V. & religion - snips of an article worth reading

[Doug Millison]

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0403/4_44/54370329/print.jhtml
Twentieth Century Literature
Winter, 1998 
Finding V.(author Thomas Pynchon's book 'V')
Author/s: Kenneth Kupsch


[...] As many critics have realized, it is the chapter entitled "The Dynamo
and the Virgin" from The Education of Henry Adams that the novel expects us
either to know or be willing to familiarize ourselves with. What Adams muses
upon so famously there is really a very simple though fascinating idea -
namely, the idea of deity as motivating force. What he noted about Gothic
cathedrals, for example, was the way in which the very idea of the Virgin
Mary became indistinguishable from the idea of an actual forceful deity
working its will on the world, as human beings over large expanses of time
and space were motivated to perform deeds that presumably they would never
have performed otherwise. As Adams puts it: "All the steam in the world
could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres" (388). Earlier in the same
passage he describes his awakening to this idea:

he [Adams] knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or
Venus as force, and not everywhere . . . possibly at Cnidos if one could
still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles, - but otherwise
one must look for force to the Goddesses of Indian Mythology. (388)

[...] Or perhaps not so far. Just as Joyce used Homer's Odyssey as his
elaborate groundplan and source of inspiration for Ulysses, so too Pynchon
followed the more general groundplan suggested by Adams. Readers of Adams
will be struck by how, in the above-quoted passage, Adams rather casually
equates the Virgin Mary and the Roman goddess Venus. Most of us know that
Venus was the Roman goddess of love adapted from the Greek goddess
Aphrodite. Fewer, perhaps, know that Aphrodite was herself adapted by the
Greeks from the Phoenician goddess Astarte. Pynchon knew this, although he
never stated it explicitly; instead, he left it for readers to discover on
their own. References to Astarte begin and end the epilogue, she being the
figure head on Mehemet's doomed xebec which carries Stencil's father to his
death. The fact that those references are withheld until the story's end
itself constitutes an important clue, since one expects to learn something
of special significance at the end of a novel organized in the manner of a
detective story. And that is exactly what one learns here: the origin of V.
[...] Actually, the goddess whom the Phoenicians called Astarte was known by
many names in the ancient Mediterranean world, but it is clearly her
Phoenician incarnation that is the original for Pynchon's fictional V. The
reason for this lies in the special nature of Phoenician culture. The
Phoenicians were, of course, the Western world's first great explorers and
colonizers. At its peak, their vast influence is believed to have extended
as far as the British Isles and included, not incidentally, the island of
Malta. How fitting, then, to think of the late nineteenth-century world of
the British Empire into which Victoria Wren was born as returning the effect
of that colonizing process so many thousands of years later. [...]

So if Astarte (Phoenicia) became Aphrodite (Greece), who in turn became
Venus (Rome), what became of Venus? Her fate was precisely that of all the
other Roman gods and goddesses: her existence was superseded by the rise of
Christianity. And given the importance attached by the book to the ideas of
Henry Adams, it would seem that the next link in the chain must be occupied
by the Virgin Mary. Except that here one must be careful to distinguish the
ideas of what was admittedly Pynchon's most important source from the highly
original and complex twist he gave to them. While it is true that the Virgin
forms a significant part of the next link, she is by no means the
centerpiece. No doubt Pynchon diminished her for two reasons. Firstly, he
needed a way to more closely fuse the end of pantheism in Rome with the rise
of Christianity. The devotion to the Virgin that gave rise to, among other
things, the majestic cathedrals that so fascinated Adams was really a
phenomenon of the later Middle Ages - the Gothic period in architecture did
not even begin until almost the thirteenth century. Secondly, and far more
importantly, it was the story of Christ, not Mary, that gave rise to
Christendom. However, in order to fully appreciate the significance of this
latter point, once again the reader must know more than what the book makes
explicit. In this case, it is something of the history of the institution
that does form the next link in the chain of motive forces traced: the Roman
Catholic Church. It is hardly necessary to rehearse the specific emphasis
that V. places on Roman Catholicism. [...] Readers may wish to substitute
"Vatican" for "Roman Catholic" with an eye on the book's title, but this
initial is not so much of literal importance as it is a convenient symbol
around which the larger concept has been organized. That concept, as I have
already shown, has been carefully crafted from any number of sources, some
of which Pynchon refers to directly and others that he didn't need to refer
to since the information is generally available. Because Pynchon rejects the
more obvious choice of the Virgin Mary in favor of Christ, and in particular
the story of Christ as advanced by the Roman Catholic Church, it may at
first be thought that the idea of V. loses consistency after its first three
phases. [...] Following V.'s transition through the historical episodes is
thus of critical importance not only in determining what kind of motive
force she has been, but ultimately what kind she has become. In this regard
one of the first things we learn about Victoria Wren is that she is English
Catholic, and not a member of the Church of England. The resonance of this
point would seem hard to miss now, since even at the end of the nineteenth
century, when the first two historical episodes take place, England was, and
had been for hundreds of years, a nation whose established religion was
Protestant. What is unmistakable here is that V. begins her new life as part
of a diminished class that still retains, however tenuously, its old
religious ties to Rome in a country that has long since formally severed
them. 

[...] V.'s metamorphosis is taken up far less subtly in the later historical
episodes through the depiction of her "obsession with bodily incorporating
little bits of inert matter" (488). Actually, Stencil's father, we are told
in the epilogue, had noticed this characteristic 20 years earlier: "she
would never let him touch or remove" (488) a five-toothed ivory comb. Roger
B. Henkle points out that a similar comb was traditionally worn by Venus
(100) - information he traces through the novel's reference to Robert
Graves's The White Goddess. As for her more recent incarnation, by 1919 she
has added a star sapphire to her navel, as well as a glass eye which she
eagerly displays to Stencil's father before pushing off from Malta for Fiume
in time to be a part of that city's brief seizure by the Italian forces led
by Gabriele d'Annunzio. In 1922 Vera Meroving, as she next calls herself,
appears in South West Africa, where her sexuality takes a sadomasochistic
turn as part of a group of besieged holdovers from the period of Germany's
ruthless colonization of that country. Ultimately, in her most shadowy guise
of all, V. returns to Maim, where she appears during World War II as a
mysterious figure known simply as the Bad Priest. There the full extent of
her obsession with replacing body parts with artificial ones is revealed
when what's left of her dying body is effectively disassembled by a band of
little children whose own insensitivity to suffering is of no small account.
One particularly noteworthy detail here is the tattoo of the crucifixion of
Christ uncovered on the bare skull after V.'s wig is cheerfully removed
(342). Careful readers will remember that crucifixion was also the subject
carved into her ivory comb, although in that case the victims were five
British soldiers executed in 1883 during the successful Mahdist rebellion in
Khartoum (167). Finally, it should be noted that all this takes place in a
novel that begins, not accidentally, on Christmas Eve.

[...] Clearly, V.'s metamorphosis has something to do with the idea of a
human being resembling a machine, or perhaps a machine resembling a human
being. As for the second question, the fact that V.'s "death" occurs against
the enormous backdrop of the European theater of World War II can be very
easily and confidently understood, if once again the reader is willing to
follow the clues. Here the most important clue is an odd detail in the
description of V. as she metamorphoses through the historical episodes. That
detail is the clock mechanism in the iris of the glass eye already acquired
by 1919, a mechanism that can be found in any accurate description of the
chief components for what came to be known as Vergeltungswaffe Eins, or the
V-1. It was, of course, Kurt Mondaugen who, after his youthful days spent in
South West Africa where he met V., went on to work as part of the
engineering team at Peenemunde that developed and built this so-called
Vengeance Weapon. This weapon, by use of a magnetic compass and a clock
mechanism, was able to fly without the aid of a pilot over a preset distance
of up to 150 miles before diving toward its target. By locking the missile's
elevators and diving it into the ground, the clock mechanism effectively
replaced the need for a pilot's eyes.

[...] Pursuing the case a bit further, it would seem no coincidence that V.
first exhibits in 1919 what turns out to be the most compelling piece of
circumstantial evidence regarding her epigenesis, given the significance of
that year in the history of rocket science. For that was the landmark year
in which Robert H. Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, published the
treatise "A Method for Reaching Extreme Altitudes," which laid the
foundation for the German V-weapon program. Similarly, it is probably no
accident that Pynchon had Fausto Maijstral (the last person to see V. alive)
and his fellow aspiring poets dub themselves "the Generation of '37," since
the same appellation might just as readily be applied to Kurt Mondaugen and
his fellow engineers at Peenemunde who first began working at the huge
missile research center built there that same year (Klee 22). Such
connections abound in V., and it is one of the book's virtues that it
painstakingly seeks to reward the reader's curiosity in this way. At the
same time, remember that no single piece of evidence proves anything;
rather, it is in piecing more and more evidence together, as Stencil does,
that what begins as a working hypothesis eventually becomes a persuasive
answer that is never completely exhausted - V. is, after all, an ongoing
phenomenon.