V.V. (3) "Young Stencil the world adventurer"

[Don Corathers]

I'm with you, jbor, right up to the assumption that it is a preoccupation with the past and future that is blotting out Stencil's present and his sense of self. The past--well, yeah, Stencil is obsessively pursuing an understanding of something that tortured his father fifty years ago. I'm not so sure about the future. There are only two possibilities for Stencil's future, neither very inviting. Either he will find V., something he tries not to think about because he would then have nothing to do but lapse "back into half-consciousness." Or he will not, in which case the rest of his life will be spent "grim, joyless; a conscious acceptance of the unpleasant for no other reason than that V. was there to track down." 

Let's make one more observation about Stencil, for the record, before we move on to Chapter Three, wherein we will doubtless speculate about him further. I think his biography is remarkable for what it does not contain, which is any information at all about how and with whom his childhood was spent. He never knew his mother, and his father, a career foreign service officer whose journals were "warped by the humid air of many European cities," was apparently similarly unavailable to him. I'm not suggesting we should do a therapeutic workup on Stencil, but this emotionally barren landscape seems to have some implications for his devotion to the pursuit of V. He says as much to the Margravine: "You'll ask next if he believes her to be his mother. The queston is ridiculous." And: "It may be that Stencil has been lonely and needs something for company."

And two other Stencil questions, both about his conversation with the Margravine:

--When the M. says to Stencil "You are so close" (53.15), what the hell is she talking about? 

--And the exchange about V., in which M. says "A woman" and Stencil replies "Another woman," who is the first woman who makes it possible for there to be another one?

Don


--------
From: 	jbor[SMTP:jbor at bigpond.com]
Sent: 	Sunday, November 05, 2000 5:23 PM
To: 	pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: 	Re: V.V. (3) "Young Stencil the world adventurer"


Quite plausible; and we need to allow the other possibility that the entire
section is simply detached narration. As you noted, how can it be definitely
resolved one way or the other anyway? It is indeterminate. I think one of
the main themes which comes through in all of Pynchon's texts is to do with
the unreliability of all narrative utterance, and never more so than when it
pretends to detachment and objectivity, and lulls the reader into that cozy
suspension of disbelief which traditional story-telling (and lying -- q.v.
oratory, political) are able to achieve. That embroidery/stencillisation of
the past is an unavoidable aspect of individual perception (and it is no
accident that Pynchon alludes to that particular Varo painting, 'Bordando El
Manto Terrestre', in *Lot 49*). Where do the layers of fiction end? Do they
ever end? Where is "the real"?

So, insofar as Stencil aspires to objectify himself and his past by using
the third person there's no reason to think that the brief bio., if it is
narrated by the man himself, is any more false than it would be otherwise.
He is certainly critical of himself, and aspires to a quite brutal frankness
at times, as when he recalls discussing his newfound resolve with the
Margravine, explicitly referring to himself in the third person then as
well: "It may be that Stencil has been lonely and needs something for
company." (54.1 up) This certainly cues the reader to Stencil's unusual mode
of self-reference, and supports the Stencil-as-narrator contention.

If he is at least partly or even wholly responsible for narrating his
adventures, both past and present, then the next question, I guess, is who
is Stencil's assumed audience? (And, connected to this, why does he feel
obliged to narrate his own life in this manner?) It seems to link in with
Fausto's need to write up the histories and raisons d'être of the various
"Faustos" later on (and, of course, with Stencil père's journal). Certainly,
in both cases it becomes the pretext for Pynchon's fictional narrative, but
I see somewhere behind this a larger consideration of the continuous process
of the fictionalisation of self which is tied in with those uniquely human
characteristics: (self-)consciousness and memory. For both men it is
self-justification, a variety of narcissism (or perhaps a deliberate
anti-narcissism) or navel-gazing, which motivates these interminable
expositions-of-self. If Benny is phenomenological man, living just in the
present in order to escape both the experiences of the past and the
potential responsibilities of the future; then Stencil is somehow the
opposite, where the past and the future have assumed such potentially
gargantuan significance that considerations of the self in the immediate
present have been all but engulfed. I think that ultimately we might find
both reflexes to be merely different sides to the same coin -- the loss of
the human as an adjunct of attempting to avert the essential meaningless of
existence.

The other thing I'd add just to explain what might be a change in the tone
of the narration after Stencil has left the party is that he has allowed
jealousy to seep into his projection of what happens next. As he leaves he
"shrugged irritably" (57.24), which pairs up with the way he "waggled his
shoulderblades like wings" at the opening of the section. I think it is
significant that Brad touches Esther's spine "exactly in that spot every man
she ever knew had been able to find" and that she "squeezed her
shoulderblades together" too. (58.9) It seems to me that the course of the
seduction scene between Brad and Esther might be one which Stencil had
previously had the experience of, and would explain how he is involved with
the WSC in the first place and why Esther had taken him into her confidence
regarding what Rachel had to say about him. And, that last question which
Esther asks, her "line", seems to be one which Stencil himself has been
responding to earlier in the episode. Read this way Stencil becomes quite
human, despite his own best efforts to establish the contrary.

best


----------
>From: Don Corathers <crawdad at one.net>
>

>
> I agree that the observations about the WSC--from 56.7, "he presented to
> Stencil a horrifying spectacle" to Stencil's departure from the party on
> page 57--are made through his consciousness. But I don't think I'm ready to
> ascribe the narration of the whole section to him. The description of what
> happens at the party after he actually leaves has a different quality from
> the paragraph above, which can be read as Stencil speculating what *would*
> (and that use of the conditional auxiliary or whatever the hell you call it
> is the major difference) happen after he left. I think when Stencil leaves
> the apartment his voice leaves the narrative.
>
> Where it begins is harder to define (and a lot more important, if you think
> Stencil might be shading, embroidering, or Stencilizing the story). What I
> think right now is that the first part of the section, including Stencil's
> biography up to the present moment at the party, is related to us by the
> omniscient narrative voice that has been telling us the story so far.
>

>