Unscripted Cameos: A Rollicking Review of History in Thomas Pynchon's V

Originally published on 09 August 2021

About 4 years ago I was informed I’ll be the recipient of a happy accident. Under circumstances unknown a friend of mine had clicked twice on the Amazon ‘buy’ button for a book purchase, thus initiating a lottery for the spare copy. But finding out I was to receive a book was, at a rough estimate, 30% of the fun. As the identity of the text was kept in complete secret, my gut performed all kinds of augury before the book finally reached my inbox. And when it did, it was nothing I initially daydreamed of – a cartoony mosaic for a cover, unreliably-thin pages, baby-soft texture, and a dialect I couldn’t quite make out if it was in English or not. It was Thomas Pynchon’s1997 novel Mason and Dixon. Our relationship, between me and M’n’D, grew stale very quickly – Pynchon was too elaborate to decipher and I too thick to understand him. But despite the rough start, I shelved it in my when-I-am-ready section, and went on with my life until, by no accident, Thomas Pynchon met me again.

I was on a campaign to search for young successful authors whose breakthroughs didn’t wait very long. Our fascination with bright young people fills news outlets, and in 1964 Pynchon was already enjoying some media attention. Entering his mid 20s, Pynchon launched himself into literary firmament with his debut novel V. A search for an enigmatic woman? city? conspiracy plot? sewer rat?, V. invites us to join a clique christened The Whole Sick Crew. This group of then-called beatniks and now-called hipsters, comprises most of the book’s cast and will be your dazed tour guide around the city of New York. To keep things neat, however, Pynchon puts in the spotlight two of The Crew’s most loveable characters – Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil – who not just come as two overheated plot engines but embrace V.’s overarching agenda. But first, let’s look what Pynchon’s style has to offer.

Book blurbs will tell you Pynchon writes with ‘amazing virtuosity’ and that his writing ‘haunt[s] the sleeping and walking mind’, but trust my word on it – his writing is dizzying… to the point vomit starts climbing up my throat. It’s a case of ‘if you blink, you’ll miss it’ and nettles the senses from very early on. In the blueprint stage of the novel, Pynchon felt as lost as his characters, sharing to his editor that he himself didn’t ‘know dick about writing novels’.

Thankfully, he didn’t go to great extremes and left the book with a rather trusty plot structure that moves back and forth between contemporaryNew York and diary accounts of the Siege of Malta. The simple architecture serves to merely comfort the reader for a while before the polyvocal plot either gets extra heady or nauseating. The narrator who switches between third person omniscient to character narration, pounces from viewpoint to viewpoint with no regard for your reading acumen. It’s incredible to think that even at the age of 23-24, Pynchon was already testing his audience’s patience and mental dexterity – something he would be known for his entire life.

Back to the meat and bones of V. Although my discovery of Pynchon was wholly accidental, my befriending with V. was downright methodical and pre-arranged. This dynamic of facing spontaneity and quickly assimilating it to make it fit our personal narratives permeates Pynchon’s literary output; and is best portrayed in the faces of Profane and Stencil. With his lack of direction or clue on life’s purpose, Profane champions chance and randomness, whereas Stencil’s dogged hunt for V. resembles historical inquiry and rationality.

Without getting too scholarly, Pynchon’s V. underpins Postmodernism’s classical mistrust in grand narratives where

‘we hear of discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentring, indeterminacy, and antitotalization’. (Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism)

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tl;dr: history is outdated. One trademark model of representing history V. rejects is the ‘timeline’ model – a straight arrow dotted with momentous events in which one event supposedly determines the following other. For Pynchon, history is something of an ‘aggregate of events’ in leu of a sequence. The sequence poorly represents the totality of history and holds no water against contrasting opinions and clashing coincidences, because, just like literature, history is a work fiction.

Theory readers are already namedropping eminent names, though it’s Pynchon’s skill to wrap grand ideas in a 500-word package that makes this subject worthwhile. In the novel, Stencil becomes so engrossed in the V character of his late father’s journals that his passions for figuring it out promptly propels both us and him on a search for repeating, yet unrelated, patterns:

Born in 1901, the year Victoria died, Stencil was in time to be the century's child. Raised motherless. The father, SidneyStencil, had served the Foreign Office of his country taciturn and competent. No facts on the mother's disappearance. Died in childbirth, ran off with someone, committed suicide: some way of vanishing painful enough to keep Sidney from ever referring to it in all the correspondence to his son which is available. (Thomas Pynchon, V.)

From thereon, Stencil’s investigation takes us on a voyage to Paris, Alexandria, Florence that unfolds in his father’s journal as the novel progresses. We don’t learn anything concrete of V’s identity (nothingI’d tell you anyway) and, instead, run into a slew of comedic manifestations irrelevant to V’s actual personage. Right from the very start we have Pynchon teasing us with V-like imagery:

Overhead, turning everybody’s face green and ugly, shone mercury-vapor lamps, receding in an asymmetric V. (Thomas Pynchon, V.)

only for his wretched symbolism to develop into more grotesque overlaps which smudge Stencil’s and our historical lens; like that ofFather Fairing who, upon converting the sewer rats of New York to Christianity, makes one female rat his paramour:

It did bring up, however, an interesting note of sexual ambiguity. What a joke if at the end of this hunt he came face to face with himself afflicted by a kind of soul-transvestism. How the Crew would laugh. Truthfully, he didn’t know what sex V. might be, nor even what genus and species. To go along assuming that Victoria the girl tourist and Veronica the sewer rat were one and the same V. was not at all to bring up any metempsychosis: only to affirm that his quarry fitted in The Big One, the century’s master cabal, in the same way Victoria had with the Vheissu plot andVeronica with the new rat-order. If she was a historical fact then she continued active today and at the moment, because the ultimate Plot Which HasNo Name was as yet unrealized, though V. might be no more a she than a sailing vessel or a nation. (Thomas Pynchon, V.)

This and many other cases we don’t have word count for is what I call unscripted cameos: doppelgängers the universe creates on its own in an attempt to harmonise itself:

The universe was folded in upon itself; the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man. (Michael Foucault, The Order of Things)

Foucault goes at lengths about the four types of duplicates found in life that make the world a container of analogue signs. But to what effect to these aid our Stencil character? Herbert wishes to create a staunch narrative by piecing bit by bit whatever information he got on his hands. Regardless of the journal’s scattered character and the appearances of V he finds outside of it, the man of the new century won’t quit stringing event after event in hopes to model a complete story. Pynchon’s main gripe with history is that it’s never considerate of life which is

so disruptive and powerful precisely because even though it emerges from a specific set of historical conditions, it is not anticipated within the social and ideological matrix from which it springs and which it then radically disrupts. (Amy J. Elias, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon)

The one character who seamlessly takes it from life isBenny Profane, Herbert Stencil’s polar opposite. Profane’s a self-proclaimed schlemihl:

That was hardly a man: somebody who lies backand takes it from objects, like any passive woman. (Thomas Pynchon, V.)

And since we’ve put women in the equation of Schlemihlhood:

'Women had always happened to Profane the schlemihl like accidents: broke shoelaces, dropped dishes pins in new shirts.' (Thomas Pynchon, V.)

Pynchon gives us a lesson on Brownian motion withProfane but in the purview of history. Just as any other object, Profane never happens to anyone, quite the opposite – each time we meet him the novel we get agitated with his minimal effort when at the hinge of some plot-decisive scene.Stencil, on the other hand, gives a new meaning to the phrase ‘do something to your heart’s content’ as he, like any orthodox historian, patches whatever evidence he finds that pertains to V:

'the historian works inductively […]collecting his facts and trying to avoid any informing patterns except those he sees, or is honestly convinced he sees in the facts themselves’ (Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse)

Stencil obviously can’t see the wood from the trees. The abundance of hints, cameos, simulacra, copies, and doubles slowly overshadow the authentic experience of his environment:

'Which is the reality and which the projection? It is often not possible to say, for emulation is a sort of natural twinship existing in things; it arises from a fold in being, the sides of which stand immediately opposite to one another.' (Michael Foucault, The Order of Things)

Stencil’s approach is to emplot all the manifestations of V available in his search; just like the aforementioned coincidences, so are

Historical events […] value-neutral. Whether they find their place finally in a story that is tragic, comic, romantic, or ironic […] depends upon the historian’s decision to configure them according to the imperative of one plot structure or mythos rather than another. (Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse)‍

‍At the closing of the book, we learn that Stencil doesn’t mind fabricating newer and newer Vs for the sake of the search and ‘God knows how many Stencils have chased V.  about the world’ and that Benny ‘hasn’t learned a goddamnthing’.

If an irresolvable ending is not up your alley, then I still recommend reading it with this hanging at the back of your mind:

But what if we could learn how to navigate these paradoxical spaces, even if only virtually; what if we could become familiar, even comfortable, with their strangeness, perhaps to the point of experiencing them as a kind of second nature? (Michael Foucault, The Order of Things)

Early Pynchon is a hard nut on a first read and a very pleasant one on your second try. Going in every direction Pynchon points us to – logical and baffling - we arrive at two oversimplified takeaways: no overthinking. Things are less rational than they appear to be. It’s the human, for Pynchon, who is the fulcrum upon which coincidences land and bounce back as facts. Without noticing, the summation of events, accounts, tales, and records is colonised as one speaks – whether a fact is tragic, ironic, or glorious is subject to the historian’s choice of narrative flair. A notion which brings us to our second bullet point where we say that Pynchon doesn’t bluntly reject the block chains of events that constitute the cortex of history; rather, he departs from conventional interpretations that prefer the gravity of one event over the other, the rule of the mightier than suffering of the serf. Is Pynchon aware of gravity despite his weightless tongue? Was Hughes holding a bad beat all along or Onassis had stashed an Ace of Cups beneath the brim of his felt hat? Straight Flush or Royal Flush, North or South, Red or Blue. Who is Jerry Fletcher?

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