VV(11): A True Windup Girl

[Dave Monroe]

"Soon there came the hurried and sexy tap of high heels in the corridor
outside.  As if magnetized his head swiveled around and he saw coming in
the door a tiny girl, lifted up to all of 5' 1" by her heels.  Oboy,
oboy, he thought: good stuff.  She was not, however, an applicant: she
belonged on the other side of the rail.  Smiling and waving hello to
everyone in her country, she clickety-clacked gracefully over to her
desk.  He could hear the quiet brush of her thighs, kissing each other
in their nylons."  (V., Ch. 8, Sec. 1., p. 216)

Does Benny recognize Rachel immediately, or only upon reading the
nameplate on her desk?  He knew that she "worked as an interviewer or
personnel girl at a downtown employment agency" (pp. 44-5).  Note, by
the way, p. 214, "Help Wanted," "Nobody wanted," "Profane wanted," "He
wanted," echoing the two-word sentence, "Rachel wanted" (p. 26), from
Benny's first encounter with her ("He met her through the MG, like
everyone else met her" [p. 23]) ...

On "the hurried and sexy tap of high heels": note the synecdoche of
"high-heel dolls" on the previous page, as well as "Her high heels hit
precise and neat each time on the X's of the grating in the middle of
the mall" (dividing those X's, as I believe jbor noted, into two V's,
that point of intersection, that crossroads, becoming a shared vertex
instead [p. 44]).  At any rate, the footwear fetish par excellence ...

Note that she is described as (inanimate) "stuff" ...

"She belonged to the other side of the rail": the proverbial,
uncrossable third rail of a subway and/or elevated train?  Note her
"clickety-clack," even that "quiet brush of her thighs" ...

"Smiling and waving hello to everyone in her country": not only "the
other side of the rail," but, perhaps, Disneyland?  The late, lamented
Great Electric Parade?  Recall those seemingly animatronic elevator
girls in Gravity's Rainbow as well.  Not to mention yr average
Homecoming Queen, or, for that matter, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy in
that motorcade, just moments before ...

"gracefully": recall Heinrich von Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater,"
his (German Romanticist) claims for the "grace" of the marionette (the
puppet, the toy, the automaton), see ...

de Man Paul.  "Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's Uber das
Marionettentheater."
    The Rhetoric of Romanticism.  New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

Kleist, Heinrich von.  "On the Marionette Theater."  Trans. Roman Paska.

    Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part I, ed. Michel Feher
et al.
    New York: Zone, 1989.  415-20.

Tiffany, Daniel.  "The Lyric Automaton."  Toy Medium: Materialism
    and Modern Lyric.  Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.

To continue ...

"Oh, oh, he thought, look at what I seem to be getting again.  Go down,
you bastard.
    "Obstinate, it would not.  The back of his neck began to grow heated
and rosy."  (ibid.)

And that's not all that's grown "heated and rosy," no?  And recall "The
Sun is hot on my neck" from Edna st. Vincent Millay's "Spring" ...

"The receptionist, a slim girl who seemed to be all tight--tight
underwear, stockings, ligaments, tendons, mouth, a true windup
woman--moved precisely among the decks, depositing applications like an
automatic card-dealing machine.  Six interviewers, he counted.  Six to
one odds she drew me.  Like Russian roulette."  (p. 217)

There is, as I've mentioned repeatedly-to-ad-nauseum here, a long
tradition of female automata, esp. in literature, not to mention other
cultural productions.  Olympia in E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman" (from
whence both Sigmund Freud's "The Uncanny" and Jacques Offenbach's
ballet, Coppelia--and cf. The Rape of the Chinese Virgins in Ch. 14, "V.
in love"), Hadaly in Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's L'eve Future (Tomorrow's
Eve), Maria in Thea von Harbou's novel, not to mention Fritz Lang's
movie (and we know at least from Gravity's Rainbow of Pynchon's
knowledge of Lang), Metropolis, and, while I can't find the passage, I
do believe Rachel is described at one point as having long (long enough
to perform the "ridiculous" maneuver of flipping it over her face) red
hair with touches of gray, a la, perhaps, The Bride of Frankenstein?
Though I believe the "receptionist" is not the interviewer, Rachel.  But
see, again ...

Miller Frank, Felicia.  The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice and the
Artificial
    in Nineteenth Century French Narrative.  Stanford, CA: Stanford UP,
1995.

As well as ...

Lathers, Marie.  The Aesthetics of Artifice: Villiers's L'Eve future.
    Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996.

Michelson, Annette.  “On the Eve of the Future: The Reasonable Facsimile

    and the Philosophical Toy,” October 29 (Summer 1984): 3-21.

And note both the gun trope ("Russian roulette") and the comparison to a
"card-dealing machine" here.  The latter reminds me of those
coin-operated carnival, fairground, Arcade fortune-telling, allegedly
tarot-card reading machines, and, again, note the longstanding
association of automata with the oracular, see "Part II: Prophecies," of
...

Connor, Steven.  Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism.
    New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

But why are Rachel's eyes--"the eyes," not "her eyes"--"both slanted the
same way" (p. 216), a "brimming slash-slash of eyes" (p. 217)?  Curious
...