V.V.(1) The Sacred and (Benny) Profane

[jbor]

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>From: Thomas Eckhardt <uzs7lz at uni-bonn.de>
>

> "receding in an asymmetric V to the east where it's dark and there are no
> more bars"
> V.: Title, leitmotif and the symbol whose meaning Herbert Stencil, and
> perhaps also the reader, is in desperate need to find out.

I think that the ludic impulse of the postmodern text is foregrounded and
exemplified in the accumulation of v-shapes and movements in this novel. In
this first section I could discern the following v-manifestations:

the V-shaped vs on the title page (an image of mise en abyme, v's-in-v)

the chapter heading

the yo-yo movement p9

the streetlamps p10

hearts, seagulls p11 (in formation: v's-in-v)

Ploy's false teeth 11-12; each filed down to a point 12; the mark(s) left on
Beatrice's ass 12 (all v's-in-v)

breast-shaped beer taps 12-13 (seven thereof -- another v-in-v formation)

Paola's eyebrows 14

flying wedge of bodies 16

a woman is only half of something there are two sides to p18 (metaphoric v?)

Miraculous Medal chain p19

snow pinpoints p21

There might be more but they do seem to start waning about here. I think
that, partly at least, this impetus to literary/textual playfulness goes
back to Pynchon's comment about suffering from "writer's block" while at
Cornell (in the Slow Learner 'Intro', p. 17). He tries to cram as many
figurative and literal images of the v-shape into the opening episode of his
text in order to generate the narrative, to kick-start the creative juices.
Certainly, this type of aesthetic model had prominent and eminently
respectable precursors in Eliot and Joyce (*Four Quartets* and *Finnegans
Wake* and, to a lesser degree, *The Waste Land* and *Ulysses*), along also
with Lowry (*Under the Volcano*), Raymond Roussel, Stein, Nabokov, Beckett,
Robbe-Grillet, Perec, Calvino, Julio Cortázar and others. As well, there was
Wittgenstein's "language game" analogy in the *Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus*, and the subsequent privileging of philosophical description
over "metaphysical" utterance, with which Pynchon was also no doubt
familiar.

Susan Rubin Suleiman nominates it as a "truism" to observe that

   modern art and literature, and modern writing about art and literature,
   are centrally preoccupied with the question of play. ... From Mallarmé's
   dice-throw in *Un Coup de dés* ... through Surrealist parlor games,
   Oulipian exercises, Joycean punnings, Steinian button games, Beckettian
   endgames, Cooverian baseball games, Robbe-Grilletian mirror-games,
   Borgesian labyrinths, Bataillean rituals, Barthian funhouses, etcetera,
   etcetera ‹ modern writing is rife with play. (In her essay entitled
   'Playing and Modernity' (1987), in Mark Spilka and Caroline
   McCracken-Flesher (eds), *Why the Novel Matters: A Postmodern Perplex*,
   Indiana University, Bloomington, 1990, p. 285)

I think that it is from this initial play impulse that the larger themes and
'serious' concerns of the novel seem to grow.

Thomas:
> Then we start encountering people who entertain a kind of sexual
> relationship with the inanimate: Pig and his Harley, Da Conho and his
> machine gun, and most importantly Rachel and her MG.

Actually, it's Profane who immediately begins encountering these types and
their death-fetishes. Throughout the novel malevolent inanimacy accumulates
around Profane, culminating with SHOCK and SHROUD later, and he is
constantly trying to avoid it, or any understanding of what it (the
"death-in-life sensation" Thomas notes) signifies. It is Stencil (who is the
"sacred" half of the equation) who actively seeks out the v-ness of 'V',
whereas, ironically, Profane is the one who is constantly confronted by it.

Like a metaphysical yoyo, Profane's and Stencil's journeys are like two
radial arms of a V themselves. Where Stencil will forever *approach* a
certain point (the revelation of the essence of V) -- moving towards but
never quite getting to or encapturing it -- Profane is forever trying to
*avoid* this moment or revelation -- moving away from it but never able to
totally escape. And it is in this way that the picaresque (anti-)hero is
fractured, split in twain; but the novel shows that the sacred and profane
halves of man can never actually escape from one another. While the sacred
searches for ultimate meaning, the profane luxuriates in carnal experience,
but neither can quite break free of the umbilical cord (yoyo string) by
which they are attached and held in check.

best