V. (was Re: Prosthetic Paradise

[rj]

TF:
> Like Carl Barrington of "The Secret Integration", the more
> V. functions as an abstract entity, the more she becomes
> inanimate and non-human. The processes are co-extensive.
> V.'s transformations (identity changes) are directly related
> to the development of the major themes in the novel.


The concept of 'V' in V. is beyond plot and character; neither Stencil
nor any other narrative agency in the novel can verbalise an extant or
all-encompassing 'V'-entity or -state. As Molly Hite notes:

"As the novel proceeds, V. comes to promise so much that any resolution
would become ludicrously deficient." (*Ideas of Order*, p. 27)

Stencil acknowledges this also. Unable to define '
V' or even to prove its/her existence, he is still profoundly convinced
of its/her actuality and equally concerned at the possible
manifestations and consequences:

"Truthfully, he didn't know what sex V. might be, nor even what genus
and species. To go along assuming that Victoria the girl tourist and
Veronica the sewer rat were one and the same V. was not at all to bring
up metempsychosis; only to affirm that his quarry fitted in with The Big
One, the century's master cabal, in the same way Victoria had with the
Vheissu plot and Veronica with the new rat-order. If she was a
historical fact then she continued active today and at the moment,
because the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name was as yet unrealized,
though V. might be no more a she than a sailing vessel or a nation."
(226)

Much of the satiric humour in this novel operates at the expense of
Stencil, and his solipsistic stencilisations of the past and urge to see
conspiracy wherever he looks are hardly conclusive, even within the
fictional landscape Pynchon renders. It is the same sort of satire
Pynchon engineers with Oedipa when she self-consciously admonishes
herself about how "unfit" she is for anything except tracking down
arcane references in books. Like those devout fools who will seek a soul
in ev'ry stone, or the paranoid and indefatigable unravellers who
"discover" Geli Raubal or Theolonius Monk or JFK or King Zog of Albania
in whichever oddly-named fictional character in Pynchon's cast, all on
the most tenuous of evidence, in V. and Lot49 Pynchon actually
consciously parodies the conspiracy theory genre, a label with which his
own fiction -- ironically, and quite erroneously -- has often since been
tagged.

best