VV(18): Fetiche

[Doug Millison]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/06/14/MN39014.DTL
"The full courtroom sat in stunned silence as the recorded voice of Stayner
-- an outwardly serene man who never had been arrested previously --
unreeled a tale of sexual torture and death, going into more detail than
ever before publicly aired. [...] "It felt like I was in control for the
first time in my life," Stayner said on the tape. "


[snip V. passages selected by Dave Monroe ]

"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)

That "journeying" recalls the Captive's Tale in M&D, a story with strong
reverberations -- woman as fetish, on a journey, etc. -- from the story Dave
discusses here from V.  Obviously, this is important stuff for Pynchon, as
he comes back to it again and again in his fiction, and as he explictly
addresses, in the Slow Learner intro, the attitudes towards women displayed
in his work.


[snip good pointers and insight from Dave, thanks...]