VV(18): A vision of her now ...

[Dave Monroe]

"Stencil even departed from his usual ploddings to daydream a vision of her 
now, at age seventy-six: skin radiant with the bloom of some new plastic 
[...].  And whenever she smiled or grinned in ecstacy there would gleam her 
crowning feature: Eigenvalue's precious dentures." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. ii, pp. 
411-2 [abridged])

"... 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 
Kingom of Death is served by fetish-constructions like V.'s, which represent 
a kind of infiltration." (V., Ch. 114, Sec. ii, p. 411)


Again, from Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of 
Modernity (Trans. Patrick Camiller.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994)  ...

"And there they find a beautiful woman who leaves hearts filled with sighing 
and desire, a gentle face of snow and roses wrapped in her own aura--the 
very object of love.  The master of disillusion then reveals all: her teeth 
have been artificial, her hair dyed, her face skillfully made up, and behind 
the appearances age and death are doing their work.  Everywhere in this 
street of the mighty and the beautiful, the world is upside down.  Madame 
Fashion and Madame Death
are on the prowl.  It must be turned the right side up again: to baffle all 
the frontiers of the real and unreal, belief and knowledge, world and 
theatre; to see the world from within.
   "Such is the great allegory that Quevedo deploys in one of his
Suenos: El mundo por de dentro ('The World from Within').  Such too might be 
the thoroughly Baudelairean city-allegory, woman-allegory ...." (p. 39)

And, again, see, e.g., Francisco de Quevedo, Dreams and Discourses (Trans. 
R.K. Britton.  Oakville, CT: David Brown Book Co., 1989) ...


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