V-ness ('am I low?)

[Steelhead]

One way to read V. (out of thousands) is as a sophisticated parody of
historiocity, a dark play on our an attempt to find the hidden dynamic (eg,
Henry Adams's the V-irgin and the Dynamo) of the 20th Century--the Century
that seems so fundamentally different than all preceeding (at least to
those living in it--though, no doubt, Herodotus, upon witnessing the
terrors of the Persian Wars, must have thought the same thing about his
century, 220 before ours).

So the angles of approach to V., the disparate peepholes on the 20th
Century, with its unique and attendent horrors, such as the concentration
camp and the atomic weapon, the apparently acclerating slide toward global
inanimacy, are myriad.

Take entropy, itself a powerful enthymeme in V. (since it's presence is
overarching but is never mentioned by Name).  Entropy is also an unspoken
metaphor for a kind of historical determinism, a one-way flow of history,
as iron-clad as anything penned by Oswald Spengler, and, therefore, I
believe, something of a joke on Pynchon's part, though admittedly a dark
one. An obsession with things entropic is a sign of a disturbed and
disjointed mind, since entropy itself has little meaning in the context of
the individual...It is a sign of spatial displacement, an exacerbated
alienation.  Entropy as metaphore is a frame, a stencil, an elastic
epistemology to be stretched out and applied to vast systems, historical,
philosophical and/or physical. Inside this frame, the individual perceives
itself as a victim of unalterable historical forces, in this case, forces
of inevitable annhilation. (Kind of like the current state of feminist
thinking, n'est pas?)

But we must assume, or at least I do, that Pynchon is no determinist. In
fact, Pynchon seems to be the utlimate in-determinist, which does not carry
with the a-morality of "a relativist."  Indeterminism may well be the
post-Modern dilemma.  It certainly is Herbert's and Benny's--though in
uniquely different ways.  For me, one of the things V. is "about" is the
failure of historical determinism to relate to everyday reality, the
failure to make things "fit." That, in fact, these kinds of structural
(Toynbee), deterministic (Spengler) and mechanistic (Marx) views of history
end up working as Plots against the People (read Preterite etc.), as
Frame-Ups. On the other hand, and here's the catch, such holistic narrative
structures also may be quite necessary to navigate the icy, flesh-stripping
shoals of post-Modern life.

So Bonnie is quite right to focus on the role of myth in V., on the faces
and fate of the fertility goddess, the mother of consciousness, the primal
muse of poetry (according to Robt. Graves), the progeniture of a certain
kind of history. For She was certainly an obsession of a string of
historical determinists starting with Freud, through Jung, Frazier,
Northrup Frye, to neo-Freudians like Lacan and neo-Jungians such as James
Hillman.

Here is James Frazier (1923, and another determinist--a despicable racist)
on Aphrodite/Astarte:  It is possible that a native goddess of fertility
was worshipped on the spot [ie, Aphrodite's Sanctuary at Paphos on Cyprus]
before the arrival of the Phoenicians, and that the newcomers identified
her with their own Baalath or Astarte, whom she may have resembled.  If two
deities were thus fused into one, we may suppose that they were both
varieties of that great goddess of motherhood and fertility whose worship
appears to have been spread all over Western Asia from a very early time.
The supposition is confirmed as well by the archaic shape of her image as
by the licentious character of her rites; for both that shape and those
rites were shared by her with other Asiatic dieties.  Her image was simply
a white cone or pyramid.  In like manner, a cone was the emblem of Astarte
at Byblus....Conical stones, which apparently served as idols, have also
been found...in the Phoenician temples of Malta; and cones of sandstone
came to light at the shrine of the "Mistress of Torquoise" among the barren
hills and frowing precipices of Sinai.  In Cyprus and Malta it appears that
before marriage all women were formerly obliged by custom to prostitute
themselves to strangers at the sanctuary of the goddess, whether she went
be the name of Aphrodite, Astarte or what not...the practice was clearly
regarded, not as an orgy of lust, but as a solemn religious duty performed
in the service of the great Mother Goddess...every woman, whether rich or
poor, had once in her life to submit to the embraces of a stranger...and to
dedicate to the goddess the wages earned by this sacrificed harlotry."

Which does, I would say, put the period on the "V"--if you know what I mean.

So with the onslaught of the 20th Century we encounter the Death of Myth,
its deconstruction, its comparative analysis, and cold interpretation. As
part-by-part the old ways, the archetypes of culture imbricated into
consciousness and language, are replaced by inanimate technologies,
artificial devices of power and remote sensation--the progress of V.
her/itself.

So what is V.?  Perhaps, V is an inverted A, "A" for Astarte and Aphrodite,
Artemis. The symbol for these Goddesses was a white cone or a pyramid.
Again an inverted V.

But where there are two there should be three--the third part being the
relationship, the bond, the interface, between the two.  V is a triangle
with the third part, the relationship, missing, obscured, removed,
murdered.

This were Freud comes in. Freud as updated by Lacan.  This is the landscape
of paranoiac knowledge, where the culture itself has descended (or
ascended, depending on your perspective) into a state of historical
schizophrenia, filled with strange twins, where images are manufactured
through a process of doubling, of splitting, all that.  The links between
language and reality have broken apart, have been elided, or turned
upside-down, replaced by artifacts, duplications or re-creations. Our
relationship to the "world" has been altered in a fundamental and
irredemable way. Thus, we are driven, like Stencil, by a need to restore
what is missing, realign the relationship between signs and signed, delve,
like Orpheus and his lyre or Aneas carrying his Broken Bough, into the
historical unconscious, the underworld, where everything of importance
appears in a kind of impenetrable code, with hidden messages inscriped in
the dark underflow of history, seeking the real name for that familiar but
distorted face haunting us like drowned Ophelia from the black waters of
our dreams.

And here in the Underworld we encounter "V.," again.  And again she is
split.  For in the hazy origins of myth, the Underworld (the dreamworld,
the land of the death, the unchanging) and the Underground (the earth, the
kinetic life force, the fertile soil) were linked in one Goddess,
combining, as Bonnie has suggested, both the immutable and the temporal,
death and life, fertility and decay. Now they have been spilt, they have
been placed in deadly opposition--by what force? to who's benefit?

What we have then in V. the character is an accretion of myths, a dense
layering of divergent images and symbols, where Goddesses and Gods really
do become multiple personalities, formed and re-formed as the dominant,
imperialistic culture expanded, as It consumed the Other's myths and
languages,in-corporated and recycled them for It's own purposes of
domination and suppression.

And still other myths, the subversive ones, of course, were horribly
mutated, were inverted to work against us, or were killed off entirely.  It
is a kind of mythological genocide.  In our historical warcrimes trial, our
mytho-Nuremberg, we could start right off by indicting, trying, and frying
characters such Jerome and Augustine.

You bring the matches, I'll bring the marshmellows. It'll be the beginning
of the Return of the Repressed!

Staid as always,


Steelhead