Language & Neutrality in V.

[cathy ramirez]

  ELH 65.2 (1998) 503-521 Imperium, Misogyny, and
Postmodern  Parody in Thomas Pynchon's V. 

BY Stefan Mattessich. 

  "No one who reads Thomas Pynchon can deny the force
and inventiveness of his prose. His prolix imagination
verges on the uncanny, and his mastery of various
discourses awes all who experience it. But if Pynchon
is an exuberant writer, he is so only by virtue of a
counterforce acting upon that forcefulness,
interrupting its flows in particular ways--cutting
into a dramatic sequence with an absurd song,
modulating from a clipped comic diction and tone to
epic
sentences a page long, mingling tragedy with
pornography, melodrama with slapstick. The diffraction
of modes and genres through the disjointed narratives
of V. reflects a highly organized, crystalline
structure that is nonetheless anarchic, patterned and
intricate yet loose-jointed and expansive."
   
  A subversion of expenditure takes place within the
mutations of narrative form, undermining the illusions
of continuity and depth, frustrating the possibilities
of coherence and closure. A peculiar emptying out of
content attends this subversion in V., marking in the
language a lightness and strange insubstantiality that
is often difficult to gauge. This quality in Pynchon's
prose corresponds to what Baudrillard calls a logic of
simulation, in which, through successive orders of
abstraction, the "real" withdraws into a permanent
elsewhere, and systems of meaning (signs, images,
discourses) no longer bear any relation to a stable
referent, but instead float in the medium of their own
"divine irreference," a hyper-real which "envelops the
whole edifice of representation." 1 This breakdown of
meaning is variously described by Baudrillard as a
process of  "satellitization," as a proliferation of
signs incapable of dissimulating their own hollowness,
as an implosion or a "non-distinction of active and
passive" opposites, as a neutralization or
"annihilation of stakes" in the political
and social spheres. 2 In the postmodern world
Baudrillard describes, All events are to be read in
REVERSE (my caps), where one perceives . . . that all
. . . things arrive too late, with an overdue history,
a lagging spiral, that they have exhausted their
meaning long in advance and only survive as an
artificial effervescence of signs, that all these
events
follow on illogically from one [End Page 503] another,
with a total equanimity toward the greatest
inconsistencies . . .  --thus the whole newsreel of
the "present" gives the  sinister impression of
kitsch, retro and porno all at the same time.3 

Although Baudrillard is here speaking about the effect
of the news media on contemporary culture, it could be
said that V. exemplifies this exhaustion, this
artificial effervescence of signs exactly. Pynchon's
novel enacts a search for meaning or substance behind
the initial V., which stands for a whole range of
possible signifiers, partial objects, fetishes,
puzzles, secret codes,and for the novel itself: V. as
the signifier of the desire for "real" or authentic
writing. But in what McHoul and Wills call V.'s
"eternal condemnation to the signifier," the necessary
failure of this voicing becomes itself an obsession of
the text.

Regards, 

Cathy calling attention to herself  and her anger
again but I did smile all night as I danced with
everry man in  Chibcha, including my husband who is
going to have my baby. Hoping for a girl baby, we''l
name her Tara. 




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