V-2nd - 7: Fathers and Sons

[kelber at mindspring.com]

This chapter, after the opening scene with Stencil and Eigenvalue, seems to be Stencil's imagining of how his own father met up with V(ictoria Wren) in Florence, based on whatever stray facts he picked up on during his recent visit there.

Godolphin the Elder's legacy to Young Godolphin:  Vheissu (where or what is it?), a place of shifting shapes and colors, like living in a "madman's kaleidoscope."  Acid trip? Or a literary foray into magical realism?  Vheissu's no paradise - the name evokes fear, more than fantasy, and it's tied in with some sort of brewing apocalypse.

This closely parallels Stencil the Elder's legacy to Young Stencil: V., a woman of shifting shapes and identities, who may or may not be entirely human.  Stencil explores the idea that Vheissu (and, by extension, V.) may have been a fictional construct created as a metaphor for something far more sinister.  In his passing reference to V. in his diary, was Stencil's dad sending Young Stencil an oblique warning (about what?  WWII?  The Nuclear Age?  The Military-Industrial Complex?  Vague terrors of the horrors technology will wreak?)?  By the end of the chapter, though, Young Godolphin seems convinced that Vheissu is a real place, or a real conspiracy.  Young Stencil is convinced that V. is similarly real.  She's no metaphor, and, in fact, those are her teeth on Eigenvalue's shelf.

Just as the mountains of Vheissu lead directly to Antarctica, so this chapter of V. leads directly to ATD, where Pynchon brings up Shambhala ( which may exist under the sand) and revisits the idea of a hollow earth (via a Boys' Adventure story - the kind Godolphin senior might have spun to his son) and an unknown terror (this time from the North Pole).

Laura