Keep cool but care :)

Ultimately, an immensely depressing and kinda frightening read, but in good postmodern fashion this is presented with such whimsy, such insanely creative energy, and such hilarious, genuinely hilarious prose and bonkers narrative that it’s definitely my favorite Pynchon I’ve read

So I made it through the first novel by Thomas Pynchon, also the first I have read of his novels. If you have never read it and you look at the Goodreads summary above, it looks straightforward enough. It is not!

I felt lost for quite a while; lots of characters and two time lines that pay little attention to letting you know what happened when. There are a ton of wikis for V. on the web but I did not use them that much. After all, a new reader in 1963 had no wikis, so I pretended I was one of them. Eventually I fell into whatever groove there was to be had and went along for the ride.

The parts about Benny Profane and the Whole Sick Crew take place mostly in New York City in 1955. All very beat sensibility and Cold War ennui. Quite an unsavory bunch they are. Even though the European/North Africa parts were way more confusing, I liked those parts better. They had a spy thriller essence to them and several incidents took place in Alexandria, a city I have a fondness for from reading Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. It is nice to have somewhere to feel at home when one is reading a chopped up, confusing story.

In the end, I felt it had been worth my time to read such an iconic book by an author revered by so many. I am actually looking forward to reading more Pynchon. His style reminded me of Michael Chabon whom I love. Also I found echoes of certain Beat authors I read in my 1950s lists.

One other thing: I was reading V. concurrently with Norman Mailer's Presidential Papers. Both were published in 1963 and the parallel ideas and sentiments and views about America at that time in both books were startling. I don't know if the two knew each other or ever hung out, but for sure they were reading the same stuff and thinking along the same neural pathways.

I have about 10 books left on my 1963 reading list and I am getting weary of the year, but V. was a breath of fresh air and a harbinger of things to come. The same thing happened when I was reading the 1940s and 1950s lists. About midway through each decade, I began to feel a shift with the older styles falling away the new ideas and concerns popping up.

I created My Big Fat Reading Project with the idea that I could learn about the whole big picture of the years I have lived by reading the important books of each one. I am thrilled over and over as I keep finding this turning out to be true.

V. is a cross-section of the first half of the 20th century as understood by paranoist/entropist extraordinare Thomas Pynchon.

In many ways, this book reminded me of Adam Curtis’s most recent documentary series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head. Curtis and Pynchon are two old-school leftists (well, that's my guess; neither of them is open about their political beliefs) who share similar concerns about the modern world and the rise of neoliberalism. At the very least, they share two: the lack of grand unifying narratives making all information equally plausible, engendering paranoia; and what room the spread of technology leaves for humanity in society.

V. touches upon the crumbling of grand narratives and man’s subsequent drifting into individualism, a free-for-all chapter in human history in which each person seeks his own version of the truth, based on whims, suspicions and manias.

As is typical with Pynchon, there are several themes dispersed throughout, the most notable of which seemed to be dehumanisation. Throughout the novel, the narrator constantly highlights the way the ‘inanimate’ (Pynchon’s word; I take it to broadly but not exactly mean ‘technology’, though it might be more closely related to Heidegger’s ‘tool’) is encroaching upon on our lives, this being made most explicit through several characters that I can only describe as steampunk cyborgs, with eccentric glass eyes, protheses and dentures.

Still, this is early Pynchon and I think this theme was presented a bit sloppily in light of his subsequent ouvre. At first, it seems a personal mania of Bennie Profane, but as the book advances we find these observations being made by a wide array of characters, both in the 1950’s timeline and in the early 20th century timeline - which was confusing. You can make it a running theme on the state of the post-industrial world or you can make it a character’s obsession. Making it both weakens the point.

Could the same story have been told and the same ideas conveyed in fewer pages? Yes, but then it wouldn’t be Pynchon. And he is one of few authors I feel compelled to humour.

You will want to abandon the book several times throughout, but I think it is worth reading to the end. The epilogue ties up a lot of loose ends, both plotwise and thematically - which I honestly was not expecting and was quite thankful for, as it made the journey feel more worthwhile.

How Hard Can It Possibly Be?

"V" isn't so much a difficult novel to read - it is after all just words, most of which are familiar - as one in which it is sometimes hard to understand what is going on and why.

What does it mean? Does it have to mean anything? How does it all connect?

Ironically, if not intentionally, the inability to determine what and why, as well as who, is part of its design. Pynchon mightn't want to answer all the questions he or life asks.

However, that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of food for thought in the novel.

Pynchon actually tells us a lot all of the time. Like "Ulysses", there are lots of hints and clues and allusions, and it's easy to miss them, if you're not paying attention to the flow of the novel and taking it all in. It's definitely a work that benefits from multiple readings.

Characters Both Sacred and Profane

"V" starts with one of two protagonists, the schlemiel Benny Profane, on Christmas Eve, 1955.

On the anniversary of the sacred day upon which a Virgin, Mary, gave birth to Christ (and thus started what would become Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant), Profane is wearing black levis, a suede jacket, sneakers and a big cowboy hat, a sort of bohemian uniform at the time.

He drops into the Sailors' Arms, which welcomes sailors from the tempestuous sea onto solid ground. For them, it's a dream come true, where the barmaids "all love to screw" and "remind you that every day is Christmas Eve".

This tavern is a haven and safe harbour. The big-breasted women here provide comfort and succour to men, something we can easily get used to and take for granted.

A Form Guide to Stencil

Sixty pages later, Pynchon introduces us to the second protagonist, Herbert Stencil, a man who refers to himself in the third person, which allows him to create a repertoire of bad faith or inauthentic identities (or Sartrean "impersonations").

He has no one solid persona, but somehow the ability to think of himself as and be not just the third person, but a first, a second, a fourth and a fifth permits him to function reasonably adequately (if not always normally) for a male, and so the multiple personalities "keep Stencil in his place".

When we meet him, however, his "place" is not static, it's dynamic. He is on a single-minded quest to find evidence of a woman named V. who he believes once knew his deceased father:

"As spread thighs are to the libertine, flights of migratory birds to the ornithologist, the working part of his tool bit to the production machinist, so was the letter V to young Stencil.

"He would dream perhaps once a week that it had all been a dream, and that now he’d awakened to discover the pursuit of V. was merely a scholarly quest after all, an adventure of the mind, in the tradition of The Golden Bough or The White Goddess."

With these V-shaped analogies and the allusion to these non-fiction works (is "V." itself just such a scholarly quest?), Pynchon gives us some insights into the myth and mystery and significance of "V".

The next paragraph gives us even more clues as to the nature of the pursuit or quest in general:

"But soon enough he’d wake up the second, real time, to make again the tiresome discovery that it hadn’t really ever stopped being the same simple-minded, literal pursuit; V. ambiguously a beast of venery, chased like the hart, hind or hare, chased like an obsolete, or bizarre, or forbidden form of sexual delight.

"And clownish Stencil capering along behind her, bells ajingle, waving a wooden, toy oxgoad. For no one’s amusement but his own."

In Pynchon's next novel, "The Crying of Lot 49", a woman, Oedipa Maas, would be the subject in and of the quest. She would be the one doing the detective work. Here, a male is the subject and a woman is the object of the quest or pursuit.

While both Oedipa and Stencil take their quests seriously, they meet with mixed success (perhaps a hallmark of a post-modern fiction). However, Pynchon seems to venerate Oedipa more highly. For all his earnestness, profundity and third person pretension, Stencil is a clown or a fool to match Profane's picaresque schlemiel.

"A Beast of Venery"

We all know the word "venereal", but how often do we see its root, "venery" (which means sexual indulgence or the pursuit of or hunt for sexual activity)?

The quest for man, if not necessarily for Stencil, is a quest for sexual pleasure, for sexual delight, for the sexual conquest of woman.

Stencil is looking for one woman. However, because she is of his father's generation and vintage, you have to ask whether in reality he is trying (potentially on behalf of all men) to understand the mystery of sexual attraction, the mystery of womanhood and the place of women in society and, if only from a male perspective, the role of woman in a man's life.

The Birth of Venus

From an etymological perspective, the word "venery" derives from the Latin "veneris", which in turn derives from the Roman god of love and sex, Venus, who in turn was modelled on the Greek god, Aphrodite.

The connotation of pursuit is thought to come from the resemblance of the word to the Latin "venari", which means to hunt.

Not coincidentally, the Botticelli painting "The Birth of Venus" features in the novel.

According to Robert Graves, Venus was also adapted from the pagan sea-goddess, Marian, who was often disguised as a merry-maid or mermaid. Suffice it to say, this Venus rose from the sea, hence the shell in the painting.

If we go back further in time, we meet another goddess Astarte, whom the Egyptians worshipped as a goddess of war and tenacity, while the Semites worshipped her as a goddess of love and fertility.

The Greeks would later adapt Astarte as the basis of Aphrodite (on the way to the Latin Venus). It is also linked to the goddesses and names Astoreth, Ishtar and Esther.

Esther is the name of a character in the novel, (partly Jewish, she gets a nose job in an attempt by her plastic surgeon who wishes to make her look more Irish), while a model of Astarte is the figurehead of the xebec or sailing ship upon which Stencil's father Sidney died in the Mediterranean off Malta in 1919. In a way, Sidney's death might be a return to the embrace of Venus (after all, she was a V) and the great unknown of the ocean?

Opposing Protagonists

Profane and Stencil inevitably meet each other over the course of the novel and collaborate in Stencil's quest as it moves from Manhattan to Malta.

They approach life and womanhood in contrasting ways.

Here's a summary of Profane:

Aimless, directionless, concerned with the present, existential, free-style, random, improvisatory, profane, superficial, more interested in the surface, physical, decadent, irrational.

And Stencil:

Motivated, purposeful, concerned with the past, in pursuit of understanding and meaning, structured, organised, profound, more interested in depth, metaphysical, civilised, rational.

Despite their differences, they join together in Stencil's quest. What they share, obviously, is their manhood, the fact that they are men in a patriarchal society.

Whatever their differences as men, they are on the inside, whereas women, in contrast, are on the outside, subjugated, unable to exercise political power or social influence, whatever other means of persuasion they might have at their disposal.

"Not Who, But What"

Stencil's quest starts when he inherits a journal in which his father wrote the following cryptic note:

"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."

There is a suggestion that Young Stencil is trying to find his own identity in V. He was raised motherless, having been born in 1901, which we are also told was the year "Victoria" died.

Stencil, speaking in the third person, says:

"You'll ask next if he believes her to be his mother. The question is ridiculous."

But does it mean the answer is ridiculous? Does it mean we shouldn't ask the question? Are Stencil and Pynchon simply steering us away from the obvious or the possible? Is Pynchon suggesting that fiction (at least post-modern fiction) need not be obliged to offer up answers, that not every quest leads to its Holy Grail?

I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say that there's not just one V, but potentially many. Or at least, Young Stencil finds clues as to the existence of many candidates.

Does it make any difference though? Does it matter who this particular woman, this V., is? Does the identity of any individual V. matter, when it is the "what", the abstraction of woman that Stencil might be seeking?

Is he, like us, simply trying to understand womanhood in all of its complexity?

Animation and Agitation

Whatever the answer, Stencil's quest animates and energises him. Beforehand, he had been inanimate:

"His random movements before the war had given way to a great single movement from inertness to - if not vitality, then at least activity. Work, the chase...it was V. he hunted...

"Finding her: what then? Only that what love there was to Stencil had become directed entirely inward, toward this acquired sense of animateness...to sustain it he had to hunt V.; but if he should find her, where else would there be to go but back into half-consciousness? He tried not to think, therefore, about any end to the search. Approach and avoid."

Sidney, on the other hand, was a spy and interrogator for the British Foreign Office whose function was to perpetuate the British Empire.

He regarded V. as a threat to order. He viewed her as an agent of chaos who, in her different manifestations, always arrived at a time when the world was in a state of siege. She had an unerring ability to appear when the patriarchal world of Western Imperialism was under threat, whether by civil war, rebellion or revolution.

In a way, V. represents an undivided, less phallocentrically structured world that unites the stability of land and the fluidity of the ocean, as well as Europe and Asia, West and East, Woman and Man.

At a more generalised level, V might represent the relationship between the Animate and the Inanimate, between Life and Death, between Eros and Thanatos.

The Woman Question

It's interesting that neither Stencil really wants to find a definitive answer to their particular woman question. They are males, and they can't see beyond an era during which men are firmly ensconced in the saddle of power and influence.

There is no preparedness to share power or to improve relationships between the sexes.

The nature of womanhood is therefore a question that remains unsolved at the end of the novel.

Women remain a mystery to men, perhaps because they (men) don't try hard enough or don't really want to understand. They are unable to change their own perspective, so that they might listen and learn. They are content to live with the allure of mystery.

In a way, what hope would there be for relationships if all of the mystery was obliterated?

As Profane says towards the end of the novel:

"Offhand I'd say I haven't learned a goddamn thing."

In a way, the unresolved concerns of the novel, from a male point of view, reflect Freud's plight:

"The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?"

What is to be Done?

Both protagonists are selfish in their own masculine way. Profane seems to be oblivious to the issue of what women might want. Young Stencil is ambivalent. However, at least Pynchon is posing a question, which I hope he did not view as ridiculous.

Ultimately, while it's arguable that "V" is a pro-feminist novel, I think Pynchon's view was that, as at the time of writing in 1963, there was no solution to the relationship question in view. There was, quite simply, more to be done.

Perhaps the underlying truth is that, unless and until man understands the place of woman in the world, he will never understand his place next to woman.

Some perspective and hope might come from McClintic Sphere, the jazz musician in the novel.

His counsel, almost zen or beat, is to "keep cool, but care." Don't worry too hard about it, just do it. But try to do it with love, not just lust and desire.

Of course, the Women's Liberation Movement was only then starting to gather force. However, for all the good it has achieved since then, I think there still remains much to be done.

Maybe at the level of couples it can be done, if we keep cool, but care.


VERSE:

Esther Got a Nose Job

After years of childhood misery,
Red-headed Esther got a nose job.
One day the doctor removed her hump
And returned it to her in a bottle.
He thought it was such a great success,
He gave her another hump for free.


Pig's Story

Task force off
Gibraltar
Moving forward
En route
To Malta
On tar-coloured
Mediterranean
Waters under
Stars blooming
Fat and sultry.
The sort of night
When there's no
Torpedoes
On the radar
And Pig tells
Us all a story
About how he was
Never caught
Behind the green door
The night Dolores
Held an orgy.


Nothing if Not Profane

They met mid-function
At the Rusty Spoon.
Although she's nowhere
Near his age or size,
He dreamed that he might
Find himself one night
At the conjunction
Of her inner thighs.


Voila, Vera Meroving!
[After and Mostly in the Words of Pynchon]

Twin tendrils of sunlight
Illuminated a crimson stain
In the courtyard of the
Baroque plantation villa.
A window swung open
On this fantastic day
To reveal a striking woman
In her forties, and otherwise,
Barely clad, in a negligee,
The hues of which were
Peacock greens and blues,
The fabric transparent,
But not especially obscene.
One Kurt Mondaugen,
A crouching tiger, hid behind
Wrought iron curlicues,
Astonished by his desire
To see and not be seen.
If he waited long enough,
A movement of the sun,
This woman or the breeze,
It might reveal to him,
A voyeur, yes, it might reward
His impatient gaze, his stare,
With a glimpse of nipple,
Her navel or some pubic hair.


For Want of Godolphin
[After and Mostly in the Words of Pynchon]

Vera wanted
Godolphin
For reasons he
Could only guess.
Her desire arose
Out of nostalgia
For the sensuous,
Her appetite
Knew nothing at all
Of nerves or heat,
Or flesh or sweat,
Or last night’s caress,
But was instead beholden
Entirely to barren,
Touchless memory.


Schoenmaker Offers to Make Esther Beautiful
[After and Mostly in the Words of Pynchon]

You are beautiful,
Perhaps, not as you are,
But as I see you.
I, my love, yours truly,
Want to give you
Something that
Is truly yours.
I can bring out
The beautiful girl
Inside you, latent,
The idea of Esther,
As I have done already
With your face and nose.
Do you think me so shallow
That I would only
Love your body?
Don’t you want me
To love your soul,
The true you?
Well, what is the soul?
It is the idea of the body,
The abstraction behind
The reality, the perfect Esther
Behind the imperfect one
Here in bone and tissue.
Just an hour of time
In my plastic surgery.
I could bring your soul
Outside, to the surface.
I could make you
Perfect, radiant,
Unutterably
Beautiful and
Platonically ideal.
Then I could love you
Unconditionally,
Truly, madly, deeply, dearly.