V.V.(1): Body Parts

[Thomas Eckhardt]

The fabulous artificer pointed to the "inordinate amount of references to
various and sundry body parts in section one of chapter one".

My laziness catches up with me: I meant to comment on the issue, but decided
there was not enough time. Here are a few thoughts:

Apart from generally supporting my view that in chapter one we are in the
realm of the bodily and the vulgar - in terms of genre the world of the
farce or low comedy -, the abundance of body parts is a main characteristic
of the narrative mode of the grotesque (of course, Bachtin is my source
here). Usually this means that certain parts of the body are of
disproportionate size (thus the relation of the grotesque to the monstrous).
Often it is the nose - traditionally representing the phallus (see for
example Tristram Shandy for this), - which is the grotesque part, but mouth,
teeth and lips also qualify. Apart from these features of the face - eyes
only when they threaten to come out of their sockets - it is the abdomen
that the grotesque focuses on. In general, Bachtin says, the grotesque is
characterized by images that express the transgression of the limits of the
body: everything that extrudes from the body crosses the line between the
individual and the outside world, every cavity in the body makes it possible
for the outside world to enter the individual. Thus, the essential actions
of the grotesque body are, of course, eating, drinking, pissing,
ejaculating, defecating, puking etc.

In chapter one of V. we do not find organs of disproportionate size, except
perhaps for the "large breasts", but the focus on isolated parts of the body
seems highly significant to me for the whole of the novel. I would like to
add to Bachtin's observations that it is also a standard motif of the
grotesque that isolated parts of the body acquire a life of their own and
sometimes even separate themselves, or are violently separated, from the
trunk. One might think of Gogol's "The Nose" here, or, quite a wonderful
example from the recent past, the hand that begins to attack poor Ash in
Evil Dead II (a scene that truly has to be seen to be believed). Note also
that the hand which turns against its owner is a standard topos of the
horror genre (for example "The Hands of Orlac"; the version with the great
Peter Lorre being of importance in Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano", by
the way). These things can be very funny but, of course, they also touch
upon primal fears. In other words, the grotesque can be comic but it also
can be horrifying. Depends on how you use it. Some of Pynchon's most
chilling scenes depend on this double-edgedness of the grotesque. In V. the
references to parts of the body will get much more concentrated and uncanny
later - think of Eigenvalue, Schoenmaker, or of the gradual metamorphosis of
V. into a machine with artificial body parts and organs, called the Bad
Priest, if I remember correctly..

Another way of looking at the references to body parts in chapter one would
thus be to see them as indicators of the disintegration of personality. If
the body represents the complete human being, body parts represent the
dismemberment of the human as an integral being and, by extension, the
dismemberment of society and also the world as a cosmos, i.e. as an order in
which every part stands in relation to the whole. Furthermore (I tried to
avoid "archetypal criticism", as Frye calls it, up to now, but what the
heck; file this under "irresponsible criticism"), it is reminiscent of
sparagmos or the dismembered god that has to be made whole again (see also
Jung, alchemy, T.S. Eliot) in some holy ritual. In archetypal terms, then,
the inordinate amount of references to body parts in the first chapter of V.
hints at a spiritual wasteland", filled with "fragments shored against the
ruins" ("The Waste Land") of myth and religion, a desert of the heart, a
"spilled and broken world" ("Vineland") etc. If this is correct, we should
look out for signs of rebirth and regeneration. I am afraid, though, we
won't find many of those in V.

Thomas

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