V.V. (13) Vheissu and Manhattan

[jbor]

More from Richard Lehan, _The City in Literature: An Intellectual and 
Cultural History_ (UCal: Berkeley, 1998, pp. 267-269):

      Thomas Pynchon is central to these cultural and literary changes: he
    systematically undercuts the mythic, historic, aesthetic, and moral
    elements of modernism, creating a series of "flattened" characters who
    lack subjectivity and find the past emptied of all but "stencilized"
    meaning. In his novels the wasteland quest plays itself out in an
    entropic landscape. In both _V._ and _Lot 49_, consciousness is lost
    in the indeterminate maze that becomes the postmodern city. In _V._
    Pynchon undoes the myth of modernism by rewriting _The Waste Land_.
    Just as the questing knight goes in search of the grail in Eliot's poem,
    so Herbert Stencil goes in search of his lost mother. But as he enters
    history all he finds is what he brings to it -- history becomes
    stencilized.  What is lost turns out to be not ideal after all, myth
    itself collapses into history, and the mind is powerless to retrieve
    a lost past or to project an idealized future.
      _V._ is a long, tangled novel with two plots that eventually converge
    like the letter V. [ ... ]
      The story of V is told against the rise of the mechanical, urbanized
    world. She embodies the decline of woman from sex goddess to
    transvestite, from mother to manufactured object, from human to
    grotesque. As some critics have pointed out, she personifies what has
    happened to Henry Adams' Virgin in the age of the Dynamo, progressively
    devitalized in an era of urban sprawl and technology. Pynchon shares
    Adams' belief in entropy, the inevitable wearing down of the physical
    world and cultural systems, as well as the belief that Western man --
    with the megalopolis, technology, and the Dynamo all expanding,
    triumphing, and supporting a commercial/industrial system -- is
    increasingly losing his own humanity. As the novel makes explicit: "A
    decadence ... is a falling-away from what is human, and the further we
    fall the less human we become. Because we are less human, we foist off
    the humanity we have lost on inanimate objects and abstract theories."
                                                                (_V._ 380)
      The city becomes an end in itself, its citizens mere relational parts.
    The second plot -- the story of Benny Profane and the WSC -- reinforces
    this theme. Without family, rootless, indifferent to all but creature
    comforts, Benny finds greatest pleasure in "yo-yoing": riding the subway
    up and down Manhattan, going nowhere, he displays mechanical energy as
    an end in itself, motion without direction. While the Stencil plot
    involves a search for a principle of harmony, the Profane plot
    recognizes the ineviatbility of chaos, the power of entropy to undo
    order and move toward death. Pynchon believes the machine age has moved
    the Puritan fear of women (that is, of sex) to its final destructive
    conclusion, leading modern man "deeper into fetish-country" until the
    woman "becomes entirely and in reality ... an inanimate object of
    desire." (386) Insofar as the journey into the past reveals no mythic
    or transcendent meaning -- taking us only to the (stencilized) self
    with which we began -- history becomes meaningless, a tenuous way of
    organizing meaning.
      All of these themes -- the power of entropy, the emptiness of myth
    and history, the mechanical limits of the city -- are embodied in the
    lost city of Vheissu, a fantasy vision that owes much to Henry Adams'
    emphasis upon entropy. Carried to a doomsday conclusion, the second
    law of thermodynamics asserts that the universe will lose heat
    entropically until all matter and energy degrade to the ultimate state
    of uniformity. Pynchon's Vheissu, located near one of the poles and
    reached by ascending large mountains and then traveling through an
    elaborate network of caves, is frozen, motionless, barren, and lifeless.
    When Hugh Godolphin reaches it, he digs down several feet beneath the
    snow to find the corpse of a spider monkey buried in the ice. The
    monkey is the physical expression of the heat loss that occurs in the
    universe as we move from the tropics (the monkey) to the poles, from the
    primitive to the civilized, from the savage to the city, from life to
    death -- dichotomies that run through P's major works. T.S. Eliot
    explored the pre-civilized to suggest that we might again make contact
    with a lost primitve energy that, when mythologized, could redeem the
    fallen city and be a source of new life, but Pynchon offers no mythic
    solution. His return to the primitve instead reveals a heat loss
    inseparable from our urbanized, industrialized existence and takes us to
    the frozen city and death. At some level of correspondence and meaning,
    Mnahattan and Vheissu, like many other elements in this novel, converge,
    perhaps becoming the final V. [ ... ]

Though I think there are problems with Lehan's reading of the location of
Vheissu (and thus some of his contentions in that last paragraph), and with
the need to fit the novel into his larger thesis about the city and
urbanization, there is much which is pertinent here imo.

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