V-style

[Mark Robberds]

Hi
I've been list-lurking down in the southern 
hemisphere for some time now and I thought
I'd finally dive in on this V-thang.
It seems that one of the dominant, if slightly
worn, paradigms of the text is being overlooked
here. I'm referring to that old fav the animate/
inanimate dualism.  On this matter you rilly can't
go past Alec McHoul and David Wills, Writing Pynchon,
and I'm not just plugging the homegrown product either.
To grossly simplify their argument: V deals with a 
crisis in western thought, manifsted in the characters
Profane and Stencil. Profane fears that the inanimate
is encroaching upon humanist subjectivity, Stencil,
that random events are usurping linear history. In both 
cases a  materially flat style, one which abandons
animation in favour of bare mechanics, would seem to 
fit the thematic bill.
As far as placing this style in some sort of tradition goes,
I've recently written something on V and Bataille. Like
Bataille's stuff, V can be read as a Vision of excess, a 
gesture towards that which threatens to exceed the framework
of western thought. Apart from some rilly cute correspondences
like a common interest in one-eyed bad priests, Bataille's work
(in part) also exhibits a certain flatness of style,esp Story of the 
Eye. There is also a connection in both texts between subjectivity
and vision. At times the pure energy of light threatens to extinguish
vision altogether. The objective flatness of the text becomes then
a type of fatal strategy, a removed reminder that something ain't
quite right with the whole sick crew.
Mark Robberds