V-2nd - 2: Summary, Part II

[Ian Livingston]

> Part II opens with more clock imagery.  The Whole Sick Crew's having a party that proceeds like an inanimate clock, unwinding, "seeking some easing of its own tension, some equilibrium."

Isn't this a rehash of "Entropy"? And, given the importance of the
role entropy plays in CoL49 (such a short time later), it might
relate. Is the party scene representative, perhaps, of social,
communication entropy? Parties, after all, are rarely hotbeds of
ideas. The steady temperature outside in the story (37 degrees) as the
scene inside shifts without advancing is pretty clearly adapted here.
I don't know--is the clock a symptom / symbol of social entropy? Is it
fair to consider communication entropy a part of P's mindset at the
time he wrote this?

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 11:21 AM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Chapter 2 - II:
>
> Part II opens with more clock imagery.  The Whole Sick Crew's having a party that proceeds like an inanimate clock, unwinding, "seeking some easing of its own tension, some equilibrium."
>
> It's at this party that we first meet Herbert Stencil, or Young Stencil the world adventurer, as he likes to think of himself.  He's been hanging out at the party for a while, creeping Rachel out with his apparent obsession with Paola.
>
> His interest in Paola, though, isn't sexual.  It's because she's Maltese.
>
> We learn something of Stencil's timeline:
>
> He was born in 1900, the year Queen Victoria died, making him about 55 now.  He was raised solely by his father, a Foreign Office attache.  His father never spoke of his mother, and Stencil assumed she'd died in childbirth, run off with someone, committed suicide, or something of that nature.  In 1919, Old Stencil died in Malta investigating the June Disturbances.
>
> Now Pynchon switches to dramatic play format, describing a scene that took place in Malta (presumably) in 1946.  It's a conversation between Stencil and a lady friend, Margravine di Chiave Lowenstein, at her villa.
>
> We learn from the conversation that Stencil likes to talk about himself in the third person, that Stencil's always on the move, and that Stencil's father left him a tattered journal with the following intriguing entry, written in Florence in April of 1899:
>
> "There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected.  Not who, but what: what is she.  God grant that I may never be called upon to write the answer, either here or in any official report."
>
> Marg[ravine]:  Is it she you are pursuing?  Seeking?
> Sten[cil]:  You'll ask next if he believes her to be his mother.
> The question is ridiculous.
>
> Pynchon goes back to novel format, though he's apparently relating what Stencil told Margravine that day in Malta.  We learn more of Stencil's biography.  After his fathers death, Stencil had bummed around Europe and Africa, freeloading off acquaintances of his late father's and working, variously, as a croupier in southern France, a plantation manager in East Africa, and a bordello manager in Greece.  He'd supplemented his income with poker games and civil service jobs.
>
> In 1939, working for the Foreign Office, he was sent on various missions in North Africa, and remained there until the end of the war.  Sitting in a cafe in Oran in 1945, Stencil leafs through his father's old journal and reads the reference to V. for the first time.
>
> Since then, he's been a man obsessed; scarcely sleeping as he travels the world trying to dig up old associates of his father; desperately searching for anyone who might know anything about V.  He'd come to NY on a tip that Dr. Schoenmaker might know something.  He hasn't been able to learn anything from him, but he's not giving up just yet.  Other people he needs to interview are Chiclitz the munitions king and Eigenvalue the physician.
>
> It's Esther who's invited Stencil to this party, which is at the apartment of Fergus Mixolydian, who claims to be "the laziest living being in Nueva York."  Other Crew members present are:
>
> Raoul, a television writer who claims to be disgusted with the commercialism of the medium.  Slab, a painter who describes himself as a "Catatonic Expressionist" and his work as "the ultimate in non-communication."  Melvin, who plays liberal folk songs on his guitar.  Rachel, Esther and Paola, one Debby Sensay, and various unnamed others.
>
> After Stencil leaves the party, Esther picks up a young man whom she sees reflected in the window, watching both of their reflections.  He's a frat boy looking for whatever it is he thinks he's missing.  She goes through the mechanistic motions of a pick-up.
>
> Later, at the V-Note club, jazz saxophonist McClintic Sphere plays to a crowd of college kids and locals who get, don't get, or pretend to get his music.  Crew members in attendance are Paola, Winsome, Charisma and Fu.  They're awestruck by Sphere, comparing him to the late Charlie "Bird" Parker, whom Pynchon eulogizes in a narratorial aside.  Outside, the February wind, "in its own permanent gig," blows.
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."