Thomas Pynchon's V.
In search of the gravity's rainbow connection...
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Thomas Pynchon: V. New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 1986 [1961].
Malta in ruins after WWII’s bombings—two engineer-poets walk amongst heaps of rubble. “Streaks of stone-dust, matte against the shiny cobblestones, interrupted at random the pavement’s patterning. The sun had almost achieved reality.”
The sun has not achieved reality, in Pynchon’s phrase, because it is obscured by some rainclouds. And yet the sun isn’t gone — as seen by the “attenuated shows strung out behind” our characters. It has projected itself as “a patch of luminous gray, a dozen times its normal size, halfway down from the zenith.”
The sun image is striking in this book, where animate and inanimate things converge: since the sun as a radioactive ball of gas is both at the same time, which has been captured in the mythopoetic layer that Pynchon has consciously tapped into.
The sun is not just a symbol but a myth in itself—the rise, the zenith, the fall, that’s what we’re really talking about when we speak of conventional plot structure!
And looking back on Pynchon’s big historical novels, maybe he is tracing, in his satirical/post-Romanticist fashion, the sun-myth of America, starting at its postwar zenith, just as the decline begins.
Cut himself shaving, had trouble extracting the blade and gashed a finger. He took a shower to get rid of the blood. The handles wouldn’t turn. When he finally found a shower that worked, the water came out hot and cold in random patterns. He danced around, yowling and shivering, slipped on a bar of soap and nearly broke his neck. Drying off, he ripped a frayed towel in half, rendering it useless. He put on his skivvy shirt backwards, took ten minutes getting his fly zipped and another fifteen repairing a shoelace which had broken as he was tying it. All the rest of his morning songs were silent cuss words. It wasn’t that he was tired or even notably uncoordinated. Only something that, being a schlemihl, he’d known for years: inanimate objects and he could not live in peace.
Of course this passage isn’t just another Pynchonian slapstick set piece. These lines cut to the heart Pynchon’s first novel, especially the very end about inanimate objects.
Something peculiar arises in media after the 60s, and its increase in spectacular violence, namely the sense that the line between horror and slapstick is not so strong. It’s not a long distance to go from one kind of flesh-rending to another, cutting oneself shaving as part of a chain of mishaps or getting crushed and blown up by modern weapons. Either way, we get to see an ironic picture of humans at the mercy of the objective world.
And V. (1961) is tracing some arc or trajectory — perhaps not necessarily a ballistic one — from the organic to the inorganic substitute. Consider Esther’s nose job (a famously gnarly scene):
“All that could harmonize with a face, [her surgeon reflects] if you were going to be humanistic about it, was obviously what the face was born with.”
In this gonzo historical world of postwar America with its industrial boom (remember what Fredric Jameson said, this is the historiographical fantasy of real sewage systems with imaginary crocodiles), swarming with commodities, unlocking new potential relationships to them.
The sexy cars of the 50s is the most perceptible example of this for sure. But then there’s the machine gun belonging to Da Conho the crazy Zionist:
During the weeks that followed, when the head chef was looking the other way, Da Conho would assemble his machine gun, camouflage it with iceberg lettuce, watercress and Belgian endive, and mock-strafe the guests assembled in the dining room. “Yibble, yibble, yibble,” he would go, squinting malevolent along the sights, “got you dead center, Abdul Sayid. Yibble, yibble, Muslim pig.” Da Conho’s machine gun was the only one in the world that went yibble, yibble.
Lest we take this for another silly interlude, the Israel-Palestine conflict, really the Arab Cold War environment seems to haunt the novel’s political dimension. The story culminates in Malta in just as the Suez Canal Crisis is playing out some miles away.
The mystery woman V., who may have prosthetic limbs, a combination of animate and inanimate, as a kind of steampunk cyborg, gathers a whole cast of sleuths on her trail, headed by the intelligence agent Stencil. There is also the dentist Eigenvalue, who expands on a relativistic philosophy of history.
Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. […] Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.
Smack in the middle of the novel is the section called “Mondaugen’s story,” and that name will turn up again in Pynchon’s next big book Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Here we have the same subject matter: the Herero Wars of 1904, German-colonized Namibia in 1922: and another GR figure, Lieutenant Weissmann traveling with another V. avatar named Vera Meroving.
Weissmann is a sultry fellow, quizzing Kurt Mondaugen on German hot-button politics, since he is a student from Munich. “‘From Munich, and never heard of Hitler,’ said Weissmann, as if ‘Hitler’ were the name of an avant-garde play.”
Kurt protests that he’s an engineer, not a politician, and Weissmann Ominously says engineers will be needed in the future. Kurt’s next line is interesting: “Politics is a kind of engineering, isn’t it. With people as your raw material.”
Along with future connections, there is a link to Pynchon’s early short story “Entropy”: Sphere and Slab, navy clowns with satirical names, are here, the latter has taken up painting Cheese Danishes.
And then, in a discovered document that’s even denser than the Mondaugen story, is a testament from the Maltese man Fausto Maijstral (connected to a female character introduced at the very beginning of the narrative).
Alongside Eigenvalue the dentist, Maijstral is doing the most to put down some deep historical thinking:
Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life a successive rejection of personalities. No apologia is any more than a romance — half a fiction — in which all the successive identities taken on and rejected by the writer as a function of linear time are treated as separate characters. The writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another “character” added to the past. So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn’t so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with “reason.”
This long episode dwells on the intensive bombing of Malta through WWII by Italy and Germany: the struggle of the children to survive air raids, cleaning up the ruins, and the effect of the siege on a sense of time or humanity. “The present Fausto can look nowhere but back on the separate stages of his own history. No continuity. No logic. ‘History,’ Dnubietna [a friend and a poet] wrote, ‘is a step-function.’”
Indeed, Maijstral, Dnubietna, and their comrades are forging a ‘national literature’ in the Jamesonian sense. They are native to Malta, and have Anglo educations: they’re formulating a national consciousness, utilizing the dominating nation’s cultural heap. Surely this situation colors how Maijstral feels about disintegrating historical coherence.
And again, the excessive tragedy of modern imperialist war — the literal crushing of humans, like one of V.’s forms by falling stone…is this not the flip side of Benny Profane’s pratfalls?