VV(13): Enters Weismann

[jbor]

Yes, Vera's name does offer up many resonances. I hadn't noticed the 
palindromic effect before, but I would add that it's only *almost* a
palindrome. Like much else in the text deeper significations are hinted at
but remain ultimately inconclusive.

Mirror reflections recur in the novel, but I think it is the voyeuristic
rather than, or as well as, the narcissistic impulse which Pynchon is
foregrounding: both the acts of story-telling (Mondaugen's, Foppl's,
Godolphin's, Stencil's, the narrator's and author's) and that of
history-("rathouse")-making are vicarious/voyeuristic impulses (and I guess
that reading and the reader of the text are inculpated in this hyponymy as
well).

I'm just not so sure that V is totally passive in respect of the events she
is involved in, though she certainly remains impassive at all times.

But what is also interesting is the characterisation of Weissmann in this
text. He is not much like the character in _GR_ at all I think (though,
Michel might disagree with this.) Remember that it's _V._, written in '63,
and it's Weissmann depicted in 1922. There is nothing in this novel to
indicate what happened with Weissmann after the Siege Party, although there
are hints enough of what he will eventually become.

I wonder why Pynchon chose to focus again on Weissmann (and not Foppl, or
Stencil etc?), and in so much more detail, in his next "historical" novel? I
wonder what the development, or outright difference, in the characterisation
in _GR_ (eg. the "Christian ambience" of his upbringing; the knee-jerk fear
of blasphemy; the philosophical intenseness, almost an *idealism*; the
adoration of Rilke's poetry; his capacity for "love") can be attributed to?
(Is it perhaps a corrective to those "superficial[ly researched]" and
"hardly profound" connections Pynchon had made in the earlier novel?)

best


----------
>From: "Karen Hudes" <kade at inch.com>

> Vera Meroving's name is mirror-like, close to a palindrome before the "ing,"
> and with a suggestion of the word "mirror." Her name suggests a moving,
> roving "v" that might pass through surfaces or reflections.
>
> Mondaugen's story also feels like something we're passing through to get to
> the other side of V., with Eigenvalue's interruption almost at the book's
> center.
>
> The mirrors in the story have a yo-yo-like quality of bouncing one's vision
> back to oneself.
>
> ----------