V. (Ch 3) Impersonations and Dreams

[Dave Monroe]

.... "there doesn't seem to me"--i.e., jbor--"to be any evidence in the
novel"--i.e., V.--"that Pynchon has delved into Gnosticism to any
significant degree at this stage of his career."  Au contraire, mon
frere ...

One might--or might not (Terrence?) grant that gnostic themes are not
quite so overt, certainly not so explicitly named as such, in V. (vs.,
esp., Gravity's Rainbow), but, again, themes, elements, whatever, need
not be made explicit, to be named as  such, in order nonetheless to be
present in, quite reasonably read from, any given text, not in the least
those of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr.  A point of no small discussion a
short while back here, as you all might recall ...

But, again, allow me to refer y'all to Dwight Eddins' inconveniently and
inexplicably out-of-print The Gnostic Pynchon (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1990), which, having demonstrated the presence of such themes in even
TRP's early, short fiction, devotes an entire chapter ("Depraved New
World," pp. 50-88) to V.  An early comment of Eddins' therein along
lines raised here, not only by me (via Felicia Miller Frank's discussion
of "Baudelaire and the Painted Woman"), but, I believe, by Terrence and
perhaps Jill as well (?):

... the potent and constantly recurrent presence of V.--the feminine
persona (or personae) whose realtion to the cabalistic option is more or
less that of demiurge, of a malevolent goddess-figure presiding of the
dehumanization of history ... the powerful complex of symbolism attached
to her ... a goddess-shaped emptiness, an oddly negative divinity taht
serves as the genius of a historical process driven by random,
antiseptically neutral forces. (51)

... concluding, more or less, that ...

This is the final gnostic vision of V.--a massive alienation in which
cosmic indifference shot through with grotesque coincidences is
indistiguishable, at least in effect and in psychic repercussions, from
cosmic hostility.  The animating symbols of unity and harmony, belied
and erodied, become nightmare personifications of the Inanimate.... The
deadly waterspout is, inevitably, shaped like a "V."  As a destructive
phenomenon of nature, it represnets the collapse of the regenerative
Virgin symbol into Adams's vortex of chaotic impersonal forces, a hollow
gnostic simulacrum of entropy and death.  (88)

... hm ... again, "V.," nu x period, frequency x period = unity ...