V's and Quincunxes: Pynchon, Browne, Galton, etc.

[David Simpson]

Not sure if this is the proper place to insert some different stuff into the V. discussion,
but am seizing the opportunity anyway (using the "scholarly quest" and "adventure of the mind"
passage as my textual point of departure.)

For whatever they may be worth, here are a few teasing parallels and cross-connections between
Stencil's search for V., the scientific and metaphysical musings served up in Sir Thomas
Browne's "The Garden of Cyrus," statistical speculations about randomness and pattern on the
part of the British eugenicist Francis Galton, and traditional Gnostic interpretations of
cosmic order and design.

Browne was a 17th-century physician, natural philosopher, folklorist, antiquarian, amateur
theologian, and universal polymath. His "Gardens of Cyrus" is a fantastic (in nearly every
sense of the word) study of the occurrence of "quincuncial" designs in nature, art, and
mystical lore. A quincunx (from the Latin word for "five twelfths") is an arrangement of five
points to form a double V or X, much like the 5-spot on a playing card or gaming die, thus:

    *     *
        *
    *     *

The legendary gardens of Cyrus the Great (Persian emperor 559-529 BC) were supposedly laid out
according to this pattern, and the result, as can be imagined, was a vast network of
quincunxes: an elaborate grid or reticule of interconnecting X's and V's. In his researches
Browne finds this V-form pattern literally everywhere: in a myriad of plants, seeds, and
vegetables; in the bone structures of animals and the veins of minerals; in art and
architecture; in physical phenomena; in folklore and alchemy; in ancient literature and myth;
in sacred history and the Bible; in Egyptian hieroglyphs and Cabalistical arcana; indeed, in
everything from honeycombs and sea-hedgehog eggs to Roman battle formations and the physical
laws of optical and sonic reflection.

The sheer volume of instances and examples Browne furnishes is mind-boggling. So much so that
as we read his essay, we hardly know (as is also the case with Stencil) whether he is onto
something crucial and pervasive or is simply the dupe of his own overactive ingenuity. (By the
end of the essay, Browne's search for quincunxes begins to look -- to modern readers at least
-- like "an adventure of the mind" indeed, and possibly the product of some form of godly
paranoia or full-blown monomania.)

A devout Christian, Browne offers his findings as evidence of a mathematically meticulous
Designing God. To him, the omnipresence of the quincunx is simply one more assurance that the
Creation is the work of a minutely diligent Maker. In this respect, "The Garden of Cyrus" is a
typical, if extreme, contribution to the literature of Natural Theology and to the tradition
of cosmic piety (the belief that universal order is the hallmark of a benevolent Creator). Of
course, as P-listers are fully aware, such a belief is the exact opposite of the Gnostic (and
more Stencilian, and Pynchonian) view.  To the Gnostic eye, such revelations of order and
system are more terrifying than edifying for they betoken the presence not of a divine
Savior-Creator but of the sinister Archons, the ruler-creators of the cosmic Jail.

One added note: by an intriguing coincidence, "quincunx" also happens to be the name that the
British eugenics pioneer Francis Galton (1822-1911) gave to his device for depicting the
"patterns" that emerge within random phenomena. Using a kind of vertical pin-ball machine
(designed so that each dropped ball might deflect right or left with equal probability),
Galton's contraption provided a graphic demonstation  -- in the form of a Bell curve -- of the
deeper-level lawfulness of haphazard events. Shades of Mondaugen's sferics.

It's not clear whether G's adoption of the name "quincunx" owes anything at all to Browne. In
any case, what is probably of greater interest to Pynchon readers is Galton's self-admiring
autobiography, "Memories of my Life" (1908). With its earnest recapitulation of the author's
eugenic theories and "scientific" views on race and culture, and especially with its middle
chapters set in South West Africa (where Galton toured as a sort of ethologist-adventurer),
this work qualifies as one of the all-time documents in the history of British racism and
imperialism -- as well as a potential source for V.

A pleasant holiday to all.
--
"Welcome to 'All About the Media,' where members of the media discuss the role of the media in
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homepage: http://www.depaul.edu/~dsimpson