Prising some Character and Emotion out of Pynchon's Books

[Campbel Morgan]

I found the Benny Profane sections of V. easy reading and the Stencil
sections difficult reading. And, although the two are also combined in
the novel and need each other, one could certainly read the Benny
Chapters and ignore or skim the Stencil ones. This, from my
experience, is what students do when they read V.

J Kerry Grant's effort, _A Companion to V._ addresses this problem. In
the Introduction Grant discusses the problems inherent in reading
postmodern fiction from a modern stance. This language is a bit dated
since postmodernism, at least as it applies to literature, is
modernism. But this argument over technical terms does not destroy his
point: the modern reader (McHale) will have a great deal of difficulty
reading a postmodern text, and this is one, if the most importnat
point of postmodern texts. As Grant notes, if we take a modern stance
and we follow Benny or Stencil, we will either learn not a goddamn
thing or misread the novel.