NP corybantes (a dance in three parts)

[Aqua Lung]

Why go to Florence? Where, well he learns more than Benny,
but  he learns little:
Florence only a few summers ago had seemed crowded with the
same tourists as at the turn of the century (Stencil like
Adams here) but V., whoever she was, might have been
swallowed in the airy Renaissance spaces of the city,
assumed into the fabric of any of a thousand Great
Paintings, for all Stencil was able to determine. He had
discovered, however, what was pertinent to his purpose: that
she'd been connected, though perhaps only tangentially, with
one of those grand conspiracies or foretastes of Armageddon
which seemed to have captivated all diplomatic sensibilities
in the years preceding the Great War. 


In what year did the word fascism enter the lexicon? 

V. is a conspiracy. Its particular shape governed only by
the surface accidents of history at the time. Not yet
knowing "who" or "what" V. is, Stencil's inability to
determine her identity gives her an indeterminate presence
within the city and a prodigious influence because she
appears enigmatic. She is somehow connected with conspiracy,
war, and FORTUNE (what does the Catholic church say about
Fortune), 
an entity somehow signaling, yet not fully
part of, the clash of events. Even in her first appearance
as Victoria in Florence in 1899, V. had begun to show signs
of extremism, decadence, and perversity, and we had to
wonder if her swinging to extremes would end in DEATH or
ReBirth.  

Her inability to differentiate the spiritual from the sexual
leads to what
on a philosophical level may be called a collapsed view of
the noumenal and phenomenal worlds. From this Fall, Victoria
develops  fetishistic historical/political fantasies. Her
love of the girl
is  a solipsistic and violent satisfaction of her  aberrant
imagination. She constructs  fantasies based on
her  private interpretation of Catholic religious ritual and
ritual
objects of the Catholic Mass. Her peculiar view of God
combined with her knowledge of Australian politics/history
allowed her to "evolve between visits"  by her Uncle (with
the wake hat)
 " a colonial doll's world she could play
with and within constantly: developing, exploring,
manipulating," during Mass.  Victoria is incapable of
differentiating the stage, the
theatre/theater and the world.  The alter, in a black mass,
is girls naked body, 
the Hosts (for Catholics remember, "real presence" 
transforms these to the body of Christ), an orgy,  the
mass.  Victoria confuses
her uncle and God and her view of God personified and fused
with that of her uncle fighting skirmishes "with an
aboriginal Satan out at the antipodes of the firmament, in
the name and for the safekeeping of any Victoria 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.  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, with voyeurism
and  lesbianism, with murder as a sexual turn on, with
"love" between the quick and the Dead. 
 Victoria's lacks all religious morality but is full
of a passionate intensity that is implicit in her
reason for helping 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" (this is her garden).  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-- 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. This non-human interest,
is 
the Darkness. She is therefore both destroyer and destroyed.
While she is in Florence,
Godolphin describes Vheissu to Victoria as a "gaudy dream"
of "what the
Antarctic in this world is closest to-a dream of
annihilation."  Vheissu
is a dream in the same way that the Street is a dream for
Profane and Esther and so on. Godolphin looks beneath the
surface of the flashing colors of Vheissu and encounters
nothingness. The Demiurge is named here. Later Fausto learns
about nothingness in
observing speaking with V., whom he sees in her private
epiphany which for her
can only be Death w/o Rebirth. Victoria is surprised by
Godolphin's comparing the random shapes of Vheissu with the
clouds of Yorkshire, Victoria's home. When talking to Evan,
she says she feels as if her memory had been refreshed by
Godolphin, that she had heard the same stories which Evan
had heard as a child. Evan replied that that would make them
brother and sister. Always a tricky thing in this novels of
Pynchon's. There is no other corroboration for this
relationship,  I think, but the suggestion operates to
connect Victoria and V. to more people and events and that's
seems to be the idea. She is possibly Evan's sister, and it
is as Veronica Manganese that she is again with Evan who is
her caretaker. While at Foppl's she spends time with
Godolphin. The ambiguity of these relationships is
paralleled by the ambiguity of her relationship with the
Father/Son Stencil.  The ambiguity of V.'s relationships is
partly due to her extremism and vacillation. These are noted
later, ironically,  by Mondaugen, who is himself an
extremist: It was her inability to come to rest anywhere
inside plausible extremes, her nervous, endless motion, like
the counter-crepitating of the ball along its roulette
spokes (the children of Malta's wheel) , seeking a random
compartment but finally making, having made, sense only as
precisely as the dynamic
uncertainty she was, this that upset Mondaugen enough to
scowl quietly and say no, turn, leave her there to return to
his sferics.

V. is indeed "dynamic uncertainty" in any disguise and to
all observers. Stencil finds  her enigmatic: He thinks she
is involved in "something monstrous"  which has been
building between 1899
and 1913. So although she is not connected yet, to  causes
the Second World War in any definite way, she  is Party to
the Herero genocide and the Nazi power scheme. She was
present in Malta during a war "whose etiology was also her
own."  thus leading Stencil to suspect that she may have
been there during the previous war. 

Again, more than as a person, V. appears as a presence
occurring synchronously with war. The resolution of extremes
that Sidney Stencil thinks he sees resolved in V.  is
actually an illusion fostered by time. The only resolution
that took place was the joining of the two extremes through
alternation. So to turn back now to the "good doctor's"
decay, his "sense of
mission" and that tick tock and flip and flop, his
statements about the "Love" and Hate and a retreat "to a
diametric opposite rather than any reasonable search for a
golden mean
" Yes, this man will destroy the human race.
The symbolism is indeed suggestive: the clock in
Schoenmaker's office, like V. depends on the two extremes
alternating to advance a step in time. Again, there is the
inside V.'s view, her artificial view,
her  eye. This eye resembles the "Birth of Venus" and
strengthens V. ' s association with the goddess.  The water
in the "Birth of
Venus" is a translucent sea- green with gold-flecked dark
green near the
scallop shell. Though the painting does not contain zodiacal
signs, as
found in V.'s clock-eye,  the flutes of the shell number
twelve and form a ring. Like the eye, the painting is
probably covered with minute fractures due to aging. The
eye, then, associates V. with
Venus who was the adulterous consort of Mars, just as V. is
the unseen spirit motivating and being present during riot
and war. Venus was the wife of Vulcan, the artisan. While
V.'s spirit is warlike, her body becomes progressively
artificial. The progressive change from Vera Meroving to
Veronica Manganese is perhaps indicated by the change of the
first name from the meaning "true" to that of "true image" "
and the surname of the latter indicating a rock. 

minerals symmetry? Plausible apostasy?