V. as a recurring character

[LOT64 at aol.com]

Bonnie,
Looking for and thinking about the presence of V. as a letter and concept in
Pynchon is one of my favorite speculative pasttimes.  Some of the things I'll
mention I've probably read in other people's work and some I've noticed
myself.  After twenty years its hard to remember which is which, so sorry not
to give proper credit.  This might be old hat to everyone anyway.

Gravity's Rainbow is of course an inversion of V.  The rocket's flight path,
the rise upward and the moment of brennschluss at its highest point and the
fall back to earth is an upside down V.  The discussion of Benny Profane as a
human yo-yo, yo-yoing on the north- south subway lines in NY is a visual
rhyme with the letter V.  The apocheir is the opposite of brennschluss.  The
SG-00000 has 5 zeros, relating to the roman numeral V.  Benny the human yo-yo
gets a job at a subsidiary of Yoyodyne.  Yo-yo and V are of course linked by
shape.  (by the way, even though TRP worked at Boeing, couldn't Yoyodyne be
something akin to Northop{Slothrop}).  The title page of V is a made up of
smaller v's.  The Candide-like chapter headings are typeset in the shape of a
v, streetlamps recede into the night in the shape of an "assymetric V",
Sphere plays at a club called the V-Note (alluding to the famous jazz club,
 the Five Spot), every chapter has the letter V, etc....  My favorite passage
about this is "As spread thighs are to the libertine, flights of migratory bir
ds to the ornithologist, the working part of his tool bit to the production
machinist..." at the start of chapter 3.  I never fully understood this till
I left academia and started working in the machine shop supply business.
 Stencil, obsessing over the search for V,  and  Slothrop, obsessing over the
search for the V-2, are definitely linked.  I think there is a good case to
be made in viewing V, CoL49, and GR as a trilogy of sorts.  Anyway, thats
enough, I don't want to turn this into a quest or anything. (I just realized
upon re-reading that Candide was written by V oltaire.)

 
                                                 Ron Churgin
                                    ps: I really do wonder what happened to
Oedipa.