VLVL2 (10) This kid is dangerous, 193-194

[Terrance]

"...aware at each moment of the lens gathering in her own image." VL.195

Katje has an eye for the camera and Melaine has an eye for
the mirror. 




His description of them is a well-composed and ageless
still-life of love at one of its many extremes: V. on the
pouf, watching Melaine on the bed; Melaine watching herself
in the mirror; the mirror image perhaps contemplating V.
from time to time. No movement but a minimum friction. And
yet one solution to a most ancient paradox of love:
simultaneous sovereignty yet a fusing-together. Dominance
and submissiveness didn't apply; the pattern of three was
symbiotic and mutual. V. needed her fetish, Melaine a
mirror, temporary peace, another to watch her have pleasure.
For such is the self-love of the young that a social aspect
enters in: an adolescent girl whose existence is so visual
observes in a mirror her double; the double becomes a
voyeur. Frustration at not being able to fragment herself
into an audience of enough only adds to her sexual
excitement. She needs, it seems, a real voyeur to complete
the illusion that her reflections are, in fact, the
audience...comes consummation...They are she.


Katje is aware of her roles and she is lifeless
pornography.  . "At the images she sees in the mirror Katje
also feels a cameraman's pleasure. But knows what he cannot:
that inside herself, enclosed in a soignee surface of dear
fabric and dead cells, she is corruption and ashes, she
belongs in a way none of them can guess cruelly to the
Oven
to Der Kinderofen
" GR.94  She is dead,
narcissistically enveloped by her own image, she "slides,
slips, squirms, floats, moves deliberately nowhere,
evaporates, re-forms," plays "what ever is expected of her"
she is the personality of pretense and she is all skin and
disease, mirrors and masks, narcissistic voyeur, and most
important I think, is the fact that she "knows her own
precarious thinness, her leukemia of soul and she teases
with it."   

PS Why the subjunctive at page 260 

I made you do  stuff,  bitch
and Frenesi would have felt a body long twinge of pure desire for her
already ex-partner, a preview of delicious trouble ... For DL's body,
whose rangy sweetness she loved, now was just as likely to try and hurt,
even cripple her, and who knew but what she deserved it ... 

Did DL and Frenesi fuck or not? 

Bruner: ’Narrative’ and ’paradigmatic’

Bruner differentiates between paradigmatic and narrative on a number of
dimensions. In language, the paradigmatic favors the indicative mode,
describing a world of fact, whereas the narrative uses the subjunctive
mode
to construct a point of view which is capable of hope and fear. The
paradigmatic works towards a synchronic picture where all is present at
the same time, while the narrative entails change over time,
particularly
through crisis. The paradigmatic is an explicit form of reasoning
whereas
narrative incorporates unspoken knowledge which is implied in the
telling.
Narrative differs from paradigmatic as enthymeme differs from syllogism.