V. Revisited (4)

Reading at the same time as V. two spy-ish autobiographies of the Thirties, Eastern Approaches & The Infernal Grove, i am struck at the uncanny resemblance. I feel at home in this topsy-turvy, midcentury, European conspiroclasm: as absurd as anything P. could devise, & as lethal.

In later books P. seems to have mostly dropped the tension between the potential interpretations of his stories as actual conspiracies & as sheer paranoia. This quality makes me think also of that tension between supernaturalist & psychological explanations in ghost stories around the turn of the last century--The Turn of the Screw but not only James--which creates a special space within the genre all its own.

Near the end of the book i sort of realized that "V." wasn't an initial of a name or a word but the Roman numeral 'five': & that the character seeking a single entity whose name begins with that letter, is simply wrong. On p. 167:

"An ivory comb, five toothed: whose shape was that of five crucified, all sharing at least one common arm. None of them was a religious figure: they were soldiers of the British Army. She had found the comb in one of the Cairo bazaars. It had apparently been hand-carved by a Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an artisan among the Mahdists, in commemoration of the crucifixions of '83, in the country east of invested Khartoum..."

On p. 443: " 'Here. In case you think tomorrow it was a dream.' Her hair fell loose. She handed him an ivory comb. Five crucified Limeys--five Kilroys--stared briefly at Valletta's sky before he pocketed it. 'Don't lose it in a poker game. I've had it a long time.' "

A souvenir of torture becomes a token of love, connecting the divided stories...the artifact that would prove the existence of V., & which eludes Stencil at last--at arm's length.

--This just after P. has explained the notorious "Kilroy" cartoon graffito by means of an electronic diagram for a band-pass filter. (Whereas i believe he noticed the resemblance himself, & so reverses the pareidolia.)

One can also count the four ['happy master'--ha!] Faustos (the last being "an interregnum") & we actually get to meet still another one.

And i think of P.'s two worlds, the modern one without tragedy or heroism, & the secret twentieth century, of the Great Game & profound obsessions; the character who wishes he did not have to choose, & the character who constantly makes the crazed meaningless gesture of choosing... This is like an inverted Bhagavad Gita that, instead of justifying war with fatalism, undermines it with existentialism.

V. Revisited (2)

(via @beTusconan via Geoff Manaugh on twitter)

"It often seems that we can stare directly into the wasteland without fear, not because there is nothing of risk there, but because our own words simply cannot communicate the inevitability of doom."

Particularities. Exotic, but you feel must be right, particularities: far beyond the needs of verisimilitude or plot. As an end in themselves. As if characters (& which one will become the star?). The mystery of knowing. (And not infrequently someone will remark on this.) How this is different from in Tolstoy.

Whether Pynchon stole anything from Gaddis (who seemed not to care if you got it--unlike P., who says: All of this, matters).

V. Revisited

I first read V. in college (along with several hundred other books) but i have been pushing it as P.'s finest moment ever since. I recently acquired my own copy in hardback, after a long wait (if not search) in the used-book biz. So now i am re-reading it.

First thought is: what i remember is the book's darkness--fuligin--compared to other dark books. I didn't remember the goofy frame of "the whole Sick Crew" nearly as much. And, unsurprisingly, i find myself not only rereading paragraphs, i'll even go back 2 or 3 pages to see if i understood something correctly. (Sadly, modern readers don't seem to want to put this much effort into a text.) Now, when i come across a character V. or Victoria, i look for hidden significance; when i first read it, it was a long time before i figured out what was going on.

This is a book of, among other things, divergent convergence. It gathers every byway, & makes them all describe (like a papier-mache covering to a balloon which is then deflated) an absence that impinges on each. A negative theology translated into fiction. I have also said that later Pynchon did not develop this technique, only dropped the singular withholding, toward an accumulation that rarely achieves apotheosis. Does this mean he felt more keenly the chaos of the encroaching century, & could no longer be satisfied with giving it a unifying name? We'll see...

(To be continued.)