V.V. 3--Rachel v. Schoenmaker, Stencil's quest, hothouse artists

[Don Corathers]

Rachel and Schoenmaker

The argument between Rachel and Shale Shoenmaker, Esther's plastic surgeon, is only about two pages long, but it contains references to or resonances of a remarkable number of Pynchon's themes and concerns: rockets, crackpot science, mainstream science and its unintended consequences, Judaism, ethnic identity, and the human/inanimate duality that keeps cropping up. The concentrated presence of all this stuff, especially right after the waiting room set piece on mirror-time, suggests that Something Important must be going on, but if there is it is not immediately evident. To me, anyway.

The arguments themselves are pretty straightforward. Shoenmaker insists that his work is harmless because the changes in his patients are superficial and don't affect future generations. Rachel says that external physical changes cause psychological ones, and that the women he operates on become the "kind of Jewish mother(s)? who make a girl get a nose job even if she doesn't want one." 

The conversation is elliptical, like a lot of Pynchon dialogue. In the first exchange we learn from Rachel that Esther "is going through hell," but that circumstance is not further explained at this point. There's another curious thing happening: both Rachel and Schoenmaker are arguing from conflicted positions. Rachel holds the surgeon and his work in contempt, yet she's paying for Esther's nose job. And Schoenmaker, even though he knows how Rachel feels (clearly they've been over this ground before), invites her to sit down, have a cigarette, and talk. Apparently, for all his conviction that his work is harmless and morally unassailable, he feels a need to defend it.

It seems possible to make the case that Rachel's response to plastic surgery is evidence of the dawning of a feminist consciousness. Probably it would be better to wait until more of Esther's story is revealed before we take that one on.


Stencil's quest

On page 52 we meet Herbert Stencil and in short order are presented with the basic facts of his quest, and the novel's mystery: V., who might be a woman, mentioned briefly but emphatically in one of his father's journals. The "sentences on V. suddenly acquired a light of their own" when Stencil read them in a café in Oran at the end of the war, and since 1945 he has been quite literally animated by the hunt.

We'll be talking a lot more about this, but there are a couple of questions we can examine now without getting into too much spoilage for those who aren't reading ahead. To wit:

--What is the relationship between Stencil's quest and the novel's thematic interest in the inanimate? Stencil's conscious campaign to do without sleep-his commitment to activity, which is the essence of his pursuit of V.-is explicitly contrasted to the sloth of the Whole Sick Crew. We are shown Fergus Mixolydian's "ingenious sleep-switch," which involves electrodes "placed in the inner skin of his forearm" that connect him to a television, and which we will have occasion to remember later when we encounter Bongo-Shaftsbury on the Alexandria-to-Cairo morning express about 25 pages hence.  

--What got Stencil started? What was the nature of the "light of their own" that the journal passages about V. acquired when he reread them in 1945? Is it that he noticed them for the first time? What he tells his friend the Margravine, translated from his third-person mode of expression, is "I am lonely and I need something for company." Whose company would that be?


Artists and models of 1956

The last few pages of the chapter sketch the bohemian art and music scene in mid-fifties New York, drawn in a few deft and deadly strokes. There's Fergus, a sort of conceptual artist whose works include "a western in blank verse" and a wall from a stall in a Penn Station men's room. Raoul, who writes for television. Slab, the "Catatonic Expressionist." Melvin, who sings "liberal folk songs." 

"The unhappy fact," we are told, is that "most of them worked for a living and obtained the substance of their conversation from the pages of Time magazine?" 

Then there's Brad, the fraternity boy late of an Ivy League college who "will straddle the line" between corporate and creative life "until he splits up the crotch? from the prolonged tension."

At the end of the chapter we catch McClintic Sphere's last set at the V-Note, which serves to remind us, before we shuffle home, that among all the dilettantes and poseurs are a few real artists, and that we're reading the work of one of them.

Don