VV. (10) Summary & Thoughts Part 1.

[John Bailey]

   Well, here goes. I've conflated the following Summary AND Commentary as 
there were a lot of resonances which I felt like bringing up as they occur 
in the text. I have trouble writing a straight summary, so here is where 
you'll find most of my reflections and inferences, correspondences and 
wanderings, rather than in another post. I will, hopefully, post something 
in the next day or so with a more developed and focused angle, but til then 
I think that there are enough starting points contained below from which to 
get the ol' ball rolling.

Chapter 7 Section vi opens with old Hugh Godolphin's waking in Victoria's 
room to the realisation that she has left him and locked the door behind 
her. His instincts, not unexpectedly, turning to thoughts of betrayal, he 
immediately begins to search for some means of escape, and finds Victoria's 
note lying on her dresser. We have already been informed earlier in this 
chapter that the period between her exploits in Egypt have lent to her a 
certain fascination with political intrigue and espionage, an interest which 
increasingly transforms to more direct involvement as the chapter 
progresses. We are already seeing here a very different person to the naive 
and fairly passive eighteen-year-old of Cairo; not forgetting the unique 
version of Catholicism which Victoria has developed, she is also making 
profound decisions concerning Godolphin's situation and acting on them. This 
is important. Victoria, already, is not the mysterious and unknowable V. of 
Stencil's imagination (not here, at least). Of course, informing the F.O. of 
Godolphin's whereabouts is tantamount to a betrayal, and considering the 
sympathy which has been developed for him, is arguably a lapse of judgement 
on Victoria's part. Godolphin's imagination tends towards the worst: 
"However he came out of this, he would have to resign his commission and 
live from here on a fugitive..." (183)
	Cap. Hugh forces the doors with a pair of pinking shears and heads off 
across the city, his thoughts turning to Tourism, and we find here 
articulated one of the novels most essential themes: "He wondered at this 
phenomenon of tourism: what was it drove them to Thomas Cook & Son in 
ever-increasing flocks every year..." (184). Godolphin mentions these 
tourists as only touching "the skin of each alien place", and skin is a 
vital metaphor which increases its valency as the chapter progresses. 
Tourists are "the lovers of skins", a term with much meaning for Godolphin, 
who has seen beneath the skin to the dark pulp which lies beneath all cities 
and civilisations.
	This reverie is broken by the sudden intrusion of an almost farcical chase 
instigated by a couple of mysterious patrolmen from the F.O, with Godolphin 
acknowledging the burlesque genre he has leaped back into here, a favourite 
of Pynchon's of course, and though we are let down, like Godolphin, by the 
failure of the chase to include a dash across the rooftops, we do find our 
hero bursting through a window and passing a shocked couple in flagrante.
	Hugh enters a lighted window and is reunited with his old friend Rafael 
Mantissa, who is in the act of buying a second Judas Tree as a decoy during 
the raid on the Uffizi. He begins to bring up his situation, referring to 
Vheissu, but cuts himself short and arranges to stow away after the robbery.

Section vii: Herbert Stencil, having finished his interrogation of the 
Gaucho and learnt nothing, is whittling his time away in the Foreign 
Minister's office flinging pens at a portrait of the Minister's forehead. He 
ponders the Situation as an abstract concept, having decided long ago that 
"no Situation had any objective reality: it existed only in the minds of 
those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment."(189) Looking back 
on young Stencil's outburst to Eigenvalue ("The Situation is intolerable" 
153), I get the impression that the young S. doesn't really comprehend the 
idea behind the term, but treats it like a buzzword, mantra, or symbolic 
phrase which invokes his father. Stencil Snr. knows that The Situation is a 
concept with limited use, "but it was a neat theory, and he was in love with 
it." Ah love. Something we find cropping up throughout this chapter. Is 
Sydney's love of a concept very different from Mantissa's love of a 
painting, the Gaucho's love of (upper-case F) "Freedom"or even Victoria's 
love of more sinister and shadowy concepts? Well....he seems to be a little 
more aware than some of the dangers in falling in love with an idea. 
Mantissa is brought to this revelation more forcefully after speaking with 
Hugh G, and it comes to him only when faced square with the object of his 
adoration...Anyway, Stencil makes orders to allow Evan and the Gaucho to be 
released, before we move to the two prisoners in their cell, one 
romantically hopeless, the other plotting escape (guess which). There is an 
element of comedy, considering we know of their impending release. Evan 
explains what he knows of Vheissu, though his slant concerns the way Vheissu 
became just another skin for him, having had no direct experience of it. 
Hearing of it second hand, it came to represent the divide between his 
father and himself, one of the walls which seem to arise as a son grows 
older. This relationship, as described, reminds me strongly here of Mason's 
love-hate thing with his dad, which is just as tenderly rendered...

Section viii: Ferrante, a young ne'er-do-well, goes to the instrument 
factory which is purportedly the hub of spy activities in Florence, and 
engages in a conversation with an old woman playing a mysteriously ancient 
air on a viola da gamba, and who seems to know a lot about Vheissu. 
Ferrante, fancying himself quite the master spy, is startled by her 
knowledge, which casts into doubt what he thinks he knows of the Vheissu 
file.

Section ix: Victoria stands at the intersection of Hell and Purgatory Sts, 
and we learn that her thoughts toward old Godolphin in indeed kindly and not 
treacherous, if a little perversely mystical. It seems as if she left him in 
the room to inform the F.O. of his whereabouts simply for the thrill of 
setting up a Situation - "some obvoluted sense of self-aggandizement which 
read the conforming of events to the channels she'd set out for them as 
glorious testimony to her own skill." (199)

Victoria is waiting for Evan, whom she has not formally met but is 
apparently working into some sort of scheme. They walk and converse, falling 
into a sort of game of love or courting with neither's motive readily 
available. He is intrigued by the crucifixion comb (ivory...). They weave 
through the city.

Back at the HQ of the Figli di Machiavelli (Sons of Machiavelli) a different 
mode of politics operates. The lion is succeeding the fox, and an open riot 
is being planned by a jubilant Gaucho.

Section x: Hugh Godolphin and Raf. Mantissa sit in Schiessvogel's Biergarten 
and discuss Vheissu, and the trek to the Pole. More importantly, it is here 
that we learn of the revelations which Hugh had upon reaching the pole and 
discovering one of the spider monkeys from Vheissu frozen there. His 
motivation, he says, was not that of the Tourist: he sought to delve beneath 
the skin of a place, and more that that, he sought to delve as far beneath 
as can be, to seek out the heart or core. It is no accident that P. chooses 
a Pole to represent this, for in the Antarctic Pole we see a literal Extreme 
(pole) as well as a metaphorical one. The Pole is also the summation of 
lifelessness, an empty wasteland whose exploration, Hugh realises, is in 
fact a "dream of annihilation". This is similar to that powerful principle 
underlying much of GR, ie the inevitable drive towards absolute death and 
negation which can be found in the colonial instinct, military science, the 
male domination of women, behavioural psychology, race relations....

There is a great deal of interest to be explored in this section, perhaps 
the most potent section of the chapter. I'll return to it by and by.

The section ends with a call to action, as the wheels of Mantissa and the 
Gaucho's plot begin to turn (Moffit watching amused from another table).



CONTINUES - FOLLOWING POST
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