VV(11): Stencilized

[Dave Monroe]

"had become, as Eigenvalue put it, Stenclized" (V.,
Ch. 8, Sec. iv, p. 228)

>From Peter L. Cooper, Signs and Symptoms: Thomas
Pynchon and the Contemporary World (Berkeley: U of Cal
P, 1983), Ch. 6, "Metaphor, Model Building, and
Paranoia: A Thrust at Truth and a Lie," pp. 153-73 ...

Positivism or no, one should not reject Stencil's (or
Mondaugen's) account of events; rather, one should
accept it provisionally.  On the one hand, V. does
become an obsession: her apparent ovements may be the
result of countless accidents.  But on the other hand,
underlying randomness will add up to overriding
regularity.  Macro events build from accidental,
haphazard micro events, but this does not mean that
the macro events are accidental and haphazard
themselves.  The course of a system can be perfectly
regular and predictable even though its individual
components are not.  It can also be mythologized or
metaphorically explained in a way that does not
misrepresent the nature and degree of its regularity. 
The perception of pattern or chaos will depend purely
on vantage point, but no one vantage point is
definitive.  Who can say that the miucro view is more
accurate, valid, or real than the macro view?  Each
has its own validity, depending on what one is
viewing.  Herbert Stencil observes not the micro
underpinnings of one Situation so much as the macro
motion of Western civilization.  The question is not
whether he fabricates, but whether his fabrications
allow for some insight. (159-60)

Pynchon did not make Stencil such a compltete fool or
paranoiac as many readers find him, for to destry
entirely his crdibility or threat of discovery would
eviscerate the fiction.  The crucial and
characteristic tension between order and disorder
could not exist if Pynchon debunked one possibility
altogether.  Coincidence, echo and deja vu are part of
the fictional texture, leading characcters and reader
alike to feel more than know that malicious design may
camouflage itself as chance. (160)

With each novel, paranoia becomes more and more
"operational" and They become more and more plausible,
but even in V. one sense that Something beyond the
control of ordinary people is happening and that
Someone invisible and higher up is making it happen. 
One minor character quips: "History, the prioverb
says, is made at night.  The European civil servant
normally sleeps at night.  what waits in his In basket
to confron him at nine in the morning is history.  He
doesn't fight it, he tries to coexist with irt" (V.,
p. 215).  (161)

Thanks to kai again, as Eddins cites part of the
above, reminding me to haul this out as well ...

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