V. (Ch 3) Itinerary

[Das Narren Schyff]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> That's the thing I remember most about the book--that in the end it's so
> unresolvable.  Things are over connected. Jill said something like this
> yesterday.  Read chapter 3 yesterday just to know what people are talking
> about. Noticed there's still another V I'd forgotten about, namely Varkunian
> the pimp, an acquaintance of Hanne whom she  overhears talking to
> Porpentine.
> A question: what's the significance of the smashing of Lepsius's blue
> glasses? Hanne WANTS to smash them and Porpentine actually does--in section
> viii. Does this indicate some mysterious link between Hanne and Porpentine.
> In addition of course to the one between Herbert and Porpentine. Or is Hanne
> just generally fed up with men and politics? Questions, questions . . .
> 
                    P.
Parody, Comedy, Fantasy: 

Yes, over connected and thus unresolvable, questions and
more questions, see Tim Ware's
HyperArt, V Mysteries, that's Pynchon's parody,  the V stain
Pentecost is comedy, the shamrock wearing (what does the
Baedeker say to wear) is a joke I'm sure Richard Farina
would have gotten but few others)  and of course we get the
Fantastic, the blue eyes removed,  the flames. 


All for the camera, but we also get, here and later on,  the
Pentecostal and Political, and these are not simply toys
that Pynchon spins about to amuse us or to delight. 

When we read the novel not as postmodern politics would
dictate, to discredit old notions, critical notions by the
way, about satire and narrative, not as subversive
indeterminacy, not as subversive fables, not as broken
estates, not as critical projects determined not to teach
clear moral precepts, determined to divide generatives like
Twain and Wolfe from degeneratives like Hawkes and Pynchon,
but as they are written, as paradoxical and "diological",
where various  modes of discourse are, in Pynchon now,
agonistic and paradoxical, or strategically juxtaposed in
order to effectuate or provoke a sustained ethical inquiry,
not a hard fixed line between "good and evil" but a line
nevertheless, we don't have to explain away what has been
written by discrediting everything we read as subverted by
how it is written and read,   So for example,  when Pynchon
compares the genocide of the Herero with the Genocide of the
Jews, not the blackest humor will erase that line. The moral
norm may be ambiguous to a point, in doubt to a point,
inconsistent and even duplicitous to a point, but even
Pynchon's Irony and all his so called postmodern technique,
not completely unlike Swift's, Melville's, but Perhaps
problamatized further by the  the disintegration of a
supernatural order and authority, do not undermine the moral
norm of his satires.  

As Eddins demonstrates, in Pynchon's fiction he begins with
an existential Wasteland but quickly develops a cosmic chaos
for a decadent culture where a malevolent inanimate force
works to dehumanize and annihilate humanity and the earth.
What
Eddins discovers, and as VL and M&D confirm, what he calls
Pynchon's "Orphic Naturalism", and that special Modernist
Nostalgia  is the Norm of Pynchon's satires. 

The Eye becomes a Rocket, NYC folk can go to Queens and
check out shutters, sprockets
and tubes, 

http://www.ammi.org/index2.html

http://www.xs4all.nl/~jikje/indexns4.html