VV(18): Fetiche

[Dave Monroe]

"'Come, fetiche, inside.  There's news.'" (V., Ch. 14, Sec. i, p. 395)

"The lady was absorbed in burning tiny holes with the tip of her cigarette, 
through the skirt of the young girl. [...] She was writing ma fetiche, in 
black-rimmed holes." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. i, p. 403)

"'Do you know what a fetish is?  Something of a woman which gives pleasure 
but is not a woman.  A shoe, a locket ... une jarretiere.  You are the same, 
not real but an object of pleasure.'" (V., Ch. 14, Sec. ii, p. 404)

"'Do you only lie passive then, like an object?  Of course you do.  It is 
what you are.  Une fetiche.'" (V., Ch. 14, Sec. ii, p. 406)

"The smallest realization--at any step: Cairo, Florence, Paris--that she 
fitted into a larger scheme leading eventually to her personal destruction 
and she might have shied off, come to establish eventually so many controls 
over herself that she became--to Freudian, behaviorist, man of religion, no 
matter--a purely determined organism, an automaton, constructed, only 
quaintly, of human flesh.  Or, by contrast, might have reacted against the 
above, which we have come to call Puritan, by journeying even deeper into a 
fetish-country until she became entirely and in reality--not merely as a 
love-game with any Melanie--an inanimate object of desire." (V., Ch. 14, 
Sec. ii, p. 411)


>From Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism." The Standard Edition of the Complete 
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Ed. and trans. James Strachey.  
London: Hogarth, 1953-74 [1927]), Vol. XXI, pp. 152-9 ...

"It is not true that, after the child has made his observation of the woman, 
he has preserved unaltered his belief that women have a phallus.  He has 
retained that belief, but he has also given it up. In the conflict between 
the weight of the unwelcome perception and the force of his counter-wish, a 
compromise has been reached, as is only possible under the dominance of the 
unconscious laws of thought--the primary processes.  Yes, in his mind, the 
woman has got a penis, in spite of everything; but this penis is no longer 
the same as it was before. Something else has taken its place, has been 
appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest which 
was formerly directed to its predecessor.  But this interest suffers an 
extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration has set up 
a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute.  Furthermore, an 
aversion, which is never absent in any fetishist, to the real female 
genitals remains a stigma indelible of the repression that has taken place.  
We can now see what the fetish achieves and what it is that maintains it.  
It remains as a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a 
protection against it.  It also saves the fetishist from becoming a 
homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic which makes them 
tolerable as sexual objects.  In later life, the fetishist feels that he 
enjoys yet another advantage from his substitute for a genital.  The meaning 
of the fetish s not known to other people, so the fetish is not withheld 
from him: it is easily accessible and he can readily obtain the sexual 
satisfaction attached to it.  What other men have to woo and make exertions 
for can be had by the fetishist with no trouble at all." (pp. 153-155)

http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/ffetish.html

The eroticization of the inanimate, the substitution of the partial for the 
whole, of the putatively present for the presumably absent.  Many fetishes, 
much fetishism, much fetishization in V., e.g. ...

"Profane had wondered then what it was with DaConho and that machine gun.  
Love for an object, this was new to him.  When he found out not long after 
this that the same thing was with Rachel and her MG, he had his first 
intelligence that something had been going on under the rose, maybe for 
longer and with more people that he would care to think about." (V., Ch. 1, 
Sec. iii, p. 23)

Herr Doktor Freud declared in the same paper that "Women do not fetishise," 
but they sure do in V. (though for a more clinical dissension here, see ...

Gamman, Lorraine and Merja Makinen.  Female Fetishism:
   A New Look.  New York: NYU Press, 1995.

http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/uaps/fetish.ht) ...


Rachel and her MG, Melanie and clothes ...

"She was not pretty unless she wore something.  The sight of her nude body 
repelled her." (p. 397)

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

"The psychoanalytic concept within and against which the whole chapter must 
be read is that of fetishism ....  For Freud and Lacan, fetishism is related 
to the fear of castration.  For the male, it serves to circumvent the fear 
of castration.  It 're-creates' the woman's (missing) phallus ... an absence 
that, he fantasizes, may come to be his own as well.  It thus re-creates a 
missing phallus from a material, inanimate object associated with women's 
bodies....  The fetish object is thus always a supplement and a simulation." 
(p. 59)

And there are some interesting translations from Jean Baudrillard's 
L'Echange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) here ...

"And if women are not fetishists, then this is because they apply this 
constant fetishwork to themselves, turning themselves into dolls." (HB p. 
49; JB p. 169)

"The whole contemporary history of the body is that of its demarcation ..." 
(HB p. 62; JB p. 155)

"The naked and the non-naked stand in a structural opposition an work toward 
the representation of the fetish.  As for instance to border of stocking and 
thigh [e.g., the garter, la jarretiere] ... because the naked thigh and 
metonymically the whole body have turned into the phallic image through this 
demarcation ..." (HB p. 62; JB pp. 155-6)

"The ideal body ... is that of the mannequin.  The mannequin is the model 
for this complete phallic instrumentalization of the body." (HB p. 63; JB. 
p. 168)

... since translated as Symbolic Exchange and Death by Ian Grant (Thousand 
Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995).  Also, from Jacques Lacan ...

"... it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the 
desire of the Other, that a woman will reject an essential part of 
femininity, namely, all her attributes in the masquerade.  It is for that 
which she is not that she wishes to be desired as well as loved." (HB p. 60; 
JL p. 289-90)

... though I am not sure if this pagination is from the original French ed. 
(Paris: Seuil, 1966) or the English translation (Ecrits: A Selection.  
Trans. A. Sheridan.  NY: Norton, 1977).  Sorry, just not at hand, and not 
clear in Berressem's book.  And note that Berressem's chapter here was also 
"published in Pynchon Notes 18-19 (1986): 5-28 in slightly altered form as 
'V. in love: From the "Other Scene" to the "New Scene"'" ...

In an unfortunately (so far as I know) uncompleted run of essays in the 
journal, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, William Pietz traced 
painstakingly the history of the fetish ...

"'Fetish' has always been a word of sinister pedigree.  Discursively 
promiscuous and theoretically suggestive ..." (p. 5)

"... the fetish, as an idea and a problem, and as a novel object not proper 
to any discrete society, originated in the cross-cultural spaces of the 
coast of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Of 
course, origins are never absolute.  While I argue that the fetish 
originated within a novel social formation during this period through the 
development of the pidgin word Fetisso, this word in turn has a linguistic 
and accompanying conceptual lineage that may be traced.  Fetisso derives 
from the Portuguese word feticio, which in the late Middle Ages meant 
'magical practice' or 'witchcraft' performed, often innocently, by the 
simple, ignoarant classes.  Feticio in turn derives from the Latin adjective 
facticius, which originally meant 'manufactured.'" (ibid.)

>From ...

Pietz, William.  "The Problem of the Fetish, I."
   Res 9 (Spring 1985): 5-17.

Commerce, imperialism, colonialism, witchcraft, manufacture .. and see also 
...

__________.  "The Problem of the Fetish, II."
   Res 13 (Spring 1987): 23-45.

__________.  "The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa."
   Res 16 (Autumn 1988): 105-23.

As well as ...

Apter, Emily and William Pietz, eds.  Fetishism
   as Cultural Discourse.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993.

Not to mention ...

Apter, Emily.  Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis
   and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France.
   Ithaca, NY" Cornell UP, 1991.

Which I kinda sorta forgot about, and am now going to have to dig for at 
home.  But I did find a bonus reading list here ...

http://www.echonyc.com/~janedoe/exams/examfetbib.htm

So let me know if anything's of any use ...


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