V.V.9: Vheissu (and Moby Dick and Arthur Gordon Pym)

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Thanks, Dave. Cowart is quite right, methinks, as far as "The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym" is concerned. Some thoughts:

Poe's "Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" is one of two American novels of the
19th century in which whiteness obviously, in Moby Dick even explicitly,
assumes symbolic qualities. In both cases whiteness is associated with
annihilation, death, a vortex, a maelstrom etc. When he lets Godolphin state
that what the antarctic in this world resembles most is a "dream of
annihilation" (206) Pynchon clearly draws from those sources. But of course
one has to dig a little deeper in order to find the spider-monkey...

On p. 204 Godolphin says that the tourists "want only the skin of a place"
but that "the explorer wants its heart". Beneath Vheissu's skin, though, he
finds no heart but "nothing" (204), the corpse of a spider monkey, "a
mockery of life" (206). He concludes: "The skin which had wrinkled through
my nightmares was all there had ever been". I don't believe the word
"wrinkled" here is an accident (neither is, for that matter, and always
IMHO, the phrase "There was nearly a mutiny." (205), as the mutiny is a
central event in "Pym", mentioned already in the subtitle): The "peculiar
snow-white wrinkled forehead" is a characteristic attribute of the white
whale.

Much more important than these instances of what I take to be conscious if
subtle allusions to "Pym" and "MD" is the fact that Pym, Ishmael, Ahab and
Godolphin display the same feelings when confronted with whiteness. The
correspondence between Ahab and Godolphin is the most striking one. Mad Ahab
wants to "strike through the mask" (MD, Norton, 144), through the wall,
through the wrinkled brow of the white whale who for him is "that wall,
shoved near to me" (144). Yet sometimes he thinks "there's naught beyond"
(144). Godolphin, "foolish", possibly "insane" (V. 205), obviously obsessed,
because he has been "tortured by Vheissu for fifteen years" (204) wants to
see what is "beneath the skin" of the South Pole and finds "nothing". The
difference between the two is that Ahab only suspects that there might be
nothing beyond that white wall, just as Ishmael fears that "all deified
Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing
but the charnel-house within" (MD, 170), whereas Godolphin has actually
struck through the mask, looked beneath all those "Colours, music,
fragrances" (V., 204) and found that his innermost fears held true.

What this seems to amount to is that Godolphin accepts the view that life is
meaningless and that there is indeed nothing beneath the phenomena of the
visible world. But on the other hand Vheissu is only "a dream of
annihilation" and the spider-monkey for him is "not like the vague hints
they had given me before" (206). Instead he thinks "that they left it here
for " him (206) and asks himself not "Who?", because this seems to be
obvious to him, but "Why?". The difficulty here is that Godolphin seems to
have found out and accepted that at the heart of existence there is only
complete desolation and inanimateness, "a howling desert", but nevertheless
sees an "unknown, but reasoning thing" (MD, 144) at work behind the scenes.

As for "Pym", the fact that Vheissu is situated at the South Pole seems to
be no accident either. "Pym" is a grisly adventure novel that at some point
is turning into some strange kind of phantastic, perhaps allegorical
reverie.  Whiteness in "Pym" is, of course, also associated with death and
annihilation. Poe, in his typical fashion, throughout the novel emphasizes
that the terror created by whiteness leads to helpnessness and paralysis:
Whenever Pym is confronted with the colour he is not able to move and even
feels an urge to give up the struggle, to submit to death. The ending of the
novel, or rather of Arthur Gordon Pym's narrative, is dominated by a tone of
clear-headed resignation until Peters and Pym finally drift towards that
figure whose skin has the hue "of the perfect whiteness of the snow"
(Penguin, 239).

The interesting thing is that Pym as well as Dirk Peters survive the whole
thing, though Pym doesn't live long enough to tell how. Ishmael, in my
favourite reading of "MD", overcomes the sentiments he laid out so
eloquently in "The Whiteness of the Whale" with a little help from his
friend and spouse Queequeg and is finally saved, or rather reborn, out of
the vortex the "Pequod" and all her crew have been sucked into. So, perhaps,
whiteness in these novels might after all not signify annihilation as the
end but annihilation as one stage of a metamorphosis. It definitely does so
in "MD". But then what about Pynchon? Does he, or rather the implicit
narrator, endorse Godolphin's view? And what, exactly, is Godolphin's view,
anyway?

Thomas

P.S. Thanks a whole lot to Michael Perez. I wish I had the time to take part
in this discussion  more often.

P.P.S. Open Google. Type "Vheissu Pynchon Pittsburgh", follow the link, and
perhaps you will find yourself slightly amused.

P.P.P.S. All this may have sounded as if I take the Vheissu-episode in "V."
as just a paraphrase of Poe and Melville. It certainly is, in lit crit
terms, a pastiche of the treatment of whiteness in "Pym" and "Moby Dick".
Pynchon's mastery, though, shows in the fact that he manages to make this
Vheissu-business genuinely creepy. It also makes one suspect that in the
general framework of the novel Godolphin's narrative and the world-view
expressed by it may perhaps not have the last word.