VV(18): Melanie l'Heuremaudit

[Dave Monroe]

"Melanie L'Heuremaudit was driven away down the rue La Fayette in a noisy 
auto-taxi.  She sat in the exact center of the seat, while behind her the 
three massive arcades and seven allegorical statues of the Gare slowly 
receded into a lowering, pre-autumn sky.  Her eyes were dead, her nose 
French: the strength there and about the chin and lips made her resemble the 
classical rendering of Liberty.  In all, the face was quite beautiful except 
for the eyes, which were the color of freezing rain.  Melanie was fifteen." 
(V., Ch. 14, Sec. i, p. 394)

First off, pardon mon lack of diacritical marks, but ... but L'Heuremaudit, 
of course, means "cursed hour," which not only foreshadows Francophonically 
her foul, frightful fate (sorry, going all Stan Lee here) at the end of Ch. 
14, not only echoes the chronometric theme with which the chapter began (and 
is echoed in turn in Gravity's Rainbow by the so-called "Radiant Hour"), but 
also perhaps picks up that aesthetic, poetic thread I've been following 
here, those allusions to early modernism, early modernists, e.g., 
Symbolists, Symbolism, that seem to pervade Pynchon's novel.  Paul 
Verlaine's, via Charles Baudelaire's, poetes maudit as a possible, even 
likely inspiration for Melanie's last name here?  See, e.g. ...

http://208.154.71.60/bcom/eb/article/5/0,5716,62065+1+60524,00.html

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sylvain.garnier/lire/baudelaire/fmal/benediction.html

http://home.carolina.rr.com/alienfamily/1.htm

Les poetes maudit would have been in the air even as Pynchon wrote V., via, 
say, the texts of Jean Genet, not to mention Jean-Paul Sartre's proposal for 
his  canonization as Saint Genet (1952), or, of course, Les poetes beat who 
Pynchon himself beatified, but also perhaps even in, say, Truman Capote's 
characterization of the murderous Perry Smith (actor maudit Robert Blake in 
the film adaptation) in his "nonfiction novel," In Cold Blood ...

"Melanie" is from the Greek root, "melan-," "black," "dark," here, 
specifically, "dark-skinned," although she does not seem to be described as 
such, her prenom lacking the Dickensian literality of her surnom.  But note 
also resonant cognates such as "melancholia" and "melange."  Eyes "the color 
of freezing rain" as the inspiration for the sky "the color of television, 
tuned to a dead channel" on the opening page of William Gibson's Neuromancer 
(1984)?  See ...

http://www.cyberpunkproject.org/lib/neuromancer/#part1

... and note as well "Her eyes were dead."   And for "the classical 
rendering of liberty," see, e.g. ...

http://192.41.13.240/artchive/d/delacroix/liberty.jpg

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/LIBERTY/lady_frm.html

http://images.virtualology.com/images/781.jpg

Reminds me, though ...

Hertz, Neil. "Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria under
   Political Pressure," Representations 4 (Fall
   1983): 27-54.

Also published as a chapter of ...

Hertz, Neil.  The End of the Line: Essays on
   Psychoanalysis and the Sublime.  New York:
   Columbia UP, 1985.

I don't have the paper on hand, but ...

Mitchell, W.J.T.  "Ekphrasis and the Other."
   Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual
   Representation.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

Which discuses Hertz's essay is conveniently online ...

"Medusa was, as Neil Hertz has shown, a popular emblem of Jacobinism and was 
often displayed ...

http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/shelley/medusa/CONTRAST.JPEG

... as a figure of 'French Liberty' in opposition to 'English Liberty,' 
personified by Athena, the mythological adversary of Medusa.  The choice of 
Medusa as a revolutionary emblem seems, in retrospect, quite overdetermined. 
To conservatives, Medusa was a perfect image of alien, subhuman 
monstrosity--dangerous, perverse, hideous, and sexually ambiguous: Medusa's 
serpentine locks made her the perfect type of the castrating, phallic woman, 
a potent and manageable emblem of the political Other. To radicals like 
Shelley, Medusa was an 'abject hero,' a victim of tyranny whose weakness, 
disfiguration, and monstrous mutilation become in themselves a kind of 
revolutionary power.  The female image of ekphrasis is not an object to be 
caressed and fondled with contemplative ambivalence like Keats's Urn, 
Stevens's Jar, or Williams's Lady, but a weapon to be wielded. (Athena's 
shield or 'aegis' is decorated with the head of Medusa, the perfect image to 
paralyze the enemy.)"

http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/shelley/medusa/mitchell.html

And on those "three massive arcades and seven allegorical statues of the 
Gare," again, see ...

http://www.paris.org/Gares/Nord/nord.html

http://rubens.anu.edu.au/htdocs/bycountry/france/paris/stations/Gare-du-Nord/

Though there are nine "allegorical statues" here ...

http://www.paris.org/Gares/Nord/gifs/gare.du.nord.facade.html

Again, any clarification would be appreciated ...


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