VV(18) - The Back Room

[David Morris]

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(410) If she were Victoria Wren even Stencil couldn’t remain all unstirred 
by the ironic failure that her life was moving toward, too rapidly by that 
prewar August ever to be reversed.  The Forentine spring, the young 
entrepenuese  with all spring’s hope in her virtu, with all her girl’s 
(410)	If she were Victoria Wren even Stencil couldn’t remain all unstirred 
by the ironic failure that her life was moving toward, too rapidly by that 
prewar August ever to be reversed.  The Florentine spring, the young 
entrepreneuse  with all spring’s hope in her virtu, with all her girl’s 
faith that Fortune (if only her skill, her timing held true) could be 
brought under control;  that Victoria was gradually being replaced by V.;  
something entirely different, for which the young century had no name.  We 
all get involved to an extent in the politics of slow dying, but poor 
Victoria had become intimate also with the Things in the Back Room.
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This text is a big key into the character of V.  The “Back Room” is where 
she started toward her disastrous end.  How did Victoria become “intimate” 
with this Back Room’s Things and not merely somewhat politically aware?  I 
think there are two implied answers to this question:

First, what happens in the back rooms of human politics?  It’s where the 
deals are really made, between the Big Boys with their chimney pipe cigars.  
If Stencil's/Pynchon's V. is Henry Adams’s Dynamo, then it's these boys who 
have fashioned her from the previously sacred/mystical Virgin.  In Henry’s 
model She, the Dynamo, is not the product of her own making.  THEY would 
replaced the human-parts of her anatomy with their inanimate Dynamo-parts, 
making her into a Freudian fetish, in order to gain control over a scary 
spiritual force.  The fetish is a form of mastery over the original, and it 
is performed by another over his object of desire.   V. is the object of 
desire.  Another entity would have to perform her enfetishment.

But Pynchon gives us no indication of an outside force ever bearing down 
upon Victoria.  By all indications she is a very independent woman, and thus 
we look to her behavior or her heart for clues to how she took the path 
toward self-enfetishment.  This break from Henry’s “Education” is fine.  In 
fact I’m relieved that Pynchon is not merely constructing in _V._ a 
dramatization of a chapter from Adam's "Education".

I think the key to V.’s transformation is revealed in the quote at the top, 
where V.’s ultimate end and her beginning are linked.  It all began in 
Florence.  What happened there? Was it there that Victoria first became 
intimate with Things in the Back Room?

When we think of a back room there is another implication, especially when 
in connection with the politics of dying.  A temple also has its back room, 
and it also is the place where the power resides.  For Moses's Temple it was 
the “Holy of Holies,” the place where the “Ark” resided and entry there 
forbidden to all except a very special Priest.  In _V._ I think this place 
is Vheissu.

Vheissu was first revealed to Victoria in Florence by a very shaken Hugh 
Godolphin.  And later what is it Vera Meroving wants from old Hugh?

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(248)	“Weren’t we both in Florence then?”
“In Florence… we…” quizzical, weak.
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Veronica/Vera/V. is revealed to us in the siege party as being a collector 
of other’s memories.  Almost a memory Vampire.

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(248)	“Don’t you see?  The siege.  It’s Vheissu.  It’s finally happened.” 
[…]
“Godolphin laughed at her.  “There’s been a war, Fraulein.  Vheissu was a 
luxury.  We can no longer afford the likes of Vheissu.”
“But the need,” she protested, “its void.  What can fill that?”
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V.’s life began its search for Vheissu with Hugh’s confessions in Florence.  
That is what propelled her perpetually into the realm of the Tourist (until 
she falls in love for a spell).  She travels the world in search of her 
Vheissu just as Stencil does for his V.   Later at Foppl’s Old Godolphin 
advises her that it’s time to “grow up” as a necessary counterpoint to 
Vheissu-searching, and in this we find the option of Puritanism mentioned a 
few times throughout V.  (This Puritanism, BTW, is also linked to the Whole 
Sick Crew’s disease by way of “Jacobean etiology.”)  Following the Puritan 
path is pitted against “delving deeper,” which is the path V. has chosen.  
She takes the Hero's path.

Both Stencil and V. are on a quest, which cast them in the quasi-hero’s 
role.  They are reaching out into the void for… something… to fill the void. 
  If V. had realized that the end of her quest would mean her own demise, 
she might have veered off into Puritanism, but the end of that would have 
been only a walking, animate death.  So she continues on in her quest, from 
siege to shining siege.


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