Stage love

[Terrance]

 Melaine is a bit like Katje, note how she moves as Katje
moves, deliberately, but she is different because  Katje has
an eye for the camera and Melaine has an eye for the mirror.
Remember that mirrors are as prominent in V. as the camera
or film is in GR. Melaine is narcissistically self-absorbed
by her own sexuality. She regards herself as an object to be
adorned and viewed and the transvestism that she practices
with V. is not between sexes, but between the quick and the
dead; human and fetish. 

Remember too,  that Mondaugen enters mirror-time in the
South-West Protectorate and that Weissman's interpretation
of the sferics during Mandaugen's scurvy illness, is
assembled  by sickness, a dead skin (ironically, Mondaugen
is brown from the scurvy) decadence, voyeurism,
transvestitism. In that Chapter V is Vera and her companion
is Weissmann. Mondaugen feels himself drawn into some
conspiracy with the Lady. When Weissmann confronts him, M
suspects that it has to do with this conspiracy, with his
own sexual fascination with the woman twice his age. What
does Weissmann, the companion say when he corners Kurt? He
asks him not about his companion Vera, but about politics.
Hitler? Never heard of Hitler? 

Vera, dressed in dancer's tights, black, leads Kurt through
a nightmare and comes through his window, stained glass of 
a Christian martyr, to tell him that a Bondel has been
murdered, that Weissmann has given her back her 1904. There
are many threads woven back to this chapter, the girl (here
is where I think textual support for Paul's insightful
comments are to be found, it is of course, Hedwig
Vogelslang, the girl that tells Kurt, "My purpose on earth
is to tantalize and  send raving the race of men."  As Kurt
drives the mechanical world, stepping in the course of
Slaves (M turns brown, and will, in the end be exhausted,
leaning on a Bondel, the whip scars singing a dialect he can
not yet understand ) she chooses Venus as partner. Also,
note the stage terminology and how the characters are often
said to be on pulleys. Even the sun, very important to both
chapters, rises as if it is staged. This two dimensional
stage, this Baedeker Catholicism is very important too. So,
for example, the chapter opens with Mondaugen being compared
with Baedeker and the Sun and "Wijik appeared in the doorway
like a two-dimensional figure jerked suddenly onstage by
hidden pulleys."   

Mondaugen waits for the sun to come up. 

The sun rose and van Wijk appeared in his doorway like a two
dimensional figure jerked suddenly onstage by hidden
pulleys...Mondaugen himself acquired motion...

The night's stage. Strike Ahab! 



History, for the civil servant, is what he wakes up to, it's
on paper on his desk, in  the "IN basket. And he is a weight
hung from the chains, forged by the System, keeping order,
time, a papered history against the chaos of the night. 

The sun is hot. The sun was nearly down.

Twilight. 

The sun set. 

Early morning, blackness, Fopple's lights blazed in the
early morning darkness. 
 
Tourism thus is supranational, like the Catholic Church, and
perhaps the most absolute communion we know on earth: for be
its members American, German, Italian, whatever, the Tour
Eiffel, Pyramids, and Campanile all evoke identical
responses from them; their Bible is clearly written and does
not admit of private interpretation; they  share the same
landscapes, suffer the same inconveniences; live by the same
pellucid time-scale. They are the Streets own. The lady V.,
one of them for so long, now suddenly found
herself excommunicated: bounced unceremoniously into the
null-time of human love, without having recognized the exact
moment as any but when  Melanie entered the side door to Le
Nerf on Porcepic's arm and time -- for a while -- ceased. 

His description of them is a well-composed and ageless
still-life of love at one of its many extremes: V. on the
pouf, watching Melaine on the bed; Melaine watching herself
in the mirror; the mirror image perhaps contemplating V.
from time to time. No movement but a minimum friction. And
yet one solution to a most ancient paradox of love:
simultaneous sovereignty yet a fusing-together. Dominance
and submissiveness didn't apply; the pattern of three was
symbiotic and mutual. V. needed her fetish, Melaine a
mirror, temporary peace, another to watch her have pleasure.
For such is the self-love of the young that a social aspect
enters in: an adolescent girl whose existence is so visual
observes in a mirror her double; the double becomes a
voyeur. Frustration at not being able to fragment herself
into an audience of enough only adds to her sexual
excitement. She needs, it seems, a real voyeur to complete
the illusion that her reflections are, in fact, the
audience...comes consummation...They are she.

As for V., she recognized--perhaps aware of her own
progression toward inanimateness--the fetish of Melanie and
the fetish of herself to be one...As all inanimate
objects...Romanticism since the Middle Ages: "the act of
love and the act of death are one...quick and dead; human
and fetish...conspiracy leveled against the animate
world...Kingdom of Death...

hmmmmm, Love in the Western World. Right, Dave? Have we got
Iseult and Tristram here? Sure we have. 

To Victoria, who  confuses her uncle and God. Her view of
God is personified and fused with that of her uncle who is
fighting skirmishes "with an aboriginal Satan out at the
antipodes of the firmament, in
the name and for the safekeeping of any Victoria. This
confusion is a symptom of "Paranoia", a delusion of
grandeur.  Victoria is a fallen RC, and her idiosyncratic
and rather peculiar religious belief is created and
sustained by moral slippage and collapse.  Not only is the
Mass inverted, now a Black Mass, the Virgin turned Dynamo,
the Church has become a Harlot. She is unable to distinguish
spirit from Eros; for Victoria, it was as if she felt that
Christ were her husband and that the marriage's physical
consummation
must be achieved through imperfect, mortal versions of
himself
it was easy enough to see where such an attitude
might lead: in Paris similarly minded ladies were attending
Black Masses,
in Italy they lived in Pre- Raphaelite splendor as the
mistresses of archbishops or cardinals. It happened that
Victoria was not so exclusive. 

Victoria's inability to make moral judgments foreshadows her
future involvement with riot, with sadism, most
importantly,  with voyeurism and  lesbianism, and of course
Murder. Victoria's lacks all religious morality but is full
of a passionate intensity that is evident  in her reasoning,
her motivation to help Godolphin. She "felt that skill or
any virtue  was a desirable and lovely thing purely for its
own
sake; and it was more effective the further divorced it was
from moral intention." 



Victoria's concern for the superficial effect or shape of
events blinds her to human significance and experience. 
Victoria's view of herself and her place in the world is
bound up in her  religiosity. So during the riots in
Florence, she "stood as still as she had at the cross roads
waiting for Evan. It was as if she saw herself embodying a
female principle, acting as a complement to all this
bursting, explosive male energy.
Inviolate and calm, she watched the spasm of wounded bodies,
the fair of  violent  death, framed and STAGED, it seemed
for her alone in this tiny square. From her hair the heads
of five crucified also looked on, no more expressive than
she.   Victoria abstracts and sexually analogizes herself to
the extreme, making herself unnatural and demoniac. She is
also fascinated by pain and destruction which mesmerizes
her.
Her egotism regards the scene as a play put on for her
alone, just like her vision of a colonial god fighting
aborigines for her security. Unable to separate the real
world from the stage, she is already becoming the voyeur who
will live on reflections and fetishism-- Her affair with
Melanie. Victoria's expressionless
response to the carnage she sees shows her to be something
of a zombie, controlled by non-human interests, who will
later use what active energy she has to increase passivity
and destructive tendencies in others (Weissmann and Fopple
gave her 1904).

Love and Death and Dirty Dreams
Love and death she never screams
love and death are still surviving on the street
and look at me
and look at you
and look
on a platter
I can't give it away on 8th avenue.