V.V.(9) Chapter Seven

[Otto Sell]

Pulp Fiction

"Back around  the turn of the century, psychoanalysis had usurped from the
priesthood the role of father-confessor. Now, it seemed, the analyst in his
turn was about to be deposed by, of all people, the dentist."
"(...) little more than a change in nomenclature." (153.2-7)

pre-modern: priesthood
modern: psychoanalysis
postmodern: psychodontia, the word itself an amalgam, denoting the fusion of
two different areas, psychoanalysis and dentistry, but related to each other
only through the logos, the word:
the warm, pulsing and living *it* versus the inanimate *I*:
"(...) the it and I Psychodontia had to deal with." (153.13-14)

Eigenvalue has a clear opinion about Stencil's assumptions:

"Cavities in the teeth occur for good reason (...) even if there are several
per tooth, there's no conscious organization there against the life of pulp,
no conspiracy. Yet we have men like Stencil, who must go about grouping the
world's random caries into cabals." (153.21-25)
"In a world such as you inhabit (...) any cluster of phenomena can be a
conspiracy." (154.11-12)

Either everything is connected like in Stencil's view or it is not, like
Eigenvalue sees it:

If we were shock-wave riders (any John Brunner-fans here?): this description
comes close to the one some scientists apply to the structure of the
universe. Heisenberg, the wave-particle question, Everett and Wheeler come
to mind, waves of probability, a folded universe:

"Perhaps history this century (...) is rippled with gathers in its fabric
such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a
fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By
virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others,
compartments off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater
importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. (...) We are
accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived
on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see." (155.30-36,
156.4-6)

Stencil sr seemed to be of a comparable opinion while his son turned the
other way:

"(...) no situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds
of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these
several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than
homogeneous, the Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much
like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world
in only three." (189.23-29)

What is that fourth dimension -Time?

157.16  "Vheissu"
http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/eti.html#vheissu
"From Molly Hite's _Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas
Pynchon_:
'If "Vheissu" encodes anything, it is a pun--"Wie heisst du?,"
"What is your name?"--that parodies Stencil's preoccupation with
sub rosa identities.'(p.54)

Another possibility could be that it's a shortage of "Verheissung" (promise,
in the meaning of "promised land" [Roget's Thesaurus]).
The way it is reached (168) and what Godolphin tells Victoria about it fits
very much to 19th-century romantic and idealized ideas about "The East"
(170), Rice-Burroughs or Rider Haggard, where you can escape from the
establishment (156), looking for the "Black Venus" and let down your pants
(170-71). Of course, as Michael wrote, Joseph Conrad is someone we think of
too because he was one of those who was *not* romanticizing the way
Europeans lived out their "Heart of Darkness" but saw (and told) what
colonialism really was about. In 1899 the genocide on the Herero is already
going on.

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The Birth of Venus (177-78)

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/botticelli/venus.jpg.html

Compared to Oedipa's description of 'Bordando el Manto Terrestre' by
Remedios Varo in the first chapter of "The Crying of Lot 49" Pynchon's
description of Sandro Botticelli's (1446-1510) famous recycling (1482) of an
old myth through the Gaucho's eyes is really different. Apparently the
Gaucho doesn't know much/anything about the picture and its assumed
importance in the arts. Its pure monetary value is inestimable and he's not
even thinking about this.
But isn't this the way art really should be looked at: fresh and innocent
and not wasted by theory or any pre-knowledge? Pynchon can be very funny at
times. As a German and no art expert myself I really smiled about this:

"She was standing in half of what looked like a scungille shell; fat and
blond, and the Gaucho, being a tedesco in spirit, appreciated this. But he
didn't understand what was going on in the rest of the picture. There seemed
to be some dispute over whether or not she should be nude or draped: on the
right a glassy-eyed lady built like a pear tried to cover her up with a
blanket and on the left an irritated young man with wings tried to blow the
blanket away while a girl wearing hardly anything twined around him,
probably trying to coax him back to bed. While this curious crew wrangled,
Venus stood gazing off into God knew where, covering up with her long
tresses. No one seemed to be looking at anyone else. A confusing picture.
The Gaucho had no idea why Signor Mantissa should want it, but it was none
of the Gaucho's affair." (178.1-14)

He fails to understand because he doesn't know the old myth. Not his fault
if nobody told him. Remember it's a Roman myth depending on a Greek myth and
her "original" name is Aphrodite ('born from foam'), not Venus, but was
formerly known too as Ishtar or Ashtaroth in Palestine and Syria. Even
older, see Dave Morris' ´Malta 5 - post from October 4th [V.V.(1)]:
http://web.infinito.it/utenti/m/malta_mega_temples/stattuet/statt/anistat/ve
nus.html

Myths made out of myths made of even older myths. This is what our cultural
heritage can be called.
But is Botticelli's Venus really "fat" like we imagine a healthy Bavarian
girl with fitting "mammalian protuberances" (Zappa)?
I don't see that but some expert who explains the picture tells that her
body is somewhat unnatural in other aspects:

"The action of the picture is quickly understood. Venus has emerged from the
sea on a shell which is driven to the shore by flying wind-gods amidst a
shower of roses. As she is about to step on to the land, one of the Hours or
Nymphs receives her with a purple cloak. (...) Botticelli's Venus is so
beautiful that we do not notice the unnatural length of her neck, the steep
fall of her shoulders and the queer way her left arm is hinged to the body."
(E.H. Gombrich, "The Story of Art": from:
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/botticelli/venus_text.jpg.html )

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"Who or what than is V," ask Ickstadt, "A recurring letter, the extending
paradigm of an empty sign?  Metaphor of a hidden meaning or sense? Or only
structure of sense and therefor open to any interpretation?"
(Heinz Ickstadt: Fiction, History and the Demon of Decay in V. and The
Crying of Lot 49, pp. 246-276, in: Gerhard Hoffmann (Hrsg.) - Der
zeitgenössische amerikanische Roman - Band 3 - Autoren - Wilhelm Fink
Verlag, München 1988, p. 249, my humble translation)

October 19th Terrance posted this remarkable quote:

The assumption of unity which was the mark of human thought
in the middle-ages has yielded very slowly to the proofs of
complexity.... Yet it is quite sure...that, at the
accelerated rate of progression shown since 1600, it will
not need another century of half century to tip though
upside down. Law, in that case, would disappear as theory or
a priori principle, and give place to force. Morality would
become police. Explosives would reach cosmic violence.
Disintegration would overcome integration.

--Henry Adams

Ickstadt quotes some more Adams that he relates to V.:

"He found himself in a land where no one had ever penetrated before; where
order was an accidental relation obnoxious to nature; artificial compulsion
imposed on motion; against which every free energy of the universe revolted;
and which, being merely occasional, resolved itself back into anarchy at
last. He could not deny that the law of the new multiverse explained much
that had been most obscure, especially the persistently fiendish treatment
of man by man; the perpetual effort of society to establish law, and the
perpetual revolt of society against the law it had established; the
perpetual building up of authority by force, and the perpetual appeal to
force to overthrow it; the perpetual symbolism of a higher law, and the
perpetual relapse into a lower one; the perpetual victory of the forces of
freedom, and their perpetual conversion into principles of power; but the
staggering problem was the outlook ahead into the despotism of artificial
order with nature abhorred. The physicists had a phrase for it...: 'All that
we win is a battle - lost in advance - with the irreversible phenomena in
the background of nature.' "
(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Boston, 1961, pp. 457ff., quoted
at Hoffmann, pp. 273-74)

Ickstadt: Pynchon is referring to Adams applying Entropy, the Second Law of
Thermodynamics, to society. The thesis that like every other system the
Occidental system too is working at his own decay structurally, in a process
which cannot be reversed, the strive for order is just a projection of the
human consciousness against the predominant surrounding chaos.
(Hoffmann, p. 249)

Otto