V.V.(9) Vheissu

[jbor]

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>From: Michael Perez <studiovheissu at yahoo.com>
>

> This is an interesting point.  However, I think what Godolphin was
> trying to relate was that the *skin*, both literal epidermis of
> Vheissu's inhabitants and figurative cultural ambience (or whatever) of
> Vheissu itself, was inanimate and once it was stripped away the animate
> being might be revealed.  When he relates his desire to ìflay that
> tattooing to a heap of red, purple and green debris, leave the veins
> and ligaments raw and quivering and open at last to your eyes and your
> touchî [171.17-20], he still leaves some doubt, I believe that an
> animate being, hence one with what could be called soul, will be below
> the skin.  Life and soul are not the same, but I think we can assume if
> an animate being can be said to have a soul (leaving aside for a moment
> an agreeable definition of "soul"), life was prerequisite and the raw
> and quivering being would at least be evidence of life.  This might
> relate in some way to the Qlippoth idea, too.  Even when life is
> evident, the soul is still an arguable issue and one about which Hugh
> is quite uncertain.  Perhaps one of the reasons he opens up so much to
> his "mother confessor" was that she might, perhaps, illuminate the
> nature of "soul."

Like the enamel/pulp analogy which opens the chapter, any simple
animate/inanimate nexus is problematic here. Vheissu is a fabulous and
dizzying whirl of colours and surface decoration, but it and its inhabitants
and creatures are certainly "animate": the iridescent spider monkeys and
tattooed native girls are alive as "alive" can be, no question about it. The
"gaudy godawful riot of pattern and colour" in the place bedazzles and
mesmerises the hapless visitor, but the problem for Godolphin is that it is
all or only surface, or "skin". It is the overdose of "beauty" which he
can't cope with, and he wants to "flay" the woman's skin just to make sure
that she is flesh and blood and human organism like he is (just as the Mahdi
had flayed the skins of Gordon & co to prove that *they* were just flesh and
blood too, not the "superior" race that they had preened and pranced into
the Sudan as.) It was Godlophin's own "*human*" reflex to do this to her (to
torture and murder her to prove that she was no more "perfect" than he)
which *really* scared him I think.

The reason he took the surveying assignment there in the first place was to
distance himself from the horror of what he had seen in Khartoum, the
inhuman cruelties which "civilised" peoples proved capable of there; and he,
like his peers, still retained romantic notions about exotic places and
noble savages and, it seems, about the human "soul" as well. His experience
in Vheissu shattered all of these illusions, and after the failed "mission"
he sought to purge or cleanse himself of the experience by divorcing himself
from *all* human contact, by seeking out the most uninhabited and lifeless
place there is (Antarctica) and, *at the very least*, to assure himself
thereby of his own bravery or will, self-sufficiency and intestinal
fortitude (i.e. evidence of "soul") in the divine madness of a mid-winter
trek to the South Pole, only to find ...

Who are the "agents" of Vheissu if not those tourists (who are depicted
momentarily throughout the chapter) in Florence who *only* seek out the skin
of the place (like V)? It's a matter of supply and demand, surely? If
"culture" (the "soul" of a place) is reduced to mere surface decoration:
food and picturesque scenery and quaint rituals; then "humanity" (i.e. the
"soul") is also lost. Or, as the Vheissuvians seem to be taunting Godolphin,
it *was never really there in the first place*: Die Welt ist Alles was der
Fall ist.

best