VV(18): "Does she know ...?"

[Dave Monroe]

"'Does she know here her father's gone?' Satin
wondered aloud, looking off into the street." (V., Ch.
14, Sec. i, p. 398)

"'Fled to the jungles, I understand,' Satin said." (p.
399)

Treading a little water here, as I never quite seem to
have assembled everything I want at hand to get to
what I want to get to, never seem to have the time to
assemble, get to any of it, but in the coming day or
two ... but I am curious about Melanie's broken family
here (did she break it herself? Hm ...), all that is
hinted at but never nearly explicated ...

Hanjo Berressem writes that "psychoanalysis is put
under erasure" throughout this chapter, see ...

Berressem, Hanjo.  "V.: 'V. in love.'"
   Pynchon's Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text.
   Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993.  53-81.

A slight revision of an essay first published as "'V.
in love': From the 'Other Scene' to the 'New Scene'"
in Pynchon Notes 18-19 (1986), pp. 5-28 ...  

But, quite frankly, I'm not up to even attempting to
paraphrase Berressem's Lacanian reading, and I'm
curious as to what anyone else has made of Melanie's
peculiar familial relations ("The mother had gone off
to tour Austria-Hungary.  She did not expect to see
Melanie in the foreseeable future" [p. 394]).  Some
seemingly significant background established for a
chracter who appears on all of 21 pages and for a
handful of days here ...

Having caught a bit of Howard Stern on E! last night,
can't help but think of how, nigh unto ineviatably,
every porn starlet he has on the show (and we're
talking a statistically significant sample here, I
think) had been subject to molestation and/or rape by
a family memeber or somesuch as a child ...

Oh, and ...

"The night was windless, hot." (p. 398)

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