you gotta name girl?

[O']

Names? What's in a name? We had this discussion, but just a
few comments: Pynchon's "Post-Dickensian" names operate on
several levels. Mostly they are just good fun. However they
also serve a broader narrative technique which may be an
indication of Pynchon's aesthetic and his attitude towards
fiction and language.  

TRP's characters suffer from a multiplication of identities.
When we get to Herbert Stencil we will learn that like Henry
Adams he refers to himself in the third person. This
narrative technique is important and we can talk about until
the cows come home, but the reason given by the narrator is
clearly stated on page 58 of my text, page 50 in some texts
and the fifth paragraph of chapter 3 for others.  


like small children
helped "Stencil" appear as only one
among a repertoire of identities
"Forcible dislocation of
personality
"  

Fausto is another example of the multiplication of identity,
and in GR, as we know, Slothrop, like Stencil,  is a "quick
change artist" of sorts and Greta (V) "had more
personalities than she knew what to do with." 

Pynchon did study Dickens and his use of names is closest to
Dickens than anyone else I think. We also know that his
buddy Richard Farina's novel BDSL also makes use of absurd,
grotesque, burlesque, parodic,  political, satirical
allusive,  figurative,  allegorical, metaphorical 
rhetorical,  poetic, names. 

Pynchon's names sometimes function to multiply the identity
of the character or simply allude to character traits that
the narrator invokes by the act of naming. 


Personally I don't think the term red herring is best, but I
think that like Driblette in CL, some of these names come
out of "other orifices as well" (paraphrased cause I'm too
lazy to look it up): some names are simply farts and seventh
grade humor. 

Of course in doing so,  the author, to a certain extent, 
negates, cancels, parodies, subverts the narrator's act of
naming or the act of naming of characters by other
characters or concerns, for example, Weissmann's naming of
Enzian or Studio's naming of Greta. So I agree with Terry
Ceaser, Tony Tanner, Charles Hohmann, David Seed, and
numerous other critics, that claim that TRP's objective is,
as Tanner says, "to undermine and mock the very act of
naming
a gesture against the tyranny of naming itself." 

This gesturing is consistent with TRP's very Modern views.
As Fowler argues, when he compares TRP's figures with those
of T.S. Eliot "
like Eliot's harrowed speakers, Pynchon's
favorites always fall victim to colossal forces beyond the
limits of human identity." V., is a colossal force. The
victims in the early chapters, the Jew/Catholic Benny, the
atheist Pig Bodine, the secular Long Island JAPs, etc., have
a comic Beatrice to guide them to Hell as they suck on false
breasts and sharpen their teach in points to bite her in the
ass, but the party in the historical novel will be a siege
party and Benny's mechanical heart, his clock of a heart,
will be an eye piece, a vision of history where the sick
greening of the streetlights will turn red with human blood,
human sacrifice to the goddess of the inanimate, technology,
death, sterility, violence, unforgiving decadence, and
genocide, in short the pornographic negative of the Catholic
Virgin Mary.      

O'