendencies in others (Weissmann and Fopple gave
her 1904). She is therefore both destroyer and destroyed.
But now, while she is in Florence,
Godolphin describes Vheissu to Victoria as a "gaudy dream"
of "what the
Antarctic in this world is closest to-a dream of
annihilation."  Vheissu
is a dream in the same way that the Street is a dream for
Profane and Esther and so on. Godolphin looks beneath the
surface of the flashing colors of Vheissu and encounters
nothingness. Later Fausto learns about nothingness in
observing speaking with V., whom he sees in her private
epiphany which for her
can only be Death w/o Rebirth. Victoria is surprised by
Godolphin's comparing the random shapes of Vheissu with the
clouds of Yorkshire, Victoria's home. When talking to Evan,
she says she feels as if her memory had been refreshed by
Godolphin, that she had heard the same stories which Evan
had heard as a child. Evan replied that that would make them
brother and sister. Always a tricky thing in this novels of
Pynchon's. There is no other corroboration for this
relationship,  I think, but the suggestion operates to
connect Victoria and V. to more people and events and that's
seems to be the idea. She is possibly Evan's sister, and it
is as Veronica Manganese that she is again with Evan who is
her caretaker. While at Foppl's she spends time with
Godolphin. The ambiguity of these relationships is
paralleled by the ambiguity of her relationship with the
Father/Son Stencil.  The ambiguity of V.'s relationships is
partly due to her extremism and vacillation. These are noted
later, ironically,  by Mondaugen, who is himself an
extremist: It was her inability to come to rest anywhere
inside plausible extremes, her nervous, endless motion, like
the counter-crepitating of the ball along its roulette
spokes, seeking a random compartment but finally making,
having made, sense only as precisely as the dynamic
uncertainty she was, this that upset Mondaugen enough to
scowl quietly and say no, turn, leave her there to return to
his sferics.

V. is indeed "dynamic uncertainty" in any disguise and to
all observers. Stencil finds  her enigmatic: He thinks she
is involved in "something monstrous"  which has been
building between 1899
and 1913. So although she is not connected yet, to  causes
the Second World War in any definite way, she  is Party to
the Herero genocide and the Nazi power scheme. She was
present in Malta during a war "whose etiology was also her
own."  thus leading Stencil to suspect that she may have
been there during the previous war. 

Again, more than as a person, V. appears as a presence
occurring synchronously with war. The resolution of extremes
that Sidney Stencil thinks he sees resolved in V.  is
actually an illusion fostered by time. The only resolution
that took place was the joining of the two extremes through
alternation. So to turn
back now to the "good doctor's" decay, his "sense of
mission" and that tic and tock and flip and flop, his
statements about the "Love" and Hate and a retreat "to a
diametric opposite rather than any reasonable search for a
golden mean
" Yes, this man will destroy the human race.
The symbolism is indeed suggestive: the clock in
Schoenmaker's office, like V. depends on the two extremes
alternating to advance a step in time. 

A christian parable? 


I don't think so, but what does Mircea Eliade say about
ritual nudity? Slothrop? 
Not christian is it? 
What does he say about the marriage of heaven and earth? V
is married to heaven,  right? only she's not very earthly
(alien? no, not ET, but see Jonas,) and she consummates her
marriage in a gnosic bed. 

http://www.alt.hist.no/~ssando/www-ses/tekno/itgnosis.htm