VV(19) Limeys and Kilroys

[Dave Monroe]

Again, here, note ...

"The foolish nose hanging over the wall was vulnerable
to all manner of indignities: fist, shrapnel, machete.
 Hinting perhaps at a precarious virility, a flirting
with castration, though ideas like this are inevitable
in a latrine-oriented (as well as Freudian)
psychology."  (V., Ch. 16, Sec. i, p. 436)

And ...

"She handed him the ivory comb.  Five crucified
Limeys--five Kilroys--stared briefly at Valletta's sky
till he pocketed it.  'Don't lose it in a poker game. 
I've had it a long time.'" (V., Ch. 16, Sec i., p.
443)

Setting aside the question of wheteher or not it is
the young Paola Maijstral who initially pockets the
comb at the disassembly of the Bad Priest ...

"'Ladies can't be priests,' replied a boy scornfully. 
He began to examine the hair.  Soon he had pulled out
an ivory comb and handed it to the little girl.  She
smiled.  Other girls gathered round her to look at the
prize." (V., Ch. 11., p. 342)

... although, as impertinent as this can be in the
Strange Case of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., one might
apply Occam's razor here and speculate, if Paola end
sup with the comb, wouldn't it be simplest if she were
the one to have received it in the first place? 
Rather than postulating some further transfer?  She
has "had it a long time," remember.  Not necessarily a
matter of Fausto Maijstral not recognizing his own
young daughter as perhaps not mentioning the fact, for
whatever reason?  Not the least of which would be that
his daughter is in the possession (a term which might
flow both ways here ...?) of an inanimate object, a
fetish, whatever, of a  seemingly sinister nature? 
This is straight out of Fausto's Confessions, no?  Or
is this somehow yet another of Stencil's
"impersonations"?  Andwhat ultimately would be the
difference here?  Though here's where that inevitable
counter-Occamian rotation begins, I suppose ... 

But it is not only interesting that Paola ends up with
the comb despite not seeming (...) to be yet another
incarnation of V., but, further, that she passes it on
to Pappy Hod?  Significance?  Neutralization?  Or ...?
 

Oops, but what I wanted to get to, is to what I posted
on this earlier ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0107&msg=94&sort=date

... because castration, dismemberment, sadism,
masochism, fetishism, rape, all sorts of sexual(ized)
violence, sexual(ized) cruelty, sex 'n' death, keep
coming up here, and continue to come up in that
Pynchonian ouevre, not in the lesat in Gravity's
Rainbow, though it's explicitly addressed here ...

"It was a variation on the Porpentine theme, the
Tristan-and-Iseult them, indeed, according to some,
the single melody, banal and exasperating, of all
Romanticism since the Middle Ages: 'the act of love
and the act of death are one.'  Dead at last, they
would be one with the inanimate universe and with each
other.  Love-play until then thus becomes an
impersonation of the inanimate, a transvesitism not
bewteen sexes but between quick and dead; human and
fetish.  The clothing each wore was incidental." (V.,
Ch. 14, Sec. ii, p. 410)

Orgasm as "little death," jouissance as the loss of
self ... 

Barthes, Roland.  The Pleasure of the Text.
   Trans. Richard Howard.  NY: Hill and Wang, 1975.

... but "banal" and, certainly, "exasperating" as it
may be, this "single melody," running from the
troubadors through opera (note evocations, for
example,  of Puccini's Madame Butterfly, e.g.
Melanie's kimono [p. 397]) through the pop music of
the time, see ...

de Rougemont, Denis.  Love in the Western World.
   Trans. M. Belgion.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,
   1956

Clement, Catherine.  Opera, or the Undoing of Women.
   Trans. Betsy Wing.  Mpls: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

Clayson, Alan.  Death Discs: An Account of Fatality
   in the Popular Song.  NY: Music Sales Corporation,
   1997.

... seems to be sung an awful lot in those Pynchonian
texts, seems perhaps to be a point of critique. 
Nationality and/or race might be incidental here, but
why "crucified" to "Kilroy" here?  From "Kilroy" to
"castration"?  Kilroy = kill roi = kill the king,
crucifixion = kill God, castration = kill the father
(e.g., Kronos) ... no, no conclusions here, not even a
tentative stab (...) at interpretation, but the same
themes, that "single melody," repeated, reverberated,
looped ad nauseum ... 

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> I guess it's all about what "could have" happened
> again, or what has kept on
> happening again in wars and political conflicts
> throughout the modern era,
> the "kilroy" image becoming a trope for the more
> general human condition of
> victimhood rather than for any specific nationality
> or race of people.

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