V-2: 4 Nose Job

[Robin Landseadel]

The virtue of this little delay in the schedule—a chance to catch up.  
By next week I'll be returning to street level.

My very first shot/glance at V. must have been 1970, around the time  
Doc Sportello had his dreams of NBA championship rings for the Lakers  
dashed. There was a Mass-Market copy of "V." lying around the home of  
Phyllis Sanders, who my father was about to marry [his third wife].  
The copy of "V." belonged to her son Bill, still in college. I asked  
if he read it, he answered along these lines—"No, it's one of those  
books folks pretend to read to look smart, kinda like Joyce." Would I  
want to do a thing like that? Christmas on Old East Main is forever  
burned into my memory. The first time through, I bailed at the nose  
job. I've bailed on "V." a few more times, finally finishing the book  
sometime after "Slow Learner" came out.

Of course, this is forty years later, I've read some pretty ugly  
things since then, the ugliest perhaps by Pynchon. I suppose there's  
no point in feeling squeamish about chapter four, and yet the chapter  
continues to produce a unique quality of queasiness in these quarters.  
In part we are present at a workshop for the Courier's Tragedy, a  
variety of "Invasion into and colonization of the human body,  
especially female", one of the central themes of "V." working  
alongside echos of Nazi torture and some of the most unprofessional  
behavior in a medical setting imaginable. But there is also a display  
of the kind of self-loathing that makes these medical practices  
popular and profitable.

What seems to be on display here is Esther's desire to be more like a  
machine—Rotwang and Maria from  "Metropolis" comes to mind, but the  
relationship is flipped, as if Maria wants to become the man-machine:

	"Now," gently, like a lover, "I'm going to saw off your hump."
	Esther watched his eyes as best she could, looking for some-
	thing human there. Never had she felt so helpless. Later she
	would say, "It was almost a mystic experience. What religion is
	it-one of the Eastern ones-where the highest condition we can
	attain is that of an object-a rock. It was like that; I felt myself
	drifting down, this delicious loss of Estherhood, becoming more
	and more a blob, with no worries, traumas, nothing: only Being .... "

"V." is published in 1963, there's still echos of the Cuban Missile  
crisis ringing in the air. TRP, working at Boeing at the time, must  
have felt a convulsive shudder at the thought of his involvement in  
the "Death Machine" that very nearly pulled a coup de grâce on Mother  
Earth. There's a different sort of apocalypse on the cover of  
"Vineland" but it's related. Again, this sort of rape of the earth,  
this perverse sort of "Anarchist Miracle," is witnessed in "Against  
the Day" via the Tunguska Event.

So many scenes of the "inert" being forced into living flesh in "V."  
is concerned with specifically female flesh.  There's more of this in  
Trench's "Stick it in, pull it out", more later at the ballet, more of  
it in the dissembling of "V." at the end of the book. I really don't  
know if this is in Deleuze and Guattari territory or if it's more  
along the lines of the Gaia theory, but there's a host of metaphors  
here that equal rape. But in Thomas Pynchon's mind the words "Land"  
and the "Rape" are usually found close to each other.