Abstract.
Pynchon’s novels blur the line between historical fact and literary fiction in his works to challenge the usefulness of various critical frameworks (ethnographic, economic, historic) in our attempts to ascribe a singular interpretation to the events of the past, one that would be the final Truth to explain - and thereby end all other conceptualisations of - history. The difficulty in distinguishing fact from fiction in his work is exacerbated by its breadth of subjects and themes and unconventional plotlines, frustrating any readerly attempts at conducting a search for an ultimate order to history. Yet, Pynchon refuses to dismiss it wholesale for the easy but unproductive conclusion that it is “pointless”. Instead, I argue that his works ultimately flesh out how multiple versions of history are constructed by various characters, and advocate for an awareness of the influence exerted by the social and historical contexts they exist within the creation of their personal, but arguably more important story.
It is often difficult to tell fact from fiction in Pynchon’s novels. The breadth of historical detail and allusions in his works are never accompanied by much exposition [1]; this means that a reader who has no prior knowledge of his references must resort to looking it up - and even then a satisfactory answer is never certain. To add to the confusion, Pynchon’s characters operate out of a dimension that seems to run parallel to actual reality; his texts all draw from real locations and events while adding fantastical or mythological organisations and polities that underlie and structure its plots - the underground mailing system W.A.S.T.E in The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), for example, or the shady government arms of PISCES and The White Visitation that are run in tandem under the unfolding horrors of the WWII in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). In the barrage of factual and fictive minutiae, any reader of Pynchon is hard-pressed to find any one suitable historical or literary framework that may act as a scaffold in guiding us through his dense texts, even as the richness of themes and subjects that abound in every novel invites us to try. From this mixture of fecund intertextual allusions and characters dogmatic or sceptical, Pynchon seems to suggest an end of history – not in the sense proposed by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and The Last Man (1992), in which all ideological struggles have essentially been resolved by now – but in a postmodern sense, wherein history is viewed as a construction or collage, a primarily subjective activity rather than linearly organised and firmly structured by external events. The topsoil in Pirate Prentice’s greenhouse in Gravity’s Rainbow might best encapsulate a Pynchonian conceptualisation of history: a mixture of Corydon Throsp’s cultivated pharmaceutical plants, manure from “a trio of prize Wessex Saddleback sows quartered ... by Throsp’s successor”, “dead leaves off many decorative trees transplanted to the roof by later tenants, and the odd unstomachable meal thrown or vomited”, all “scumbled together” to form “an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil in which anything can grow” (Pynchon 6). The blend of experience (traced here by the remnants produced by people or objects that are left behind) accumulates to form an interconnected and inseparable “impasto”, painting a picture of history that is less a monolith than a confusion of leftover sights, sounds, and smells – a fundamentally bodily, fundamentally social construct. Pynchon’s penchant for integrating fact and fiction to expose the lack of transparency in either places his work within the tradition of historiographic metafiction, that is, works that expose the activity of historiography as an “[act] of construction that [does] not reflect or naively represent reality or the past, but (re)invent[s] and shape[s] them from necessarily subjective and ideologically laden perspectives” (Butter 626). Yet even as Pynchon flirts with a hermeneutic breakdown [2] in “problematising the very possibility of historical knowledge”, his work does not ultimately cumulate as a series of “unresolved contradiction[s]” without hope for reconciliation or dialectic (Hutcheon 106), a downward spiral of nihilistic excesses. Although his works often feature atemporal spaces akin to the fantastical ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ [3] , pictured by Lukacs as a “beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity”, facilitating the “daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments” which “can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered” (Lukács 22), I argue that Pynchon himself is not a patron of that prestigious institution. Instead, I offer that his novels preserve a recognition for the importance of personal history – for one’s need to consciously seek out and construct an individual narrative that is no less significant for being subjective and subject to change. By analysing Pynchon’s portrayal of Herbert Stencil and Benny Profane’s journeys in the novel V. (1963), I argue that, whilst wholly committed to unravelling the concept of history as anything approaching universal or comprehensive, Pynchon’s works still maintain that the pursuit for a self-made, individual history is integral for one’s survival, and that the most effective weapon against totalising accounts of history is to embrace a polyvalent (or paranoid) search of one’s own.
The End of History in Stencil’s Search for V
If we read V. as a work of historiographic metafiction that aims at unveiling the socially constructed nature of history, then the disjointedness of the novel’s ‘plot without a plot’ may instead be seen as a ‘plot to find a plot’; to find the “plan made in secret by a group of people to do something illegal or harmful” (OED) becomes both the telos of V. the novel and the characters that inhabit it. The novel begins with the aimless wanderings of Benny Profane, a recently discharged Navy sailor, entering his old drinking spot with no reason more than being “given to sentimental impulses” (Pynchon 9), and ends with him walking off into the night with a girl he met whilst roving; the dizzying swirl of secret societies, conspiracies, events and meetings that occur between his introduction and the novel’s penultimate chapter is neatly, almost satirically, put into perspective by Profane in his final line of dialogue before his ignoble sendoff: “offhand I’d say I haven’t learned a goddamn thing” (454). Pynchon’s characters, whether profoundly aimless or zealously driven, are all ultimately on quests without resolution, and the nature of their quests are always historical or at least chained to history. For Herbert Stencil, his goal to find V is historical in its most macro sense: he is the figure of the historian and/or the writer (for in Pynchon’s view one bears no difference to the other) attempting to make sense of the age he is living through, yet his quest to shape history by imposing his own invented structure and coherence on it necessarily fails within a postmodernist construction of a chaotic world that resists such order. Stencil’s obsession with finding V acts as a deferment for living his own life – yet ironically, as V is a myth of self-creation, a palimpsest for Herbert to ‘stencil’ on, each lead he pursues inevitably follows the trajectory of the inescapable “law of concentricness” (Baudrillard 77) and ends up circling back to himself one way or another. We are told that Stencil “always referred to himself in the third person”, employing a “forcible dislocation of personality” to “keep Stencil in his place: that is, in the third person” (Pynchon, V. 61). Stencil mobilises a literary technique in an attempt to distance himself from himself so that he might be inserted into or infiltrate “a past he didn’t remember and had no right in” (ibid.) with the ease of the objective third-person narrator, to place himself as the author and thus authority on the lived experiences of others. Yet his authority is always an unstable one, what Eigenvalue calls a “Stencilized” (228) narrative that is as much “impersonation and dream” (63) as it is an account – and since the entirety of V. is written in third person, we never can be entirely sure which parts of Pynchon’s narrative are real (by which I mean the fictive ‘real’, or ‘what really happened’ in the story) and which are merely the poeticisms of his characters. In his essay “The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense”, art historian Arthur C. Danto [4] writes that historical narratives “do not belong to the events they transcribe” – one writes a narrative only when one has felt that something has “come to an end”, otherwise one ends up writing “a kind of diary of events, never certain of what will belong to the final narrative and what will not” (127). Even so, a narrative itself is always “external to what it transcribes, else a “further narrative must be written which includes the writing of the first narrative among the events narrated”, which can, or in Stencil’s case, will, “run to infinity” (ibid). Through Stencil, Pynchon thus points out the paradoxical nature inherent in metanarrative constructions of history, whereby the appearance of transparency necessitates the author to be invisible, alienated, or dislocated from the time which he is recording, undermining the very primacy/proximity to the historical events that lend legitimacy to such an author’s narrative.
V, in Stencil’s mind, is the holy grail, “The Big One, the century’s master cabal” (226), a key that may unlock history (personal and global) for him, but her presence in the novel is always merely an empty signifier, a shape that takes many forms both human and Other. She is Victoria Wren, Vera Meroving, and The Bad Priest, and yet also the image of “spread thighs”, “flights of migratory birds”, “the working part of [a production machinist’s] tool bit” (61), a “waterspout” appearing on Sidney Stencil’s journey from Malta to Lampedusa (492) that kills him, the line of “mercury-vapor lamps, receding in an asymmetric V” (10) that haunts Profane’s all- encompassing Street, and any number of places, objects, and secret plots that happen to start with V: Valletta, Vheissu, Veronica the rat – just to name a few. The sheer number of these series of recursive figures/images with no real presence but the scant apocryphal remnants left behind for Stencil to piece together allow the search for V to take on a mythology of its own within the novel, a secondary narrative of piecing together a narrative, and a literary mise en abyme which will “run to infinity” (Danto 127) with no hope for resolution. The constant frustration of Stencil’s (and our) quest in the novel seems to indicate a foolishness for even attempting one in the first place, suggesting that perhaps the point of V. is that there is no point in trying to impose coherence on a universe that is fundamentally random, in which there is no cause-and-effect but the ones we blindly ascribe to it.
Why We Continue to Read Pynchon: The Seductive Quest for Meaning
Why then, do Pynchonian characters continue endlessly on their quests? The last mention of Stencil Jr. is his note to Majistral informing him and Benny Profane of his departure to Stockholm, chasing “the frayed end of another clue” (452), a blunt refusal to accept Majistral’s lack of answers or to stay with Profane and adopt the aimless human yo-yo lifestyle. Stencil’s identity has become “quite purely He Who Looks for V.” (226), and his status as an animated, human being rests on maintaining the informatic system he has adopted, which is a continuous interpretation of data or “cluster of phenomena” that can be weaved into a pattern or conspiracy, an activity that prevents him from “inertness” and that he has to “sustain... but if he should find [V], where else would there be to go but back into half-consciousness?” (55). Hence while Stencil’s voyage has always been doomed to failure due to its inherent recursiveness, it is precisely that continuous deferment of victory or meaning that allows him to fight against ‘inertness’ or entropy, to remain receptive and alert to the forces and events that shape and influence history. In tracing V, Stencil encounters the confession of Fausto Majistral, the failed priest-turned-poet who re- presents another narrative-within-narrative, recounting his time in Malta in the mid-20th century in which he envisions multiple instances of evolution in his identity, writing out a history of himself in the form of an apologia. As with Stencil, the distancing of his present self from the other Faustos in his narrative provides him with a screen to historicise his personal experience, unlike Stencil, however, his confession ends with the abdication of his position as a poet-historian, which he derides as only having value in their ability to “[cloak] [the universe’s] innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the ‘practical’ half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they” (326). While Fausto I still had faith in his art as an effective discursive tool to excavate issues of colonialism and nationhood, the effects of the war on his home and self-hood effected a disillusionment with the idea of education and art as instruments for progress. Living under the shadow of the Second World War and witnessing daily the excesses of military technology, Fausto encountered the increasing difficulty poets faced in convincing people (including himself) of The Great Lie, the idea that human life had inherent value and meaning that is often embedded in grand narratives of history and historical ‘progress’. Pynchon exacerbates this disillusionment by foregrounding the “computerisation of society” (Rose qtd. Edwards 65) a theme implicit within the fetishisation of informatics and objects by characters in V. (Rachel Owlglass with her MG, Eigenvalue with his set of false teeth, Mélanie l'Heuremaudit with her dream – and its eventual bloody apotheosis – of becoming an inanimate windup doll, for example), problematising the valourisation of the Enlightenment ideals of rationalist science by unveiling its role in furthering military technology, the “engineer’s politics” (316) that became primary systems of organising information precisely due to the pragmatic need for more advanced weapons during the war [5]. The scientific paradigm of cold calculation and observable randomness that revealed for writers like Majistral the human condition to be one of “tautological [imprisonment]”, “[leaving] thinkers in all disciplines facing the void, the implicit meaninglessness of the cosmos” (Hume 40-43), a state described by Pynchon elsewhere as “antiparanoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition that not many of us can bear for long” (Gravity’s Rainbow 434), is thus a direct product of the military industry’s pervasive expansion into all social realms, including art and history. Like Fausto Majistral Sr., who turns his back on Malta by working as a double agent for Sidney Stencil, Majistral Jr’s apologia may be read as a double-cross of his earlier vocation as a poet, implicating his historiographic account by rewriting over it, and hence resolving (and absolving himself of) his personal narrative.
While Herbert Stencil is in many ways a parallel of Fausto Majistral – both are descendants of men who played a role against the formation of Malta as an independent state, both are writers/storytellers who attempt to formulate their own identity against that of their forebears – Stencil refuses to accept Majistral’s insistence that V is dead. His quest remains alive, a cyclical obsession encapsulated by the phrase “events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic” (V. 449), repeated each time in his mind with an emphasis placed on a different word. Stencil’s condition of paranoia, looking for an order or logic by which events could be explained, is one that has many different modes for expression, each clue or lead modifying the meaning of the whole. Just as Stencil hops around the globe searching for V, so too do readers of Pynchon struggle to place emphasis on a coherent or singular paradigm, to locate the ‘big picture’ of the novel from its scattered perspectives and petit narratives. The repetition of certain images and themes throughout Pynchon’s novels – entropy, automata, decadence, paranoia, for instance – induces in us a similar obsession with pattern-making that is analogous to Stencil’s mantra, one that is especially acute in those who practise literary criticism, which by its own nature requires us to filter and pick out details to produce a defensible interpretation, excavate some deeper meaning from the topsoil, to make a message of the noise. Like Weissmann, we shift through Pynchon’s sferics, rearranging his words each time in the pursuit of a deeper knowledge hidden in his works. Yet what we end up finding is often only the realisation that our need to know precludes any real ability to reach a definite understanding; as the commonly conjured rule of statistics reminds us, correlation does not equate to causation, and even as countless studies have tried to arrange the chapters of V. into a linear timeline or solve the riddle of who V ‘truly is’, we constantly run up against the limits of epistemology, unable to separate between the discovery of a viable pattern or merely our projection of our need to see one. We thus fall into a similar unending quest for meaning, in which there seem to be an infinite number of possible interpretations yet none that hold more weight over the others, participating in the same trajectory of failure that undergirds Stencil’s quest. Yet a big part of the appeal of reading Pynchon lies in the invitation to try and piece together his historical and literary references, his development of “the historical sense... into a real sensual delight” (Brecht 276). Rather than writing from a grounded or ‘realistic’ perspective that would “annihilate distance, fill in the gap, gloss over the differences”, Pynchon instead “delight[s] in comparisons, in distance, in dissimilarity – which is at the same time a delight in what is close and proper to ourselves” (Brecht 276), blending his extensively researched historical settings with characters like Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil, whose lives often take on a surrealist bent. The inscrutability of his work seems to invite two opposing instincts in readers of Pynchon: the desire to piece things together from the jumble of noise – a desire made all the more tempting by the interpretive richness of his texts – on the one hand, and the looming spectre of the postmodern condition on the other, in which the spectre of meaning is always put out of reach, an infinite deferral of signification whose “absence... extends the domain and the interplay of signification infinitely” (Derrida 89).
The Sacred and The Profane: The Schlemihl Redeemer
Might it be possible to hold these two paradoxical positions simultaneously? If we accept that there may not ever be a satisfying conclusion to a search for a historical version of the theory of everything whilst still maintaining that our need for constructing narratives is a useful and productive instinct, we may end up with adopting a historiographic tradition that can be understood as provisional instead of dogmatic, individual rather than universal. By embracing heterogeneous and mutative discourse instead of a dominant or authoritative one, we locate a method of dealing with history that allows us to remain open and sensitive to our relative position within particular social and historical contexts without capitulating to a resolved (and hence static) narrative. In his magnified focus on the prosaic and bodily aspects of living, the peterites and the outcasts, Pynchon seems to suggest that the glorification of the individual experience, the conscious creation of a fiction to explain and legitimise one’s singular history and identity, offers a way out from the entropic mechanisation or computerisation of society and from the totalising narratives of control propagated by militarised informatic systems and government-propagated myths of historical progress. Rather than Stencil, it is perhaps Benny Profane, the victimised, self-proclaimed schlemihl/human yo-yo, that may best encapsulate this position of an individual, un-authoritarian narrativising. Profane’s unique social position, inhabiting a bricolage of personages, allows him to live in between worlds: he is half Catholic, half Jew; as an ex-sailor and roadworker, he is familiar with the urban habitus of flophouses and subways, yet his involvement with the Whole Sick Crew – the cadre of rich New York layabouts/artists, of which Rachel Owlglass is a member – gives him glimpses into the decadence of upper-class New York; he is both hopelessly entangled with the inanimate and still, being a schlemihl, always at odds with them. His exposure to multifarious experiences is coupled with an enduring suspicion of the inanimate and his desire for human companionship, hence his narrative perspective within V. is the one that appears the least obscured by domineering ideological paradigms. Even his name evokes his irreverence for a higher order or untouchable religious/sacred outlook on life, an ode to the pedestrian over the profound. Unlike Stencil, who is animated by his endless search for V that occasionally blinds him to everything else, Profane’s yo-yoing is less directed and more exploratory, and his motivations are not the grandiose ambitions of piecing together history but far smaller in scale, simply to find people to accompany him in his wandering. Profane offers an alternative method of resisting the allure of the inanimate and the stagnant depravity of decadence simply by critically and consciously constructing an identity of himself as the “schlemihl Redeemer”, standing still before “a century’s worth of wavelets” (453), letting history wash over him as experience and yet not giving in to its encompassing tide. For him, “[t]ruth or falsity don’t apply” to stories, “[t]hey just are” (Pynchon 120) – and if we are to model our reading of Pynchon on Profane’s sentiment, then perhaps we too should just allow ourselves to be taken on a ride.
Perhaps any attempt at recuperating Pynchon may be doomed to fail, yet another unintended projection of the self’s wants onto his palimpsest-like text. Yet whilst his novels repeatedly send characters on quests without even a hope for resolution, or even an idea of what the quest is for, might there not be a hint of his own struggle to reconcile an individual history, an identity? Of recurring characters, locations, corporate entities, there is always a shadow of the past in Pynchon, even if the past is only his previous books. To conclude, I have argued that Pynchon’s V. is a work of historiographic metafiction that exposes the socially constructed nature of history, a postmodern narrative whose disjointedness and inscrutability resists reader’s attempts at imposing a singular interpretation or theory to completely make sense of it. While its recursive imagery and unresolved plotlines opposes any claims to transparency, I have offered that it is possible to detect within Pynchon’s focus on the specific experience of the individual a mandate to not only recognise the constructedness of historical representations, but the importance of historiography as an activity of self-creation, a conscious and continuous search for provisional (and thus non-totalising) truth; his novel thus puts forth not the encompassing, idealistic capital V of veritas, but only the humble small-case appearance of verisimilitude.
Works Cited
"plot, v.1." OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/145916. Accessed 10 November 2022.
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Sidereal Voyage.” Radical Alterity, translated by Ames Hodges, Semiotext(e), 2008.
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Ed. and trans. John Willett. London: Methuen, 1964.
Danto, Arthur C. “The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense.” History and Theory, vol. 37, no. 4, 1998, p. 127. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505400. Accessed 10 Nov. 2022.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. University of Chicago Press, 1978
Edwards, Paul. "Why Build Computers?: The Military Role in Computer Research", The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, 1997.
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. Penguin. 1992.
Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. Routledge, 1984. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Routledge, 1988.
Lukács, György. The Theory of the Novel: A Historical Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. MIT Press, 1971.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Vintage Books, 1973. Pynchon, Thomas. V. London: Vintage Books, 1963.
Endnotes
[1] Pynchon’s work has been described as a “veritable pandemonium of acronymania” (Pütz 374) for his use of acronyms alone.
[2] Teh, David. “ Tentative Essay Topic on Pynchon.” Received by Joy Pang, 26 October 2022.
[3] In his 1962 preface to The Theory of the Novel (1916), Lukács uses this analogy to criticise writers such as Adorno and Schopenhauer for using nihilism as a refuge from reality, allowing them to evade thinking about or addressing the social difficulties of the historical period they wrote in.
[4] Danto critiques the practice of writing historical narratives by writing a historical narrative that argues for the “end of all art”, in the sense that the idea of a historical progression – in this case the idea of a progressive ‘movement’ of art, from Romanticism to Surrealism and so on – falters when one starts to question the very nature of art itself. He argues that the age of accessible mechanical reproduction through the invention of the camera caused artists to turn away from mimesis and towards the theoretical and metaphysical, breaking the artworld’s implicit understanding of a historical artistic progression by probing at the definition of art itself. The practice of writing historical narratives is implicated as soon as we are conscious of the narrative, and our compromised part in constructing it.
[5] Having studied engineering physics in Cornell University and having served in the U.S. Navy, Pynchon would have been acutely aware that “military support for computer research was rarely benign or disinterested, as many historians... have assumed. ... [In] the context of the Cold War, computers [were enrolled] as supports for a far-reaching discourse of centralised command and control -- as an enabling, infrastructural technology for the closed-world political vision.” (Edwards).