VV(18): No one knew her name ...

[Dave Monroe]

"If we've not already guessed, 'the woman' is, again, the lady V. of 
Stencil's mad time-search.  No one knew here name in Paris." (V., Ch. 14, 
Sec. ii, p. 406)

>From Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity 
(Trans. Patrick Camiller.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), Ch. 8, " 
Appendix:  Viennese Figures of Otherness," pp. 115-23 ...

"'The only fear is of non-being, Nothingnes, Evil; of madness, oblivion, 
discontinuity; of woman, of the double.'"

[epigraph, citing Otto Weininger, Uber die letzten Dinge]

"Discontinuity here breaks out in the form of the most radical and dangerous 
otherness--woman--and arouses the limitless fear stemmingb from self-hatred 
in which madness, the double and nothingness combine thir evil powers.  The 
feminine is thus directly indicated as a space of projections and phantasms, 
a mythical and allegorical corpus where other disclaimed differences, 
including Jewishness, take their place.  For Weininger 'the woman' and 'the 
Jew', in their similarities and differences, make up the very spirit of 
modernity....  An age, one might say, of nameless people 'without 
qualities'.   For Weininger believes that fundamentally 'women have no 
name': like Kundry in Wagner's Parsifal or Lulu in Wedekind's play, they 
simply pile up forenames shaped by male desire: Eva, Nelli, Mignin.  As 
Namenlose, they are excluded from the symbolic and are therefore 'without an 
essence', 'without identity', 'without a soul', 'non-logical'--a non-subject 
possessed by the omnipotence of its sexuality, 'amoral' and 'anti-social', 
'ignorant of the State', prisoners of a libido of evil." (p. 115)

... and see here, apparently, Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (London: 
Heinemann 1910), p. 329.  Buci-Glucksmann goes on to elaborate on Weininger 
on Jewishness here, but I thought this was a succint statement of widespread 
conceptions of femininity in romanticist, gothic, fin-de-siecle, Symbolist, 
Decadent, even Modernist, literature.  Which  raises esplicitly a question I 
beleive I've been raising implicitly here (at least, it's been an obvious 
interest of mine) since we started in on V.--in what way are these 
conceptions, constructions, what have you of femininity, if "woman," of 
women being deployed in V.?  To what extent, or, at any rate, in what 
way(s), is Pynchon reproducing such constructions?  To what extent, in what 
way(s) might he be deconstructing them?  And, Paul, thanks for bringing up 
again that Wedekind, Lulu thing, definitely an intertextual element here.  
See also ...

Praz, Mario.  The Romantic Agony.  2nd ed.  Trans. Angus
   Davidson.  New York: Oxford UP, 1951.  Cleveland: Meridian,
   1956 [1933].

Dijkstra, Bram.  Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine
   Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture.  New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Doane, Mary Ann.  Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory,
   Psychoanalysis.   New York: Routledge, 1991.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0104&msg=152&sort=date

Okay, then on to ...





And, sorry, Kai, all, neglected to grab my copy of Theodor Adorno's 
Philosophy of Modern Music (New York: Continuum, 1990), but I will get a 
translation up of that passage Kai posted ...
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