Thomas Pynchon's V discussion

Ok, so a few days ago i finished reading this book and I would like to
discuss a few points, if anyone's interested.
WARNING: I intend to talk about the ending and various plot details so if you haven't read the book i suggest you avoid this thread (or at least my posts).

Here's some points id like to discuss:

-The Ending: does anyone feel like there was no closure for Stencil nor for Profane? That's probably the point of the book: Profane keeps yo-yoing and Stencil keeps searching... but still.

-does anyone find a parallel between Old Stencil's demise and the story told by the ship captain Mehemet about Mara, the sort of women patron of Malta? Maybe the parallel is also between V and Mara.

-This brings me to discuss what I consider one of the main themes of the novel: the relationship between the inanimate world and the human world; how Profane feels menaced by inanimate things. I find it as a metaphor for the development of society in the twentieth century in a way, although I can't exactly explain how at the moment. The reflections that Pynchon makes around this points are some of the highest points of the novel (tough call though: the whole novel is amazing). Anyway, i see V in the end turning to a sort of ambassador for the inanimate in the human world, as she more and more becomes inanimate by mechanizing her own body. A certain contradiction is to be found in her i feel cause she's sometimes insinuated as a reaper of death or decadence or revolution or... i don't know those three words are pretty dissimilar... but at some point in the epilogue she mentions her desire to do good to old Stencil, yet i cant help seeing her as some sort of reaper for the inanimate world. There is also the matter that she (V) is supposed to be the same as Victoria Wren and the german woman in Mondaguen's story but I find their attitudes or their personalities very different. I saw Victoria as a sort of sweet but not-so-innocent young girl; then we hear she turned to the german woman and that she flirted with old Stencil in Florence... Not to mention the affair with the ballet dancer! did her attitudes change as she became more and more mechanical, more and more an emissary for the inanimate? I don't know, maybe there's something I missed.

Anyhow, I know this was a sort of shallow assessment of the book, and there's lots to talk about, I just wanted to get some plot details out of the way and get the ball rolling.

I read this book three years ago, so I don't remember much about it but I really enjoyed it. I think my favorite Stencil story was the one where they were trying to steal a painting during a revolution? I am not sure if thats actually how it went down since I don't really remember much about V. since it had just so much going on.

I do remember reading somewhere that Profane's description at the end of the book is the same as it was in the beginning meaning that he hadn't changed at all during the course of the book which I think reiterates your thoughts that there was no closure for him.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGHHH!
NO RESPONSE!
Has anybody read this book or what?

sorry if that was rude...

I've read the book and would love to discuss it...as soon as I get my copy back! I read it about a year ago and, well, it's not as clear in my head as it used to be. It's a wonderfully bizzare and very eccentric book.

While I was reading the book, I found one site that was quite good at explaining some points. It's dedicated to all of Pynchon's works so I guess it will be useful for his other works as well as V.

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/index.html

I've read it also. But I too have lent my copy to someone. Not that I necessarily need it to discuss the book. I'll try to work up a response to your OP when I have a little more time (probably later today).

Dear Guzman,

I perused V about three years ago -- after already having taken up with Lot 49, which I read as a continuation of Pynchon's personal quest to make sense of a mystery that has troubled every inquiring literary mind for the past 400 years. On the latter book I can elaborate fully, which may help you make sense of the former, as it did for me. If you'd like to know more about Lot 49 (assuming you've read it) post and I shall reply in depth at your request.

Lisa

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The Ending: does anyone feel like there was no closure for Stencil nor for Profane? That's probably the point of the book: Profane keeps yo-yoing and Stencil keeps searching... but still.

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If you've read any other Pynchon, you'll know he rarely provides much closure. I don't, however, think they are exactly the same as before. I think by traveling to Malta with Stencil, Profane abandoned in his old friends, The Whole Sick Crew - people obsessed with the inanimate. He embraced his animate-ness and stopped his meaningless yo-yoing.

Also, I think it's interesting that Stencil and Profane's relationship forms a V. At the beginning of the novel, they are far apart, they don't even know each other. As time goes on they become closer friends until finally Stencil invites Profane to go with him to Malta - the tip of the V.

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does anyone find a parallel between Old Stencil's demise and the story told by the ship captain Mehemet about Mara, the sort of women patron of Malta? Maybe the parallel is also between V and Mara.

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I don't remember this... What page(s) is this on?

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This brings me to discuss what I consider one of the main themes of the novel: the relationship between the inanimate world and the human world; how Profane feels menaced by inanimate things. I find it as a metaphor for the development of society in the twentieth century in a way, although I can't exactly explain how at the moment. The reflections that Pynchon makes around this points are some of the highest points of the novel (tough call though: the whole novel is amazing). Anyway, i see V in the end turning to a sort of ambassador for the inanimate in the human world, as she more and more becomes inanimate by mechanizing her own body. A certain contradiction is to be found in her i feel cause she's sometimes insinuated as a reaper of death or decadence or revolution or... i don't know those three words are pretty dissimilar... but at some point in the epilogue she mentions her desire to do good to old Stencil, yet i cant help seeing her as some sort of reaper for the inanimate world. There is also the matter that she (V) is supposed to be the same as Victoria Wren and the german woman in Mondaguen's story but I find their attitudes or their personalities very different. I saw Victoria as a sort of sweet but not-so-innocent young girl; then we hear she turned to the german woman and that she flirted with old Stencil in Florence... Not to mention the affair with the ballet dancer! did her attitudes change as she became more and more mechanical, more and more an emissary for the inanimate? I don't know, maybe there's something I missed.

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I agree with much of what you say, about V. becoming more and more inanimate, being a reaper of death and whatnot. I don't know about the whole contradictory innocence seen in some of her incarnations, though. It never occurred to me as I read it (I was too busy gaping in awe at everything else). Maybe it would elucidate itself if I read the novel again.

First of all, thanks to everyone for answering

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Originally Posted by Lisa Marie

Dear Guzman,

I perused V about three years ago -- after already having taken up with Lot 49, which I read as a continuation of Pynchon's personal quest to make sense of a mystery that has troubled every inquiring literary mind for the past 400 years. On the latter book I can elaborate fully, which may help you make sense of the former, as it did for me. If you'd like to know more about Lot 49 (assuming you've read it) post and I shall reply in depth at your request.

Lisa

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I read the Crying of lot 49 last year and loved it, which was what drove me to buy V and Gravity's Rainbow.

WARNING, GIVING AWAY PART OF THE ENDING HERE:
While i feel that both stories, Lot 49 and V, have a relatively open ending, I think that what is accomplished by the author by leaving it as such is radically different, yet, although with this I probably contradict my earlier post, i feel this is in both cases the whole point of the story.

In lot 49 i think that Pynchon leaves the ending open, that is the whole mystery unsolved (although much is explained towards the end), to emphasize the inability of the individual to ponder the extent of the mystery, the feeling of uncertainty and paranoia into which Oedipa is driven while dealing with the wide and tenuous reaches of the unknown. I find the ending fantastic, along with the explanation of the novel's title which comes as an interesting surprise, at least to those of us with no experience in the stamp business...

On the other hand, i find that V's ending leaves the mystery almost solved, yet it's solved in retrospective; its solved for us, that is, but not for stencil who keeps searching, some might say eternally on the fringe of a breakthrough, although at least a bit closer. For Profane i don't think there's any change at all. I don't think, as tudwell points out, that he stops the yo-yoing, although the novel ends with an encounter for him with the opposite sex that's somewhat different from his previous experiences.

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Originally Posted by tudwell

If you've read any other Pynchon, you'll know he rarely provides much closure. I don't, however, think they are exactly the same as before. I think by traveling to Malta with Stencil, Profane abandoned in his old friends, The Whole Sick Crew - people obsessed with the inanimate. He embraced his animate-ness and stopped his meaningless yo-yoing.

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Hi there, thanks for the reply! I adressed some of this points in my previous post....

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Originally Posted by tudwell

I don't remember this... What page(s) is this on?

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It's in the epilogue, page 513 of the Harper Perennial modern classics edition.

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Originally Posted by tudwell

I agree with much of what you say, about V. becoming more and more inanimate, being a reaper of death and whatnot. I don't know about the whole contradictory innocence seen in some of her incarnations, though. It never occurred to me as I read it (I was too busy gaping in awe at everything else). Maybe it would elucidate itself if I read the novel again.

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I guess i just misjudged the Victoria Wren character, or didn't pay that close attention to her, although i don't see the progression or evolution from her to the V in the epilogue that clearly. Maybe when i reread it ...

Another thing: why does young Goldophin cry when waving goodbye to Stencial at the end?

Dear Guzman,

I’m curious to know why you find Lot 49’s conclusion “fantastic” and what meaning you glean from the novel's title. I agree there is a certain amount of ambiguity that attends the novel’s conclusion, but to date I’ve not found anyone whose suppositions on the matter remotely match my own. After having read your initial post, I recalled having printed out an article on V, which exegesis I found compelling at the time. I shall see if I can dig that up for you today and post its content in summary.

Regards,
Lisa

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Originally Posted by Lisa Marie

Dear Guzman,

I’m curious to know why you find Lot 49’s conclusion “fantastic” and what meaning you glean from the novel's title. I agree there is a certain amount of ambiguity that attends the novel’s conclusion, but to date I’ve not found anyone whose suppositions on the matter remotely match my own. After having read your initial post, I recalled having printed out an article on V, which exegesis I found compelling at the time. I shall see if I can dig that up for you today and post its content in summary.

Regards,
Lisa

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-The "fantastic" bit: sorry about that, I don't think the ending is fantastic in the fantasy sense of the word, thats just an expression that makes sense in Spanish (as it was originally thought up in my brain I guess) but doesn't make any sense in English.

-As far as I remember the meaning of the title refers to that the auctioning of a certain lot is refered to as "the crying" among the people that are in the business, hence "the crying of lot 49" refers to the auctioning of a particular lot from Inveririty's estate, that lot being, his collection of trystero stamps.
If you were searcching for a deeper meaning im afraid i cant produce one at the moment, sorry...

Señor Guzmán,

I hope this finds you well.

I took your use the word fantastic as it appears you applied it; meaning wonderful -- "fantástico!" And, I must concur, the ending to Lot 49 is mind-blowing, provided you know what you’re dealing with, which, and I do not mean this derogatorily or despairingly, you clearly do not. As evidenced in V and at least culminating in Vineland, each of Pynchon's novels shows a successive development of thought on the subject that seemingly most piques his interest, which I will here define philosophically fast and loose as a head-heart split. What you must understand about Pynchon (despite what the ivory tower’s postmodern critics would have you believe) is that he doesn’t rest on the postmodernist platform of abysmally absolute indeterminacy: to the contrary, his perennial claim is that while not everything may be categorically construed, it is reasonable and rational to claim that certain things can be known: to paraphrase Annie Dillard, it’s always instructive to ask a die-hard relativist how they raise their children.

Neither V nor “Lot 49” is “anti-detective” fiction by a long shot; even while Pynchon’s parodying that particular ‘pigeon-hole’ genre (at the peak of its powers), he’s begging the reader to read closely – and closely again– to discover how ‘real’ mysteries reveal themselves through literature, and so become (by default I suppose one might say) literary mysteries of the highest order, which, while they may not be categorically construed, yet retain reasonable and rationale claims for (conjectural) resolution. Believe me when I tell you that if you can ‘crack’ Pynchon you can read any major work of literature written since, say, the thirteenth century, with that sort of “trained eye” literary/artistic expertise invariably demands; as such, the doors of a “fantástico!” world (yet unbeknownst to you) will, like Alice’s, open wide to an unimaginably intriguing and, it must be said, frustrating adventure.

Pynchon’s works are not only wholly allegorical – in an absolutely (by which I mean literally) medieval sense – but within them runs the unmistakable thread of a consistent theme – the consummate literary mystery if you will, which has less to do with the radically esoteric ramblings some would ascribe him than the less assiduous, but ultimately more substantial cumulative wisdom accrued through the ages; the very sort that Swift and Pope espouse and use to renounce their detractors.

I don’t particularly enjoy Pynchon as a story-teller (though I think his language frequently poetic;some saving grace) but I do admire him as a thinker; a tantalizing tinkerer of ideas and an astute lover of seemingly obscure but immeasurably influential history. And herein lies the challenge of reading Pynchon: should you dispense with history (which aspiration, I believe, the New Critics unwittingly ushered in and which later ‘post-structuralists’’ bore to fruition) you forfeit the “rich … goodness” his novels afford and, therefore, that which literary history offers. Though Pynchon would, I’m quite confident, be satisfied if catalogued as one who “writes under hair,” as Nashe phrases it in his masque-cum-shewe “Summer’s Last Will and Testament,” Pynchon's hair is not so thick (at least in V and Lot 49) that one can’t run a good comb through it.

In any case, thank you for your honest response. I asked because I’ve spent about four years painstakingly unraveling Lot 49 (attending many infinitely interesting historical diversions along the way) and have come to the realization a new direction in literature appreciation is long overdue. On a final note, I did locate that article I mentioned in my previous post: if you’d like, I will email to you (as it’s rather lengthy) at your request. I’m new to posting on this board (and generally not too computer savvy) so I’ll leave it to you to determine when, how, and even if you’d like to read the article in question.

If should ever go back and re-read Lot 49 again and find it piques your interest, then I’ll gladly get down to the “fantástico!” nitty-gritty of it with you.

Regards,
Lisa

Thanks for the response.
I'd appreciate it if you could send me that article.

Dear Guzman,

Here's that article:


Finding V


Up to now, Pynchon supporters and detractors alike have tended to evade the question "Who or what is V.?" and have assumed it to be either purposely insoluble or simply irrelevant. It is my contention that there is a knowable, unequivocal, and essentially irrefutable answer to the question, and that far from releasing the reader from any further obligation to the work, knowing that answer heightens one's obligation to it.
Here we may begin to see the way in which Pynchon set out in V. not simply to parody forms he was in the end imitating, but rather to challenge basic assumptions and formulae of detective and historical fictions, while at the same time adhering to their most traditional demands. For example, the matter of resolution: since the author has asked the question "Who is V.?," is it not reasonable to expect, to demand even, that he answer it? Certainly most readers of detective fiction would think so. The weakness of much of the genre derives not so much from its unreasonable demands as from its often cheap solutions, wherein solving the riddle (as Robert Sklar suggests) becomes the only intelligible point to the exercise. At the same time, it strikes me that far too many critics - admirers and detractors both - have assumed rather easily that either Pynchon was not obliged to solve his own riddle or he simply wasn't up to the task. Neither point of view is correct. For not only did Pynchon satisfy the basic demand of the form (that is, answer the novel's central question) but, more remarkably, he did so in a way that instead of closing the book, opens it up to nearly infinite reflection on its vast, magnificent, and unmistakable architectural design. Stated more specifically, it is by knowing who V. is, and more specifically still, who V. has become by the "present" of the book, that the reader will be able to make sense of why things are the way they are at that time. Looked at another way, one-half of the novel (the historical episodes) is devoted to solving the riddle of V, while the other half (the contemporary episodes) is devoted to making use of that solution.
That the question of V.'s identity is answerable, and what is more, that Stencil answers it, is very easily demonstrated. In the contemporary episode that precedes the epilogue, Stencil interviews Father Avalanche. The previous night, after speaking to Fausto Maijstral, Stencil had become nearly convinced that "it did add up only to the recurrence of an initial and a few dead objects" (445). But after learning that Avalanche's predecessor on Malta had been Father Fairing, Stencil mutters to himself unequivocally: "Clinches it" (449). Later he adds: "Stencil came on Father Fairing's name once, apparently by accident. Today he came on it again, by what only could have been design" (450). Two days later Stencil is gone to Stockholm to chase what he describes as "the frayed end of another clue" (452). More importantly, he is gone as a character from the book, and we are left with an epilogue whose very title confirms that indeed the story has already reached its end. Yet, simply stated, if the question of V. were not itself also by implication resolved, then the story of V could not in any truly artistically defensible sense lay claim to having reached its ultimate conclusion. Stencil's behavior here is thus a very important clue: he has proved the answer, though by no means exhausted it, any more than proving the Copernican theory exhausted the field of astronomy. On the contrary, and as we shall see, Stencil continues his quest at the novel's end, not because he is some quaintly obsessed madman who simply refuses to accept the idea of the unanswerable, but rather because knowing that answer has given his quest all the more meaning and importance, and has given all future evidence its proper place in the overall architectural scheme.
However, before one can hope to find the correct solution to the question of V., it will be helpful to observe some of the reasons why its discovery has been so elusive. As I have stated, Pynchon set out not merely to challenge the familiar conventions of plot, characterization, resolution, and so on in detective and historical fiction, but to do so in the most artistic manner possible. That is, he chose to seek original means of presentation and resolution to well-established but largely static literary traditions. And nowhere is this more true in V. than in the very nature of the object of its quest. Most fictions organized around the idea of a quest - detective stories being among them - tend to resolve in one of three ways: the thing sought turns out to be (1) an object of some kind, such as the Holy Grail, Charles Foster Kane's sled, or a large sum of money; (2) a person (the clever murderer in the standard detective novel); or (3) a cabal of shadowy and manipulative people or institutions. (This last category, comprising what have come to be known as conspiracy tales and including everything from Rosemary's Baby to Pynchon's own Gravity's Rainbow, has surely been one of the most fecund developments in modern fiction.) But in V., Pynchon's first and still most original work of major fiction, he chose something new, and he chose to reveal it in a most original and demanding way.
Certainly at the time Pynchon was writing V., no formula in the detective genre had gone more adamantly unchallenged than the manner in which evidence was revealed to its readers. All evidence would lead to, and ultimately be validated or invalidated by, a so-called smoking gun. Indeed, no single phrase or idea has more clearly come out of the tradition of the detective story and taken its place in everyday speech than that of the smoking gun. But how often in life does smoking-gun evidence actually appear to prove a thing is so? Or for that matter, how often does the lack of such evidence, depending on the quality and quantity of other existing evidence, dissuade intelligent observers of a thing's unqualified veracity? At what point, for instance, in the history of astronomy (Copernicus? Tycho Brahe? Kepler? Galileo? Newton?) did proof of the heliocentric view of the solar system become little more than a formal rubber stamp of what was already understood to be true? It was, in fact, considerably after Newton's time that telescopes were developed accurate enough to measure the minute changes in the positions of nearby stars, a desideratum to proving that the earth moved around the sun. Yet by the time that proof came, no educated person, let alone scientist, imagined it would be otherwise. When, in other words, did the circumstantial evidence so overwhelm as to become essentially irrefutable? Such is usually the way in science. Is it surprising, then, to think that a writer whose scientific background has so often been observed and commented on should have adhered to and found literary inspiration in an aspect of that background so basic to it? Nevertheless, readers have apparently been so bound by the convention of the detective form that they remain willing to assume that the lack of smoking-gun evidence means that no certain answer can really exist. The only thing missing from the solution to V.'s central mystery. is the smoking gun. However, despite this lack, Stencil knows he has solved the mystery of V., and Pynchon seals the fact by ending the story proper and adding an epilogue. Thus it is important to recognize what kind of evidence Pynchon intends his readers to seek, and on what basis they can, like Stencil, hope to solve the mystery.
One other important reason exists why the answer has been so elusive, and that reason is more demanding and original still. When one looks at modern literature's other most difficult and demanding works, say Gravity Rainbow or Joyce's Ulysses, one finds a vast body of scholarship devoted to mining their most obscure veins. In his book about Pynchon's work, Tony Tanner writes:
It is worth noting that [V.] is not a difficult book to read in the way that Joyce's major works, for example, initially are. Each of the fifteen [sic] chapters and the epilogue can be read in what might be called a traditional way. What is confusing initially is the connection between the chapters. (42)
By this he means, I take it, that no annotated version seems necessary to ease the reader through a maze of uncommon vocabulary, little-known references, forgotten quotations, and the like. What is interesting, however, about those works, for all their initial difficulties, is how conventional in one sense they really are: how little, if any, outside knowledge is ever actually required to appreciate the stories they tell or to resolve the dramatic mysteries they evoke. As in most traditional works of fiction, one need only be a patient reader, willing to wait until the answer is supplied by the text. And this is where V. asserts itself most audaciously. For in V., many of the crucial references merely point the way; like Stencil, readers must be willing to do their own legwork or, like Benny Profane (who, I submit, would be doomed to failure in any story he might appear), risk wandering futilely through the novel's landscape. Indeed, perhaps no novel rewards its reader more thoroughly for being willing to bring to bear upon it knowledge that can only be gotten outside of it. At the same time I would hasten to add that that knowledge is never really far to seek and is always very specifically pointed to by the text.
Well then, how and where should one begin? Quite as Tanner suggests, by seeking to remove the confusion among the chapters; that is, by placing them in chronological order and playing out, as it were, the story of the woman most closely associated with the idea of V. Presumably, the historical episodes are scattered as they are through the text so as to mimic, albeit inexactly, the order in which Stencil acquires the information they contain. The information in two of those episodes, Mondaugen's story and the Confessions of Fausto Maijstral (and, arguably, the epilogue as well), is acquired during the course of the novel. In any case, Pynchon very helpfully sets readers along the correct path by presenting the first two of these episodes in chronological order; after that, however, readers are on their own. Therefore, I should like to present the answer to the question "Who is V.?" that can be inferred by proceeding along purely chronological lines, beginning where Pynchon began: with Henry Adams.
In his essay "V. and V-2," Tony Tanner states:
Thomas Pynchon made his intentions clear from the outset. The title of his first important short story is "Entropy" and it contains specific references to Henry Adams. Whereas some novelists would prefer to cover the philosophical tracks which gave decisive shaping hints for their novels, Pynchon puts those tracks on the surface of his writing. (16)
And so he does. While Thomas Pynchon, philosopher, interests me not at all, insofar as his extraliterary interests "gave decisive shaping hints" about the architecture of his fiction, the tracks interest me very much indeed. For in tile end it is not what Pynchon may have gleaned of Adams's philosophy that gave rise to his astonishing first novel so much as what was suggested to him in terms of fresh literary possibilities. As many critics have realized, it is the chapter entitled "The Dynamo and the Virgin" from The Education of Henry Adams that the novel expects us either to know or be willing to familiarize ourselves with. What Adams muses upon so famously there is really a very simple though fascinating idea - namely, the idea of deity as motivating force. What he noted about Gothic cathedrals, for example, was the way in which the very idea of the Virgin Mary became indistinguishable from the idea of an actual forceful deity working its will on the world, as human beings over large expanses of time and space were motivated to perform deeds that presumably they would never have performed otherwise. As Adams puts it: "All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres" (388). Earlier in the same passage he describes his awakening to this idea:
he [Adams] knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus as force, and not everywhere . . . possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles, - but otherwise one must look for force to the Goddesses of Indian Mythology. (388)
Or perhaps not so far. Just as Joyce used Homer's Odyssey as his elaborate groundplan and source of inspiration for Ulysses, so too Pynchon followed the more general groundplan suggested by Adams. Readers of Adams will be struck by how, in the above-quoted passage, Adams rather casually equates the Virgin Mary and the Roman goddess Venus. Most of us know that Venus was the Roman goddess of love adapted from the Greek goddess Aphrodite. Fewer, perhaps, know that Aphrodite was herself adapted by the Greeks from the Phoenician goddess Astarte. Pynchon knew this, although he never stated it explicitly; instead, he left it for readers to discover on their own. References to Astarte begin and end the epilogue, she being the figure head on Mehemet's doomed xebec which carries Stencil's father to his death. The fact that those references are withheld until the story's end itself constitutes an important clue, since one expects to learn something of special significance at the end of a novel organized in the manner of a detective story. And that is exactly what one learns here: the origin of V.
The New Century Handbook of Greek Mythology and Legend states the case thus:
Some say that Aphrodite was originally the Assyrian goddess Ishtar, and that her worship was brought to Paphos in Cyprus by the Phoenicians of Ascalon, who called her Astarte, and from whose temple the Paphians copied their temple. . . . Whatever the origin of her worship, the Greeks evolved the worship of Aphrodite, in all its aspects, into a purely Greek conception. The Romans, who claimed Aphrodite as their ancestress through her son Aeneas, worshipped her as Venus. (63-64)
Most reference works are not so coy about the connection between the Phoenicians and the Greeks on this point, but what is most relevant here is the historical process whereby a motive force in one culture effectively metamorphosed into a new motive force in another culture, and how neatly that phenomenon corresponded with the rise of each culture's hegemony in the Western world. Actually, the goddess whom the Phoenicians called Astarte was known by many names in the ancient Mediterranean world, but it is clearly her Phoenician incarnation that is the original for Pynchon's fictional V. The reason for this lies in the special nature of Phoenician culture. The Phoenicians were, of course, the Western world's first great explorers and colonizers. At its peak, their vast influence is believed to have extended as far as the British Isles and included, not incidentally, the island of Malta. How fitting, then, to think of the late nineteenth-century world of the British Empire into which Victoria Wren was born as returning the effect of that colonizing process so many thousands of years later. At any rate, what brought the Phoenician empire down in the end was the ascension of the Greeks, just as in time the Grecian empire would fade with the ascension of the Romans. Of course, one may object here that nowhere does the novel even mention the name of Aphrodite. But nowhere does it mention the word entropy either, yet that hasn't stopped critics from concluding that entropy is the work's central theme. Though I believe that conclusion is incorrect, what is undeniable is that there is really nothing so extraordinary about the inferential nature of the quest that animates Stencil - it is a crucial aspect of virtually all scientific, historical, and scholarly inquiry.
So if Astarte (Phoenicia) became Aphrodite (Greece), who in turn became Venus (Rome), what became of Venus? Her fate was precisely that of all the other Roman gods and goddesses: her existence was superseded by the rise of Christianity. And given the importance attached by the book to the ideas of Henry Adams, it would seem that the next link in the chain must be occupied by the Virgin Mary. Except that here one must be careful to distinguish the ideas of what was admittedly Pynchon's most important source from the highly original and complex twist he gave to them. While it is true that the Virgin forms a significant part of the next link, she is by no means the centerpiece. No doubt Pynchon diminished her for two reasons. Firstly, he needed a way to more closely fuse the end of pantheism in Rome with the rise of Christianity. The devotion to the Virgin that gave rise to, among other things, the majestic cathedrals that so fascinated Adams was really a phenomenon of the later Middle Ages - the Gothic period in architecture did not even begin until almost the thirteenth century. Secondly, and far more importantly, it was the story of Christ, not Mary, that gave rise to Christendom. However, in order to fully appreciate the significance of this latter point, once again the reader must know more than what the book makes explicit. In this case, it is something of the history of the institution that does form the next link in the chain of motive forces traced: the Roman Catholic Church.
It is hardly necessary to rehearse the specific emphasis that V. places on Roman Catholicism. What may not be so obvious to all readers is how the early Roman Church came to distinguish itself on a matter of important religions doctrine. Briefly stated, the early Christians were extremely fractious, and the chief theological question dividing them concerned the nature of Christ. Specifically, was Christ or was He not consubstantial with God the Father and thus Himself a deity? The powerful and growing faction known as Arianism held essentially that He was not. The first Council of Nicaea in 325, convened during the reign of Constantine, helped formally stem the tide of this religious heterodoxy. As Edward Gibbon put it: "The Consubstantialists, who by their success have deserved and obtained the title of Catholics, gloried in the simplicity and steadiness of the their own creed, and insulted the repeated variations of their adversaries, who were destitute of any certain rule of faith" (1: 687). Although this fundamental article of Christian faith would receive the unanimous consent of the later Greek, Oriental, and Protestant churches, it was the Latin church that, after adoption of the Nicene Creed, became most powerfully identified with establishing the doctrine that Christ was Himself a deity. Moreover, it is the Latin church that, through its nearly unbroken papal line, can be said to date directly back to the life of Christ.
All of which brings us to the woman of the historical episodes. However, before entering upon that discussion, I should like to say a few words more about V.'s Roman Catholic phase. Readers may wish to substitute "Vatican" for "Roman Catholic" with an eye on the book's title, but this initial is not so much of literal importance as it is a convenient symbol around which the larger concept has been organized. That concept, as I have already shown, has been carefully crafted from any number of sources, some of which Pynchon refers to directly and others that he didn't need to refer to since the information is generally available. Because Pynchon rejects the more obvious choice of the Virgin Mary in favor of Christ, and in particular the story of Christ as advanced by the Roman Catholic Church, it may at first be thought that the idea of V. loses consistency after its first three phases. But it does not, if properly considered. I daresay that much of the dispute concerning the rightful genders of dieties has less to do with our gender bias than with our bias for gender - that is, with our human incapacity for imagining sentient beings other than ourselves without imposing upon them some notion of gender. Yet why should we do this? Again I cite Gibbon:
The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings. (1: 382-83)
Whether or not Pynchon had actually read Gibbon, it would be difficult to find a passage more saliently attuned to the novel he has written. For not only is the idea of "Religion as she" one that the novel unquestionably seeks to invoke, but so too is the notion of a deity in human form taking up residence among a race of inferiors. In V. this happens at the transitional moment between phases, and readers are given a second glimpse of the phenomenon in the person of Victoria Wren.
Following V.'s transition through the historical episodes is thus of critical importance not only in determining what kind of motive force she has been, but ultimately what kind she has become. In this regard one of the first things we learn about Victoria Wren is that she is English Catholic, and not a member of the Church of England. The resonance of this point would seem hard to miss now, since even at the end of the nineteenth century, when the first two historical episodes take place, England was, and had been for hundreds of years, a nation whose established religion was Protestant. What is unmistakable here is that V. begins her new life as part of a diminished class that still retains, however tenuously, its old religious ties to Rome in a country that has long since formally severed them. This effect of the Protestant Reformation is only one of the causes touched on by the novel (the progress of science is certainly another) that serves to underscore how the process whereby the Catholic Church is losing its sway in the world as a motive force has long been under way. Within this context, Victoria first emerges while touring Egypt with her younger sister and their widowed father, Sir Alastair Wren. There she has a brief affair with an English spy named Goodfellow before breaking away from her family and turning up in Florence, determined to pursue a career as a dressmaker. In Florence she seduces another English spy, Stencil's father Sidney, thus raising the question of whether or not she is Stencil's mother. Once again, the novel provides only circumstantial evidence, all of which boils down to this: who ever heard of a detective novel that presents only one suspect? The standard gambit of such works is to create enough credible suspects to keep the reader guessing until the smoking gun conveniently appears to sort them out. In V. the only real question is how close the reader can push the evidence toward what in effect is the sole explanation. Surely by now one could have expected so determined and assiduous a detective as Stencil to have produced another suspect, if one existed, to explain so singular a mystery in his life.
This ostensible mystery next leads to Paris in 1913, where V., as she is for the first and only time known, appears as a wealthy patroness, apparently having succeeded as a couturiere just as strikingly as she failed as a mother. Her newest romantic liaison involves a nubile and ill-fated ballerina named Melanie in a relationship more remarkable for its voyeuristic than its lesbian nature. Melanie's bizarre death during the premier of a ballet reminiscent of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps leads V. to abandon Paris in favor of Malta, where she arrives on the eve of World War I. There she adopts the name Veronica Manganese, and there she again meets Stencil's father in 1919. Viewed chronologically, this meeting between former lovers reveals a notable inversion of a device employed by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. In that work the title character first appears as a man of 20, and over the course of almost as many years, he fails to display any sign of physical change. The most memorable scene occurs when the brother of Sybil Vane (the namesake of an equally suicidal Nabokov character) threatens to murder Gray, blaming him for his sister's death 18 years earlier. Gray, however, manages to cleverly extricate himself by convincing his would-be executioner that he is too young to be the man he is accused of being. Interestingly, there is no real reason why a man in his late 30s could not look very much like he had looked at 20. By the same token, there is no reason why V. could not have so drastically changed over the almost identical span of her life that even a man who had known her intimately might have difficulty initially recognizing her. Such is the case with Stencil's father, who senses immediately that he has previously met Veronica (476), yet cannot positively identify her until hearing the sound of her voice (486). It should be noted, then, that in and of themselves, V.'s various changes (name, appearance, residence, sexual habits, and so on) amount to little more than so many curious, and indeed plausible, idiosyncrasies. But by subtly and elaborately weaving into the story this evocation of one of English literature's most famous metaphysical rules, Pynchon has helped to lay the basis for reading V.'s metamorphosis as a genuine event.
V.'s metamorphosis is taken up far less subtly in the later historical episodes through the depiction of her "obsession with bodily incorporating little bits of inert matter" (488). Actually, Stencil's father, we are told in the epilogue, had noticed this characteristic 20 years earlier: "she would never let him touch or remove" (488) a five-toothed ivory comb. Roger B. Henkle points out that a similar comb was traditionally worn by Venus (100) - information he traces through the novel's reference to Robert Graves's The White Goddess. As for her more recent incarnation, by 1919 she has added a star sapphire to her navel, as well as a glass eye which she eagerly displays to Stencil's father before pushing off from Malta for Fiume in time to be a part of that city's brief seizure by the Italian forces led by Gabriele d'Annunzio. In 1922 Vera Meroving, as she next calls herself, appears in South West Africa, where her sexuality takes a sadomasochistic turn as part of a group of besieged holdovers from the period of Germany's ruthless colonization of that country. Ultimately, in her most shadowy guise of all, V. returns to Maim, where she appears during World War II as a mysterious figure known simply as the Bad Priest. There the full extent of her obsession with replacing body parts with artificial ones is revealed when what's left of her dying body is effectively disassembled by a band of little children whose own insensitivity to suffering is of no small account. One particularly noteworthy detail here is the tattoo of the crucifixion of Christ uncovered on the bare skull after V.'s wig is cheerfully removed (342). Careful readers will remember that crucifixion was also the subject carved into her ivory comb, although in that case the victims were five British soldiers executed in 1883 during the successful Mahdist rebellion in Khartoum (167). Finally, it should be noted that all this takes place in a novel that begins, not accidentally, on Christmas Eve.
Such is the basic tale of V. as reassembled from the text and supplemented with information from appropriate sources. This tale gives rise to a series of important questions. Firstly, what does all this suggest about V.'s most recent emanation as a motive force? Secondly, what was going on in the world at the time of the putative death of the Bad Priest that Pynchon may have intended for his readers to connect with that event? Lastly, where might we find the clues in the text that will lead us to the correct answers? Clearly, V.'s metamorphosis has something to do with the idea of a human being resembling a machine, or perhaps a machine resembling a human being. As for the second question, the fact that V.'s "death" occurs against the enormous backdrop of the European theater of World War II can be very easily and confidently understood, if once again the reader is willing to follow the clues. Here the most important clue is an odd detail in the description of V. as she metamorphoses through the historical episodes. That detail is the clock mechanism in the iris of the glass eye already acquired by 1919, a mechanism that can be found in any accurate description of the chief components for what came to be known as Vergeltungswaffe Eins, or the V-1. It was, of course, Kurt Mondaugen who, after his youthful days spent in South West Africa where he met V., went on to work as part of the engineering team at Peenemunde that developed and built this so-called Vengeance Weapon. This weapon, by use of a magnetic compass and a clock mechanism, was able to fly without the aid of a pilot over a preset distance of up to 150 miles before diving toward its target. By locking the missile's elevators and diving it into the ground, the clock mechanism effectively replaced the need for a pilot's eyes.
The actual German scientists who developed and built the V-1 and its even more sophisticated counterpart, the V-2, had the technical problem before them of finding the means of guiding an aircraft accurately over great distances without a pilot. Their solution, in effect, was to build into the machine as many characteristics of a pilot as were required to accomplish the task. The 1969 World Book Encyclopedia article on guided missiles (source of the above-cited information pertaining to the V-1's clock mechanism, readily available to any reader who would seek such information) begins with the following illustrative paragraph:
Imagine a streamlined tube with stubby wings shorter than your arms. Put in an electronic brain so it can follow orders and solve problems for itself. Give it electronic eyes to see its target. Fill its nose with explosives. Add a rocket or jet engine that can send it racing through the sky without a pilot aboard at a speed of more than 9,200 miles an hour. This is a guided missile. (Good)
One might perhaps have also mentioned its metal skin and sensitivity - to radio waves. Because although the Vol was not as complex as the object described above, the point is that it can very plausibly be seen as marking a seminal moment in human history - the moment when a machine became an object imbued with anthropomorphic qualities on a massive scale.
Pursuing the case a bit further, it would seem no coincidence that V. first exhibits in 1919 what turns out to be the most compelling piece of circumstantial evidence regarding her epigenesis, given the significance of that year in the history of rocket science. For that was the landmark year in which Robert H. Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, published the treatise "A Method for Reaching Extreme Altitudes," which laid the foundation for the German V-weapon program. Similarly, it is probably no accident that Pynchon had Fausto Maijstral (the last person to see V. alive) and his fellow aspiring poets dub themselves "the Generation of '37," since the same appellation might just as readily be applied to Kurt Mondaugen and his fellow engineers at Peenemunde who first began working at the huge missile research center built there that same year (Klee 22). Such connections abound in V., and it is one of the book's virtues that it painstakingly seeks to reward the reader's curiosity in this way. At the same time, remember that no single piece of evidence proves anything; rather, it is in piecing more and more evidence together, as Stencil does, that what begins as a working hypothesis eventually becomes a persuasive answer that is never completely exhausted - V. is, after all, an ongoing phenomenon.
The following diagram presents an outline of V.'s historical biography:
All of the events of the novel - including those of the historical episodes, since they occur entirely in the imagination of Stencil - take place at the beginning of the ascent of V.'s fifth and current phase (not to mention that five is itself neatly symbolized by the Roman numeral V). This explains why much of the evidence in the book appears somewhat sketchy, as much of what will happen in the world with greater and greater force and frequency has only begun to take shape. Similarly, the novel's treatment of V.'s past tends to provide only as much evidence as it deems necessary to project V's basic outline. For example, as V. loses power to influence human events, "she" ultimately reaches the nadir of her descent at each stage by becoming briefly and entirely human. Two of these moments are accounted for in the persons of Christ and Victoria Wren, while preceding figures who served the same function remain absent from the book. However, these "missing links" do not imply that for Stencil - - r for the novel - these figures did not exist. On the contrary, they imply that Stencil has rightly assumed their existence pari passu based on that which he has already established. Remember that Stencil has not given up his search for further evidence at the novel's end, but that evidence, while adding possible refinement to his thesis, has become supererogatory to the proof of its overall correctness.
If Pynchon intended the connection between the death of the Bad Priest and the birth of the V-1, why didn't he set that episode in a more logical location, say Germany or London? This would certainly not have been inconsistent with his plain desire to represent in his first novel as wide a range of times and places as possible. Looking at the novel this way, it seems far more strange that he should have written two historical episodes set on Malta (not to mention the contemporary episode set there) than that he should have avoided Germany and London. His reasons would seem obvious. In his introduction to A Gravity's Rainbow Companion, Steven Weisenburger writes that the "idea [for Gravity's Rainbow] had grown, parts of it during a stint in Mexico, from the writing of V." (1). If this was so, and Pynchon knew that a subsequent novel would be set mainly in Germany and London, dramatizing events surrounding the advent of the V-2, why should he risk stepping on the toes, so to speak, of that future project for the sake of a single episode in V.? The narrative breadth of V. can hardly be said to have suffered much from that choice. But given the difficulty that so many readers have had linking the death of V. on Malta with the birth of the V-1, the wisdom of that decision may be justly questioned. All literary works must, of course, be judged on the basis of what they can actually be demonstrated to have achieved, rather than by authorial intentions, which are difficult to prove and often subject to change. Richard Ellmann recounts James Joyce's subsequent misgivings about having based Ulysses so closely on the narrative of Homer: "A whim," he explained in 1937 to an amazed Nabokov (616). However, the idea that Joyce could really have composed so complex and meticulous a masterpiece had he not based it on Homer seems, to me at any rate, itself as whimsical as the idea that Pynchon could have created so specifically imaginative a work as V. by building it around so general a concept as entropy.
Regret over the failure to more closely link V.'s death and the birth of the V-1 may in fact explain Pynchon's curious remark in the introduction to Slow Learner, published in 1984, where he stated: "people think I know more about the subject of entropy than I really do" (12). Such a statement might easily be dismissed as false modesty, especially since entropy is not a particularly complicated scientific concept to grasp. I am inclined to suspect it represents a measure of frustration with the continuing reaction to V Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines entropy as "the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity." If my thesis is correct, this notion cannot be relevant to V., however relevant it may be to Pynchon's other works. For one thing, nowhere does the novel imply that V. is in anything other than her most recent phase, save perhaps in the moony speculations of Mehemet to Stencil's father in the epilogue ("The body slows down, machines wear out, planets falter and loop, sun and stars gutter and smoke, etc." [461]). For another, entropy is an all-inclusive process utterly inconsistent with the effect of V.'s powers at any time in her relatively brief history. V. did not first appear until long after the human race, let alone the universe, had come into existence. Moreover, the notion of V. as an all-consuming power is impossible to reconcile with the ingenious novel Pynchon has written. As Tony Tanner has stated: "if V. can mean everything it means nothing" ("V. and V2" 27). It is, I would argue, V's greatest achievement that it presents a mystery whose solution is expansive enough to satisfy the most expectant reader while at the same time finite enough to keep from being rendered meaningless.
If anything in V. can be said to have become meaningless, it may be the distinction between the words animate and inanimate. Indeed, it is almost as if they would be forged into some new word that could contain both ideas simultaneously. It has been thought that V single-mindedly depicts a decline in the world from the animate to the inanimate, but this view really only represents half of the novel's more complex and subtle equation. For each animate being that can be seen to have become somehow less animate, there is some inanimate object, like Benny's garrulous robot-antagonist SHROUD or Rachel Owlglass's sensuous sports car, that has become to some degree newly animate. It may be that the idea of an animate object has so quickly and thoroughly insinuated itself into the modern world that readers are less inclined to regard with surprise this half of the equation. But whatever the reason, this process as it occurs in two opposing directions at once creates the chief dramatic focus of the book's contemporary episodes.
Because many critics have so well documented the animate becoming the inanimate, I shall limit my own observations to the reverse process, focusing on two examples. The first comes from the opening chapter and involves the owner of the lively Sailor's Grave bar, Mrs. Buffo, who has had "custom beer taps installed, made of foam rubber, in the shape of large breasts" (12-13). These she employs during something called Suck Hour, in which the 250 or so sailors present are invited to suck beer from these beer spigots turned humanlike breasts. That this scene represents a reversal of the animate-to-inanimate formula is made even more interesting by the fact that so ambitious a writer should have begun his first novel with so ostensibly sophomoric a scene. No doubt Pynchon was emboldened by the knowledge that a second reading of it, in light of V.'s full implications, would dissolve concerns about puerility. The second example comes from chapter 10 and involves the jazz musician McClintic Sphere, one of whose fellow band members is rendered virtually indistinguishable from his musical instrument: "The horn wanted to finish off: he'd been tired all week as Sphere" (281). Later in the same chapter, Sphere is singing to himself, while in the background, we are told, "the natural horn was soloing" (293). Surely this is no "sterile fantasy," as Edward Mendelson has described it (6), but rather literary achievement of the highest order in a text that is nothing short of vibrant.
To be sure, there has been a certain amount of backing away from the strictly entropic view of V in recent years. As early as 1986, Robert D. Newman complained that "the apocalyptic tag most critics have attached to V. is too one-dimensional to fit Pynchon's vision" (34), although he subscribed to the equally widely held view regarding the book's central mystery that "the answer is that there is no answer" (56). David Seed shares a similar opinion about entropy - or anything else, apparently - as a strict theme; he argues that "the text is complicated so as to make a clear overview well nigh impossible" and goes further still on the question of V. itself, stating that it "mocks the reader's search for certainty over the novel's title" (116). Theodore D. Kharpertian has more recently attempted to merge the idea of entropy with its opposite:
The V. narrative and the Profane narrative constitute, then, a binary opposition; as the Profane narrative represents entropy (and ridicules its principal exponent, Profane), so the V. narrative represents the contradictory effort at negentropy (and ridicules its principal exponent, Stencil), and the two narratives coexist within the frame of the text, consequently, in ironic relation to each other. (76)
Yet, while sharing my skepticism of entropy as the central motif in V., what all of these views (and many others besides) hold most strikingly in common is their basic distrust of the text as it stands, a feeling that its evidence ipso facto can never be truly and faithfully accepted as adding up to any one thing in particular.
Nowhere has this distrust of the evidence been more fully exhibited than in response to the historical episodes, yet nowhere has the evidence been more faithfully preserved. What the historical episodes represent first and foremost is a device that allows the author to summarize the information acquired by Stencil before the opening of the novel. Thus the question becomes: how can Stencil be relied on to know everything he relates in them? It is, therefore, to a somewhat closer examination of one of them that I wish to turn in order to demonstrate just how ingeniously reliable they in fact are. Bear in mind that unlike the character in Borges's magnificent tale "The Circular Ruins," who is content to go off and create life entirely out of his own imagination and thin air, Stencil must first acquire a requisite degree of solid evidence before attempting any Stencilized version of history. Now, at one point in the episode set in Florence, we are asked to believe that old Godolphin, on the verge of being picked up for interrogation by the Italian police, manages to flee his would-be captors only to be chased melodramatically through the streets. Soon, however, he runs headlong and conveniently into his old friend Signor Mantissa, who ultimately helps him flee the city. What characterizes these scenes is what would seem to be their utter disregard for narrative plausibility. How, for instance, does this old and spent figure manage to proceed with such youthful alacrity directly into the path of the one man in a city the size of Florence willing and prepared to escort him to safety? Let us speculate for a moment on the genesis of this tale: let us suppose that all Stencil really knew for certain was that old Godolphin was being sought on such-and-such a date for questioning by agents of the British Foreign Office, including Sidney Stencil, and that he managed to escape Florence shortly thereafter in the company of Mantissa. Does it really matter in the end what specifically transpired between those two points? Well, it might, of course, if between those two points were hidden some crucial piece of information capable of undoing all the other known evidence. But that is hardly likely, or even really possible. Hence, Stencil is not engaged in producing an aesthetic event for its own sake, any more than he is engaged in pretending that nothing happened between those two points simply because he has no specific evidence to support it. What he is engaged in is the useful and necessary process of connecting the points that he does possess as efficiently as possible for the purpose of laying out, and thus more easily comprehending, the larger picture they describe. In this sense, the very lack of plausibility of these scenes becomes a function, and indeed a proof, of Stencil's restraint from taking unnecessary dramatic license in constructing them; furthermore, it helps us to remain cognizant of these episodes in the light in which they are presented and on which basis they can be truly relied: as depictions of what Stencil's knowledge has led him most safely to conclude.
Where V., and especially the contemporary episodes, may be more seriously faulted is in the level of its characterizations. As Roger Henkle has stated: "It is fair to take Pynchon to task for his failures to dramatize his themes through characterization" (107). In a way, the very premise of V conveniently provided Pynchon with a kind of alibi for this. To have created characters as rich and fully dimensional as those found in more traditionally great novels would have undercut one of the book's central themes: namely, that human beings aren't exactly what they used to be. This in turn affects the plotting, if such it may be called, since quite appropriately nothing much happens in any conventional sense. One notable exception may be the famous chapter "In which Esther gets a nose job." Although nothing happens here either in the sense of traditionally furthering the story, Pynchon's combining highly specialized knowledge with cruelly inappropriate humor ("'Should have used Hyoscin,' Trench said. 'It gives them amnesia, man."Quiet schlep,' said the doctor, scrubbing" [104]) gives the scene a vividness quite absent from most of the rest of these episodes.
Benny's indistinct and uncompelling nature as a character raises an important question: if passive Benny is more character type than character, why does he play so prominent a role in the novel? Having already discussed a number of the ways in which Pynchon devised V to avoid some of the worst cliches of detective and other forms of quest fiction, I should note how many of those ways depend on the idea of V. as the specific chain of motive forces that this essay has demonstrated her to be. Yet there is one other notable convention of the genre that Pynchon manages to sidestep, one that helps explain Benny's significant place in the work - the cliche of the red herring.
It would, of course, be inept to abandon even the most overworked cliche without substituting something that could function quite as well. (Many pretentious works presume to parody their superiors, but really only succeed in demonstrating why a cliche has become a cliche.) In order to see how V manages without the red herring that flourishes in so much detective fiction, it will be helpful to first look at an example of what might be confused with a traditional use of the device. Consider the story of Vheissu. Since it is now clear that Vheissu is not the answer to the question "Who or what is V.?" then this story would seem to have functioned to distract the reader's attention from any premature discovery of the answer to the book's central mystery. And in a sense it has. But here again, let us view the thing a little more closely and carefully. By what artistic right should the story of Vheissu have merited inclusion in a work entitled V.? I have already established that V. is not an all-inclusive phenomenon. Rather, it is like the articles in a single volume of an encyclopedia: numerous, wide-ranging, and connected by the fact that each entry begins with the common letter. However, in the case of Pynchon's novel, that letter is not the connecting point. Instead, what connects everything is the history of V. To whom, after all, does old Godolphin tell his story, with its almost mythical overtones (most obviously reminiscent of the latter sections of Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym)? Simply stated, he tells it to V., thus connecting it to her and making it a part of the biography of her existence. In this sense, it is no red herring at all. Moreover, its coincident themes not only shed greater light on the book's larger ones, but actually help to create them. What serves as the longest running "red herring" turns out to be the story of Father Fairing, which is introduced in chapter 5, but whose connection to V. is not revealed until the penultimate chapter. Appropriately, it is this final connection that effectively pushes Stencil's theory over the top and justifies his claim: "Clinches it."
Which brings us back to Benny. It is important to realize that Benny is not a victim of V.'s powers per se; he is, it must be admitted, a technological "schlemihl" (among other kinds), out of tune with the thinking and movement of the modern world. His inability to adapt to the increasingly mechanized world around him is simply the most recent and obvious development pushing him around and making him into a victim; his passive nature and character type is really much older than V. - it is as old as the human race itself. As for what can be said to more directly justify Benny's appearance in the novel, by now it should be obvious: his direct connection to V. through Stencil. Of course, this presumes that Stencil is the son of V., and as such her unwitting agent, but that is a fact the novel never challenges. Draw a straight line between two points. Call one point a mystery and the other the solution.

PYNCHON AND I
...meeting our match in cyberspace

Part 1:

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr.(8 May 1937) was born the very week, the very month, that the North American Baha'is were putting into place their first organized and systematic teaching Plan: 1937 to 1944 for the extension and consolidation of the Baha'i community in the western hemisphere. It is a Plan I have now been associated with, in the form of its many extensions after 1944, for more than 60 years. Pynchon is an American novelist, a MacArthur Fellow, a polymath, a workaholic, some say a genius. He is noted for his dense and complex novels. This prose-poem provides for me, and others with the interest, a type of synchronicity between his life and mine.

Both his fiction and nonfiction writing encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including--but not limited to---the fields of history, science, and mathematics. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.(1) Some see him as the finest postmodern writer of our time.

Pynchon is also known for being very private; very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumours about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s, although in the last several years he has become more of a public figure. Pynchon's most recent novel, his eighth, is Bleeding Edge. It was published less than one year ago, on 17 September, 2013. In that novel Pynchon may have encountered a subject that resists even his ample literary capacities.(2)

Part 2:

After graduating from high school in 1953 at the age of 16, Pynchon studied engineering physics at Cornell University. In 1953 I had just begun my 9 year baseball, hockey and football career spanning, as it did, my late childhood and adolescent life in a small town in Ontario's Golden Horseshoe. I was in grade 4 in 1953, and in love with a girl who lived several houses away who knew nothing of my love. My mother had just joined the Baha'i Faith which claimed to be the newest, the latest, of the Abrahamic religions. This Faith had been in Canada for a little more than 50 years at the time, and it had a membership of several hundred in what was a very conservative country next to what is and was, arguably, the most dynamic country in the world, the USA.

Pynchon's first published story, "The Small Rain", appeared in the Cornell Writer in May 1959, and it narrated the actual experience of one of Pynchon's friends who had served in the Army. Pynchon received his BA in the following month, in June 1959. Four months later, in the second week of October, I joined the Baha'i Faith, and watched the first episode of The Twilight Zone, an American television anthology series created by Rod Serling.
In September 1962, in the opening weeks of my traveling for the Canadian Baha'i community, a journey which was to last for the rest of my life---in Canada for a decade and then in Australia, Thomas Pynchon was employed as a technical writer at Boeing in Seattle, where he compiled safety articles for the Bomarc Service News, a support newsletter for the BOMARC surface-to-air missile deployed by the U.S. Air Force.

Part 3:

Pynchon's most celebrated novel is his third, Gravity's Rainbow, published in 1973 just as I was about to begin working at what is now the University of Tasmania as a senior tutor in education studies. I knew nothing of Thomas Pynchon, and I would not learn of him and his writing for another 40 years.

That novel's artistic value is often compared to that of James Joyce's Ulysses. Some scholars have hailed it as the greatest American post-WW2 novel, and it has similarly been described as "literally an anthology of postmodernist themes and devices". Gravity's Rainbow received the 1974 National Book Award . That same year, the Pulitzer Prize fiction panel unanimously recommended Gravity's Rainbow for the award, but the Pulitzer board vetoed the jury's recommendation, describing the novel as "unreadable", "turgid", "overwritten", and in parts "obscene".

In 1975, Pynchon declined the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1975 I was working in Melbourne Australia and teaching behavioral studies to library technician trainees among other vocationally oriented students, was the secretary of the Baha'i group of Kew, a suburb of Melbourne, and was about to enter my second marriage. I was 31.

This now famous writer is frequently cited by Americans as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Renowned American literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy. I have never been a reader of modern novels, novels written during my adult life, and so it is not surprising that Pynchon was never on my radar. But it is high time that he has arrived on my screen. Pynchon's novels have led critics to classify his work as postmodernism, high modernism and hysterical realism. Pynchon does not like to talk with reporters, and refuses the spectacle of celebrity and public appearances although, as I say above, he has recently assumed a more public profile in his New York life.

Part 4:

I first came across this novelist in 2014 just as I entered the first weeks, the first year, of my 70s. I had been retired from a 50 year student and employment life, 1949 to 1999, for 15 years and had reinvented myself as a writer and author, poet and publisher, online blogger and journalist. I have taken an interest during the years of my retirement, 1999 to 2014, in authors who become reclusive: Patrick White, Emily Dickinson, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon. It is said that while "people like Salinger hide, people like Pynchon "run." But they all create solitary characters and personae; then they disappear into their fictions. This asocial predisposition came to have a certain fascination to me since I had become more reclusive myself especially as I entered my 70s in 2014. I have been both running and and hiding in recent years, partly if not mostly, because of the medications I take for bipolar I disorder.

Pynchon is not exactly a recluse, though, and neither am I. In select company, he’s intensely social and charismatic. I, too, claim a degree of sociability, if not charisma. In spite of his famously shaming Bugs Bunny teeth, he was rarely without a girlfriend for the 30 years he spent wandering and couch-surfing before getting married in 1990 at the age of 53.1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Wikipedia, 29/8/'14, and 2Alexander Nazaryan, Thomas Pynchon Meets His Match: The Internet, Books, 9/11/'13.

All of his books are in some way
autobiographical as all of mine.
But, after a brief examination of
his life and a review of some of
his writing, I must say that he &
I are in different leagues, on very
different trajectories & universes,
cosmologies and raisons d'etre....

Our life-spans are not that much
different, although he belongs to
that silent generation & me, well,
I'm a war-baby or one of the first
baby-boomers depending on just
how one defines the generational
markers....We have, indeed, both
met our match, cyberspace, as we
head through our 70s and into our
old-age, the years after 80.....if we
last that long, eh Thomas.....eh??1

We both came of age during the
countercultural Sixties, although
you are suspicious of seriousness
and I have imbibed it with relish,
and we both center our lives on
a sweaty quest for the unspoken,
the unattainable. Thomas, don't
you think it's a Farsi matter of...
kam kam, ruz beh ruz....little by
little and day by day as they say
and as I've heard it said so many
times in my last 60+ years?????2

1 "Not only is the internet a vast, endlessly connective, suggestive, allusive medium, and ever-expanding, but it is gleefully self-referential, loving nothing so much as to talk about itself, on its own terms and turf. It is impossible to explain outside its own experience." See Alexander Nazaryan, "Thomas Pynchon Meets His Match: The Internet," Books, 9/11/'13.

2 The Baha'i community I have moved in all these years has many Persians and this phrase is a popular one.

Ron Price
28/8/'14 to 2/9/'14.