V.V. (18) "sadism, sacrilege, endogamy and homosexuality"

[jbor]

Homoeroticism in this chapter is lascivious, almost palpable.


1. Melanie

The heat and humidity of the Parisian summer reflect and accentuate
Melanie's sexual "heat", as well as the political climate, and that
ever-looming storm is a constant premonition of both her own sexual
initiation (and death) and the breakout of political unrest in the city.

Early in the chapter Melanie barely notices or cares what is happening about
her, only thinks of when she was fondled incestuously by her father, recalls
an erotically-charged dream-memory of sliding down the "great mansard roof"
of her family home, feels the tightness of her skirt and Satin's gaze at her
crotch, the itch beneath her black stocking. She is in a constant state of
heightened self-arousal, an abandoned child she is fated to become "a
wanton" perhaps (404.8). Finally, when left to herself, she dresses up in
her stage costume and takes the headless de Chiricoesque mannequin as a
bed-partner, then dreams of being a wind-up doll herself.

She is immature, sluttish, narcissistic.


2. History and V.

The essential inscrutability of history resurfaces as a theme in this
chapter.

Images of sickness, disease and decadence which permeate the sequence take
on metaphorical overtones. Melanie is putatively the "daughter" of Apollo
(394.23) and is thus linked -- perhaps ironically -- to Asclepius, who with
his staff and serpent (cf. the pole on which Su Feng is impaled, the dragons
on her silk tights?) was the Greek god of healing. The gender bending which
goes on later in Melanie's tryst with V foregrounds the allegory imo.

And in fact, Melanie does seem to have a perversely curative effect on V.,
who, for the brief time they are together at least, is "bounced
unceremoniously into the null-time of human love", and is perhaps
"excommunicated" (409.23) from the "Kingdom of Death" (411.3) which she has
come to habitually inhabit and embody.

The men debate historical cycles and the coming revolution at the theatre.
Itague speaks of the "basic rhythms of History" as a mystery: "Perhaps she
is a woman: women are a mystery to me. But her ways are at least
measurable." (405.28)

Chauvinists, not one of them notices that what they pass on the way out the
door is in fact an allegory of history:

"Outside they passed the woman, holding Melanie by the arm."

The irony is laid on here.

What the long expository passage (408-412) explicitly announces, what has
been demonstrated in the earlier chapters in Egypt, Florence and Sudwest,
what V. in fact embodies, is the insidious and all-encompassing manner in
which cultural imperialism is still manifest and is being propogated in the
twentieth century, in the shape of that apparently innocuous phenomenon,
"tourism":

     ... for as tourists bring into the world as it has evolved part of
    another, and eventually create a parallel society of their own in every
    city, so the Kingdom of Death is served by fetish-constructions like
    V.'s, which represent a kind of infiltration. (411.10)


3. Narrative self-consciousness

    If we've not already guessed, "the woman" is, again, the lady V. of
    Stencil's mad time-search. No one knew her name in Paris. (406.1 up)

That "we" is a forerunner of _GR_'s ubiquitous "you". Along with the
extracts from the Baedeker (408-9), this type of narrative
self-consciousness or reflexiveness is in fact a (proto)typical gesture of
ontological destabilisation. Something which is pretty straightforwardly
postmodernist, really . . . .

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