V. the form? the function? the symbol? the methodology.

[Joseph Tracy]

V is the letter in the middle of Civil and appear twice at the  
beginning of War.

I think Pychon is trying among other things to find new effects and  
forms for narrative storytelling. It isn’t that he is throwing out a  
baby or even chucking much bathwater. The old forms are there  
aplenty : Allegorical visit to hell with Beatrice ( woman) giving a  
glimpse of  heaven, a detective story that finds a  surfeit of  
killers,  naturalism( nose job described in detail, symbolism is  
everywhere( V, machinery, the street, the underground, cars, ships,  
the killing of rats birds and Hereroes, nose job described in  
detail ) , Swiftian satire , the anthropological exploration of local  
dialects  culture and manners, historical writing, poetry, pop songs,  
mythology, surrealism, send ups .  The question becomes not so much  
what is it, as what isn’t it?

V is not about the soul or even about the individual.  It soon  
becomes apparent that in his V period at least Pynchon is skeptical  
about the very idea of the individual. V seems to actively strip away  
the props that hold together the self.  Characters are defined by  
their relations , their jobs, their  inherited mythos  and what they  
say and do in response to circumstances rather than by an inner  
narrative of growth and transformation or dramatic change of status  
through confrontation of fears which is the traditional stuff of  
dramatic fiction. There are 2 central journeys, These journeys follow  
the lives and quests of Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil. At first  
glance these 2 seem to be very different, upper and lower class,  
schlemiel and skilled researcher. Profane seems to have no past and  
no intentions for the future other than a vague interest in free  
pussy, escaping responsibility and deferring human feeling, that and  
passive observation. Stencil is  driven by his Father’s legacy of  
spying and through his father’s diary  becomes focused on a  
mysterious woman  named V. He ,like Profane, keeps a passive distance  
from his own experience talking in the 3rd person and rarely entering  
the narrative of his search. They are both very hard to locate as  
individuals, but their paths  can be seen to form the V structure in  
several ways: 1)  as 2 sides of a street or a street that splits. -   
The convergence to a point is that it is one street and that anything  
that happens, happens somewhere along a continuum. Benny and  
Stencil’s lives converge at several points. The split or  divergence  
is different directions  and branches  of a street or any of the  
differences that occur across a division , 2)  the two wings/arms/ 
lines of the letterV can be seen as making a kind of  equal balance  
of forces- interdependent symmetry and convergence- the yin yang of  
light/dark, male-female, chaos/pattern, form/space, wildness/ 
civilization, 3) the shape can also be seen as a descent followed by  
an ascent- the Dante allegory ( in V the ascent is an implied exit of  
the reader and return to the land of the living),4) One can also see  
it as two lines pointing down into the void , Dante’s descent without  
the ascent to Paradise but only glimpses of Beatrice and doors  
unopened, The inevitable triumph of entropy implied in the post  
Newtonian world view. In V Benny, the human yo yo goes nowhere;  
Stencil disappears in a freak accident involving a water spout  
( there she blows, Dave) 5) haploid cell in the gametic state: with  
the point of convergence being the potential point of creation of the  
diploid organism ( in V this union never takes place as a fulfillment  
of the journey of Stencil or Profane, though the possibility of life  
begotten is often glimpsed in grotesque aberration ( Veronica, the  
Rape of Fina, the rapes in the castle in  Namibia, the seduction of  
Esther by Schoenmaker ). A more hopeful congress may be implied in  
the  love of Paola’s parents,   or possibly Fina’s family. Generally  
though, apart from the surprising connections between various  
elements of Pynchon’s visionary first try as a novelist most of the  
impregnation is pretty dismal.

There is not much of a center to either journey. What happens instead  
is an energizing of the peripheral, all the life is in the other  
characters and places through which these 2 journeys pass.  
Illumination comes in bits and pieces through digressions that are  
constant and startling. Some passages startle with realism , some  
with surreal lunatic metaphor, some with parodic humor, but we are  
constantly forgetting the 2 characters whose life lines are moving us  
along the forks of the path.

Everywhere we go along either path one thing is constant and that is  
war. Characters are fighting it, ravaged by it, enriched by it,  
mentally and emotionally caught up in its spell. But is this a divine  
war? A battle between heaven and hell,  love and hate, darkness and  
light; or is it a civil war, a battle of our own making, its origins  
fully human? Well war is hard and I don’t know if V is fully up to  
such an inquiry though some of the battle scenes were among the most  
powerful I had ever read. Later after CoL49 , after putting some  
flesh on his characters and putting them through some changes he  
makes a second run in GR and Harpoons the great W hite W ar.   It is  
asthouh in V no one has a soul, and in GR everyone has a soul.  But  
he builds some interesting scaffolding in V. and that is where this  
whole thing started- the form by which he accomplishes his work.

  What I see as the unifying aspect of all Pynchon’s writing,  
introduced in V is  a kind of spiritual and secular democracy.  In  
this world every form, every kind of person, every layer of  
consciousness is given a voice. History speaks, the imaginary speaks,  
the unconscious speaks, the factual meets the mythic on level ground,  
the living meet the dead, the conspiracy meets the theorist.  Not  
only that,  but the  encyclopedic meets the unread dufus and the  
writer meets the reader halfway. The reader must make what meaning  
there is to be made of all this, can take what pleasure there is to  
be had, pockets stuffed or empty, glass empty, full or somewhere in  
between, drunk, sober or just a bit tipsy.  Pynchon shows you where  
his mind wondered, but not what to think or feel. Thanks Tom, I   
always kinda liked doin my own thinking, and feeling my own feelings,  
and  there’s plenty here to go on. OK I barely scratch the surface of  
the V thing and didn’t even mention the mystique of the missing  
feminine or the union of fecundity and machinery. I yield the floor.

I wrote an essay for John Carvill’s Oomska which has yet to be  
published called
Literary Democracy in a Three-Layer Cake:
An introduction to certain structural qualities of the novels of  
Thomas Pynchon.
This essay explains more clearly my views of how Pynchon builds his  
books. So John C, I’m wondering when the next issue might come out,  
cuz I’d like to put this idea on the table.









Mike Bailey:
Structure of V. - if there is a V. shape to it, if there are 2 wings...

then V. herself should be the point of the V. and there shouldn't be
anybody like her, but everybody else should have a duplicate.
Or it could be just pointing downward into  void, as the rocket is a  
kind of reverse V pointing up but must come down

If the 2 topmost points represent Benny and Sidney (or vice versa),
then perhaps all the other characters range between V and B or between
V and S on some kind of continuum

and does the positioning mean we can assume something like

Benny / left side of the V / lower class / left wing / the id / manual
labor / experiencing / younger

Sidney / right side of the V / upper class / right wing / the superego
/ theorizing / older

You can probably see how impaired is my ability to see the V. pattern
from these speculations...hope somebody else will elaborate more
satisfyingly


so, now for something completely different...okay, let me see now,  
harumph...

ancient genres: epic, dramatic, lyric, tragic, comic, pastoral,
something like that

having to do with, like, maybe,
a) why they are telling the story (theme, or what they are trying to
get across) (the deeper why, of course, (like, why try to get
something across?  if trying to get something across, why create
literature?  et al) isn't going to be a literary term but a
philosophical one)
b) how they are telling it (who to, where, oral or written or acted out)


newer ones - these two -
romance like romance of the rose, or Faerie Queene allegory symbolism
vs novel like, Don Quijote where the story "makes points" but
characters aren't pointers per se to something beyond themselves like
they might be in a romance?

- other new things since Greek times?

trunk poetry like Emily Dickinson

tv scripts
movie scripts
advertising scripts

but can we overlay the romance/novel distinction right over top of
modern/postmodern - completely different distinction, like Ulysses is
modernist romance, deliberately creating a symbolic universe, written
in the modernist style,
while maybe like, Princess Cassamassima or Man Without Characteristics
might be more of a modernist novel telling a tale and creating
characters?


Robin:
I think the Universal Binding Ingredient, the one that did not /could  
not sink in [for me] previously is Vheissu.

In every Pynchon tale, there is The Great Lost Place. Against the Day  
reaches for a different Vheissu, something akin to  Shangri-La.  
Inherent Vice points to the recent past, a pre-Manson L.A. Mason &  
Dixon points to that place called America before the Mason-Dixon line  
was drawn, the one that might have been if only . . .

I'm seeing a Lot of what is to become "Against the Day" in "V."

Seems like a compare and contrast will prove fruitful.

On Sep 2, 2010, at 5:21 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

I cannot hold V. in my head along the lines of the structure back-and- 
forth
postings. So, I dunno nothing re that.

But I do keep thinking of this re this read: I felt the nose job  
chapter was
like a separate set piece. Then someone
else felt another chapter was a separate set piece. That, too, seemed  
possible
to me.........then I o'erleaped (maybe)
mentally to thinking many are set pieces.....and then I think I  
remember some
scholar, maybe the guy who wrote
Understanding Pynchon or Tony Tanner hisself write that THAT was part  
of P's
point...............

That is, we try to make all the chapters cohere cuase that is what we  
do with
fiction but TRP---is this another postmodern
touchstone?---subverts that.  They, therefore history leading to the  
present,
don't cohere?



Also Misc. I am reminded from Shakespeare that Venus had Mars as her  
lover......



I think the Universal Binding Ingredient, the one that did not /could  
not sink in [for me] previously is Vheissu.

This little posting was lifted from the PynchonWiki for "V."

             Vheissu
             From The Modern Word (an excellent website for postmodern
             literature):
             Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen über das Land
             Ukkbar in Klein-Asien
             Johann Valentin Andreä Strassburg, Lazarus Zetzner, 1641.

             A very rare work of which only seven original copies  
survive,
             this fictional travelogue was written by J. V. Andreä, the
             purported author of Chymische Hochzeit Christiani
             Rosencreuzand "accidental" founder of the Rosicrucian
             movement. Author of several works involving imaginary
             communities and mystico-Christian utopias, including the
             Reipublicae Christianopolitanae Descriptio, Bemerkungen was
             an expansion of ideas first expressed in the  
Christianopolis,
             now projected onto an abstract philosophical country  
situated
             within the borders of present-day Iraq. While certainly  
of interest
             to Borges scholars and modern Rosicrucians,Bemerkungen is
             most notorious for its chapter on the ideal community of
             Vheissu, the major inspiration behind the infamous Zweite
             Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft. Better known to history as  
the
             Commune of Prague, the ZFG was an isolated group of
             philosophers, Rosicrucians, and Lutheran radicals who
             attempted to recreate the ideals of Vheissu by  
establishing a
             closed community outside Prague in 1773. Their experiment
             was a disaster, ending two years later in a spiral of  
cannibalism,
             violent orgies, and mass suicide. (For further details, see
             "Rosiges Glühen, Blutiges Kreuz," by Kristoph Gross, Der
             Annalen Metakarus, 1934, pp. 345-78; or "The Prague
             Commune and its Influence on DeSade's The 120 Days of
             Sodom," by Josephine Pinto, Lingua Franca, Vol 10/No. 3,  
April
             2000, pp. 22-25.)