VV(18): The clock inside redux ...

[Dave Monroe]

"The clock inside the Gare du Nord read 11:17: Paris time minus five 
minutes, Belgian railway time plus four minutes, mid-Europe time minus 56 
minutes.  To Melanie, who had forgotten her traveling clock--who had 
forgotten everything--the hand might have stood anywhere." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. 
1, p. 393)

>From Hanjo Berressem, Pynchon's Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text 
(Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993), Part Two, "Textual Analyses," Ch. 4, "V.: 
V. in Love," pp. 53-81 ...

"Right away, the first sentence of the chapter ... defines Melanie in her 
first 'interpellation': her last name translates as 'the cursed hour,' a 
time that denotes both a historical and a cultural framework--for Pynchon, a 
growing decadence.  Accordingly, Melanie's exact time of arrival in Paris is 
not her time and can be extrapolated only by its relation to various 
official time-systems operating simultaneously ....  Her arrival is defined 
as an interface of various paradigms and is from the beginning colonized by 
differing forces and determinations that align her with a specific 
historical moment .... Against these geographically, culturally, and 
politically mediated times, Melanie's time, a well as she herself, is 
explicitly undefined ...."  (p. 59)

See also Hanjo Berressem, "V. in love: From the 'Other Scene' to the 'New 
Scene,'" Pynchon Notes 18-19 (1986), pp. 5-28.  Which brings us to ...
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