V2nd, C3

[alice wellintown]

A while back I was chasing down words, literally, Graves and
the OED:
For Herbert Stencil, V. is "ambiguously a beast of venery,
chased like the hart, hind or hare, chased like an obsolete,
or bizarre, or forbidden form of sexual delight" and I noted
that Paola is the hare chased by the Pigs.  Stencil or both
Stencils  create V., their creation of V.  as a beast of
venery coincides with her actual development both
politically and sexually. Though H suspects rightly "V.'s
natural habitat to be the state of siege", he is led astray
by his own ambivalence, he becomes  "He Who Looks For V."
and seems destined finally to turn his line of search away
from important news of V. on "the inevitable looped trail."

So with Stencil we go to Florence where 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.

see ch 14 of Adams Education

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.

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 chance, 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. has begun to show signs
of extremism, decadence, and perversity, and we have to
wonder if this will 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,
solipsistic and violent satisfaction of her  aberrant
imagination. For example, she constructs  fantasies based on
her  private interpretation of religious ritual and ritual
objects. So earlier we saw that  her peculiar view of God
combined with her knowledge of Australian politics/history
allowed her to "evolve between visits"  by her Uncle (not
Lyle) " a colonial doll's world she could play
with and within constantly: developing, exploring,
manipulating."

 Victoria provides a lesson: she
is incapable of differentiating the stage, the
theatre/theater and the world.  The alter, the mass, the
ritual of the RC Mass and the Black Mass is a distinction
Dwight Eddins draws attention to in GP. 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 (II) …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, most
importantly,  with voyeurism and  lesbianism, and of course
Murder. Victoria's lacks all religious morality but is full
of a passionate intensity that is here 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."  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. Later we will
read of  her affair with 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. She is therefore both
destroyer and destroyed. But now, 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. 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 Pynchon. 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, 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 tic and 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. Her
sister's rock perhaps or the rock of Malta? Or the Rock et?

On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 9:18 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Farina is Pooh. The stick, the wand, the oxgoad, the penis, the most
> phallic, or the horn, the
> pipe of Pan or of Ian Anderson, though that sax is a phallic axe.
>
>
> In Chapter One Part I of V. the women pursued is not V or
> any of her persona, but Paola. All the Pigs want her. Paola
> is important. I think if we focus on the men and the Vs we
> will miss this.
>
> When Pig Bodine, with a "diseased baboon fur", "a miasma of
> evil", sees the girl, the young Maltese, "the broad" he
> eventually "grabs", in the Grave of Sailors, we get this
> comment,
>
> "What was it about the prairie hare in the snow, the tiger
> in the tall grass and sunlight?"
>
> Chapter Three opens with a proliferation of Vs.
>
> "…and that now he's awakened to discover the pursuit of V.
> was merely a scholarly quest after all, an adventure of the
> mind, in the tradition of The Golden Bough or The White
> Goddess."
>
> These two books are used as parodic material, as is De
> Rougemont's Love In The Western World-- the Myth of Love
> secularized, decedent, debased.
>
> Henry Adams is a different case.
>
>
> "the same simple minded literal pursuit…"
>
> That's Mr. Graves, whose pursuit of the White Goddess is
> literal, a search for words, word meanings, although Mr.
> Graves certainly is not literal in the sense of avoiding
> exaggeration, metaphor, embellishment, and perhaps most
> importantly, ambiguity.
>
> "V. ambiguously a beast of venery"
>
> Now here we get an interesting paragraph, the H---Hare,
> Hind, Hart, seems opposed to the V---Venery, Venus, Vener,
> with compressed and succinct allusions to both Golden Bough
> and White Goddess. Note how Love, sex, the hunt, see, one example,
> Frazer's GB II, page 10 for the Hare, and what Frazer describes in
> many traditions as the Corn Spirit or
> mother/baby/maiden/ and Proserpine. That Love / Death
> (telos?) again, here sex, hunt, kill, sacrifice, rape (Paola
> and Pig), and again all the whore, virgin, mother,
> stereotypes are played on.
>
> The word venery means the  Indulgence in or pursuit of
> sexual activity. 2. The act of sexual intercourse. [Middle
> English venerie, from Old French, from Medieval Latin
> veneria, from Latin venus, vener-, desire, love.
>
> It is also the act or sport of hunting; the chase. [Middle
> English venerie, from Old French, from vener, to hunt, See
> Wen.
>
> Also see Chapter Twenty of The White Goddess, Who'll hunt
> the Wren? And the Hare and so forth, the sexual hunt, also
> the battle of the male/female magicians.
>
> "Chased like the Hart"
>
> Hart: A male deer, especially a male red deer over five
> years old, but reading this novel or maybe it's my own fears
> of plastic valves,  I am inclined to think of the
> homophone-heart. Also, Red deer are sacred to both Germany
> and Ireland and North America, see Frazer on the American
> connection.
>
> Hind: A female red deer. So now we have the male and the
> female red deer.
>
> Hind can also mean a part, a part Located at or forming the
> back or rear; posterior: the behind, the ass. There are
> several scenes in the novel where revelation is awaited or
> expected or called for and so on, but what appears is but
> the posterior, the ass, the horses ass, the ass of Stencil
> and so on, ...this other side of God
> and Moses and Pynchon connects the ass-the
> digestive system to fear and paranoia and so on.
>
> Hind: is also, British, farm laborer,. a country bumpkin; a
> rustic. Reading Frazer, especially on the corn spirit and
> the hunt, we discover that the Hind becomes the clown, the
> fool in the harvesting ceremony.
>
> Hare: Any of various mammals of the family Leporidae,
> especially of the genus Lepus, similar to rabbits but having
> longer ears and legs and giving birth to active, furred
> young. And to move hurriedly, as if hunting a swift quarry.
>
> And of course the homophone hair is a human part, also plays
> to the fetish theme.
>
> "chased like obsolete, or bizarre, or forbidden form of
> sexual delight. And clownish stencil along behind her, bells
> ajingle, waving a wooden, toy oxgoad. For no one's amusement
> but his own."
>
>
> And of ours of course, since we do know, or we will,  what
> Stencil refuses here, that V's natural habitat is not the
> woods, the corn field, the spring, the autumn, the winter,
> the summer, but the "state of siege," for our amusement as
> well.
>