Existentialism in V

[John Bailey]

I've always thought V was heavily influenced by existentialist thought, but 
that feeling began to fade away in the last few years. I realise now that I 
first read V. shortly after reading lots of Sartre's fiction and dipping 
into Being & Nothingness alongside bits and pieces of other works, so that 
probably affected my reading.

But the sort of stuff I read *into* the novel (V.) included...

*) a literalisation of the Sartrean idea of Bad Faith as "regarding oneself 
not as a free person but as an object", in this case, the mirror of Benny's 
Bad Faith and V.s actual self-transformation into an object.

*) Fausto & Stencil's messing around with identities as a very 
existentialist idea of identity as a role, a performance for the self (this 
isn't just an existentialist idea of course)

*) Sartre's refutation of the idea of the unconscious seems to play around 
the edges

*) The inescapability, the necessity, of freedom, seems a good framework 
through which to read the paranoia/anti-paranoia matrix in the early works 
of P.

*) The subject/object dialectic Sartre harps on about also seems to be a 
recurrent image in V., here inflected through a complex notion of the 
animate/inanimate relationship.

For more information and baking tips, see the Sartre Cookbook:
http://www.icemcfd.com/wayne/sartre-cookbook.html
"I have realized that the traditional omelet form (eggs and cheese) is 
bourgeois. Today I tried making one out of cigarette, some coffee, and four 
tiny stones. I fed it to Malraux, who puked. I am encouraged, but my journey 
is still long. "

Also, I've been reading Robert Coover's "Pinocchio in Venice", because I 
found it on sale second hand for a bargain bin price, and I'm really 
enjoying it in a v. V. way (which is in fact mentioned by Anthony Burgess in 
a back-cover blurb (V., that is, not my enjoyment, of which Mr Burgess is 
presumably unaware))

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