VV(18): Suicide

[Aqua Lung]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> "The coroner's verdict, charitably, was death by accident.  Perhaps Melanie,
> exhausted by love, excited as at any premiere, had forgotten.  Adorned with
> so many combs, bracelets, sequins, she might have become confused in this
> fetish-world and neglected to add to herself the one inanimate object that
> would have saved her.  Itague thought it was suicide ..." (V., Ch. 14, Sec.
> ii, p. 414)
> 
> "The next day her body washed up on the beach." (V., Ch. 9, Sec. iii, p.
> 272)



Interesting to put these two together, death by water and
crucifixion. When the Lady V. attends the Black Mass, where
the RC Hosts are scattered (again, the RC sacraments defiled
in V's presence), she has with her, another girl, a little
sculptress, whose "black hair seemed to float like a drowned
corpse's" as the exhausted yellow light, filtered through
rain clouds that refuse to burst,  bathes the black church. 

Eliot! The phoenician allusion are very important in these
closing chapters. 

 
> 
> "Profane thought maybe it was tired of living." (V., Ch. 5, Sec. i, p. 111)
> 
> Cf. ...
> 
> "I doubt it was only firepower and aggrssiveness that beat the Herero during
> that 'complex and terrible' time.  I think the Hereros had as much to do
> with it as von Trotha did. [... W.P. Steenkamp, Is the South-West African
> Herero Committing Race Suicide?] attempts [...] to discount the notion,
> apparently widely-held at the time, that the Hereros were deliberately
> trying to exterminate themselves.  But I find that perfectly plausible,
> maybe not as a conscious conspiracy, but in terms of how a perhaps not
> completely Westernized people might respond." ("Letter to Thomas F. Hisrch,"
> pp. 241-2)
> 
> "... there was a tribal mind at work out here, and it had chosen to
> commit suicide." (GR, Pt. III, p. 317)
> 
> "... an evil Rocket for the World's suicide." (GR, Pt. IV, p. 727)
> 
> That last phrase always chokes me up, because, you know, one can easily
> imagine the arms race appearing as such, "maybe not as a conscious
> conspiracy," but ... but I tend to read these other suicides in allegorical,
> world-historical terms as well.  Let me know ...


Also, in accordance with the teachings of Mani, one should
not marry, not make love, not bear children, in other words,
the society should not be fruitful or multiply, but seek an
end to the succession of generations, but one must not
commit suicide, the entire human race should simply stop
re-producing. This is major theme in Pynchon's fiction: SOS
or  Sold On Suicide, the empty ones, all that sort of thing,
and it explains what happens on the Island of Malta, the
dark and the light and mixing of dark and light in GR, and a
whole lot more.  

Note that the children of Malta