V-2nd - 7: Victoria Wren, late of Lardwick-in-the-Fen

[Ian Livingston]

I agree, and hope you will interpret me correctly when I suggest that
this, too, is a layer of the cake. So far, in my readings of P. and
his influences, it just hasn't proved adequate to take his work at any
one interpretive level. Reduction does not foster understanding. Of
course, neither does complexity, but the experience is richer to my
way of thinking.

2010/9/18 János Székely <miksaapja at gmail.com>:
> "Are these three different women?  Two?  One?  What's Pynchon doing here? "
>
> One. This is a case of the "unreliable narrator" or unreliable POV
> taken to ironic lengths. P. Aieul, the waiter tries to make sense of
> the scene he watches and overhears) and these are three versions of
> how he interprets it. The embryonic  "Under the Rose", which is much
> closer to the conventions of spy fiction is much clearer or at least
> simpler both plotwise and in showing where the perceptions are wrong.
>
> János
>
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 12:01 AM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> OK, we meet Victoria Wren again, wiser after her affair with Goodfellow.  Here's something I hadn't noticed in Chapter 3 during the first go-round:
>>
>> p. 63 (Harper Perennial):  "The peer's [Alistair Wren's] wife - Victoria - was meanwhile being blackmailed by Bongo-Shaftsbury, who knew of her own secret anarchist sympathies."
>>
>> A few sentences later:
>>
>> "Bongo-Shaftsbury's avenue of approach would be through the glamorous actress, Victoria, Wren's mistress, posing as his wife to satisfy the English fetish of respectability."
>>
>> Later, we meet Wren's naive 18-year-old daughter Victoria, who has the fling with Goodfellow and resurfaces in Chapter 7.
>>
>> Are these three different women?  Two?  One?  What's Pynchon doing here?  Suggesting that these Victoria's aren't human, but some sort of robot that can be issued as needed?  Or one very devious spy playing wife, glamorous actress/mistress/, and naive daughter?
>>
>> Thoughts, anyone?
>>
>> Laura
>>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."