VV(18): La Jarretiere

[Dave Monroe]

"'Mlle. Jarretiere'; using her stage name." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. i, p. 395)

First off, from J. Kerry Grant, A Companion to V. (Athens: U of Georgia P, 
2001) ...

"Melanie's stage name can mean a number of things.  The primary meaning is 
'garter,' but it can also mean 'picketing rope' and, according to Berressem, 
'conductor-wire' ..." (p. 173)

Was reminded of something here which I'd neglected.  From Roland Barthes, 
"Striptease," Mythologies (Trans. Annette Lavers.  New York: Hill and Wang, 
1984 [1957]) ...

"Striptease--at least Parisian striptease--is based on a contradiction: 
Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked. We may 
therefore say that we are dealing in a sense with a spectacle based on fear, 
or rather on the pretence of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than 
a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to 
evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration."

"... here, as in any mystifying spectacle, the decor, the props and the 
stereotypes intervene to contradict the initially provocative intention and 
eventually bury it in insignificance: evil is advertised the better to 
impede and exorcise it. French striptease seems to stem from what I have 
earlier called 'Operation Margarine', a mystifying device which consists in 
inoculating the public with a touch of evil, the better to plunge it 
afterwards into a permanently immune Moral Good: a few particles of 
eroticism, highlighted by the very situation on which the show is based, are 
in fact absorbed in a reassuring ritual which negates the flesh  as surely 
as the vaccine or the taboo circumscribe and control the illness or the 
crime."

[...]

"There will therefore be in striptease a whole series of coverings placed 
upon the body of the woman in proportion as she pretends to strip it bare. 
Exoticism is the first of these barriers, for it is always of a petrified 
kind which transports the body into the world of legend or romance: a 
Chinese woman ... 'Sininess' ..."

[...]

"... all aim at establishing the woman right from the start as an object in 
disguise.  The end of the striptease is then no longer to drag into the 
light a hidden depth, but to signify, through the shedding of an incongruous 
and artificial clothing, nakedness as a natural vesture of woman, which 
amounts in the end to regaining a perfectly chaste state of the flesh."

[...]

"The classic props of the music-hall, which are invariably rounded up here, 
constantly make the unveiled body more remote, and force it back into the 
all-pervading ease of a well known rite: ... the whole spectrum of adornment 
... constantly makes the living body return to the category of luxurious 
objects which surround man with a magical decor.... to shed objects as 
ritualistic as these is no longer a part of a further, genuine undressing. 
Feathers, furs and gloves go on pervading the woman with their magical 
virtue even once removed, and give her something like the enveloping memory 
of a luxurious shell, for it is a self-evident law that the whole of 
striptease is given in the very nature of the initial garment: if the latter 
is improbable, as in the case of the Chinese woman ... the nakedness which 
follows remains itself unreal, smooth and enclosed like a beautiful slippery 
object, withdrawn by its very extravagance from human use: this is the 
underlying significance of the G-String covered with diamonds or sequins 
which is the very end of striptease. This ultimate triangle, by its pure and 
geometrical shape, by its hard and shiny material, bars the way to the 
sexual parts like a sword  of purity, and definitively drives the woman back 
into a mineral world, the (precious) stone being here the irrefutable symbol 
of the absolute object, that which serves no purpose."

"Contrary to the common prejudice, the dance which accompanies the 
striptease from beginning to end is in no way an erotic element. It is 
probably quite the reverse: the faintly rhythmical undulation in this case 
exorcises the fear of immobility. Not only does it give to the show the 
alibi of Art ... but above all it constitutes the last barrier, and the most 
efficient of all: the dance, consisting of ritual gestures which have been 
seen a thousand times, acts on movements as a cosmetic, it hides nudity, and 
smothers the spectacle under a glaze of superfluous yet essential gestures, 
for the act of becoming bare is here relegated to the rank of parasitical 
operations carried out in an improbable background. Thus we see the 
professionals of striptease wrap themselves in the miraculous ease which 
constantly clothes them, makes them remote, gives them the icy indifference 
of skilful practitioners, haughtily taking refuge in the sureness of their 
technique: their science clothes them like a garment."

http://xroads.virginia.edu/g/DRBR/strip.html

http://www.cs.uwindsor.ca/units/english/projects/gibb/barstrip.htm


Cf., albeit kinda sorta in reverse ...

"She was not pretty unless she wore something.  The sight of her nude body 
repelled her.  Until she had drawn on the blond silk tights, embroidered up 
each leg with a long, slender dragon; stepped into the slippers with the cut 
stel buckles, and intricate straps which writhes up halfway to her knees.  
Nothing to restrain her breasts: she wrapped the underskirt tightly around 
her hips.  It fastened with thirty hooks and eyes from waist to thigh-top, 
leaving a fur-trimmed slit so that she could dance.  And finally, the 
kimono, translucent and dyed rainbowlike with sunbursts and concentric rings 
of cerise, amethyst, gold and jungly green." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. i, p. 397)

"Melanie knew the dance by heart, she had perfect rhythm ..." (V., Ch. 14, 
Sec. ii, p. 413)

By the way, John Dugdale, in his Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power 
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990) reads that "Norman dervish" (p. 413) 
shortly thereafter as an allusion to "the 'Norman .... Virgin' ... pursued 
by Henry Adams in his Mont-Saint-Michel & Chartres (1904, 1913)" (Dugdale p. 
97).  To continue from Pynchon ...

"Two of the male dancers, whom Itague had never left off calling Mongolized 
fairies, produced a long pole, pointed wickedly at one end." (V., Ch. 14, 
sec. ii, p. 413)

"The conception depended on Su Feng continuing her dance while impaled, all 
movement restricted to one point in space, an elevated point, a focus, a 
climax." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. ii, p. 414)

Hm ... cf. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Refelctions on Photography (Trans. 
Richard Howard.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), on the 
"punctum" in photography ...

""It is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an 
arrow, and pierces me." (p. 26)

To continue ...

"Melanie was supposed to have worn a protective metal device, a species of 
chastity belt, into which the point of the pole fit.  She had left it off." 
(V., Ch. 14, Sec. ii, p. 414)

Hm ... "Suddenly one of the automaton handmaidens seemed to run amok, 
tossing itself about the stage" (p. 413).  Premonition?  Just plain noticed 
something missing?  Hm ... anyway, have to catch up with Sam, Ch,. 16 here, 
though I still have some translations to dig up, that "Tristan-and-Iseult 
theme" (THE theme?) to comment on ...
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com