Dream Tonight

of Peacock Tails
Dream Tonight
of Peacock Tails:

Essays on the Fiftieth

Anniversary
of Thomas Pynchon’s V.

Edited by

Paolo Simonetti and Umberto Rossi

Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails:
Essays on the Fiftieth Anniversary of Thomas Pynchon’s V.

Edited by Paolo Simonetti and Umberto Rossi

This book first published 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2015 by Paolo Simonetti, Umberto Rossi and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-7767-0

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7767-1
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Works by Thomas Pynchon ....................................................................... vii

(With List of Abbreviations)

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Dream Tonight of Thomas Pynchon
Paolo Simonetti

Part One: Re-Visions

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 13

Monkey Business: The Chapter “Millennium” Removed from an Early
Version of V.
Luc Herman and John M. Krafft

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 31

Cherchez La Femme: The Coercive Paratexts of Thomas Pynchon’s V.
Tore Rye Andersen

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 53

Traveling and Spying into Baedeker’s Land: (Re)living and (Re)telling
The Great Game, Political Tourism and Other Victorian Intelligence
Activities in Thomas Pynchon’s V.
Mario Faraone

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 75

Re-Reading V. in the Emergency of the Crisis
Stipe Grgas
vi Table of Contents

Part Two: V-Locations

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 95

Florence, or Pynchon’s Italian Job
Umberto Rossi

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 117

“Paris for Love”?
Clément Lévy

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 131

Katabasis, Orpheus, and Alligators: V.’s Various Underworlds
Jennifer Backman

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 153

“He Could Go to Malta and Possibly End It”: Malta as “Prime Location”
in The Epilogue of V.
Paolo Simonetti

V.: A Bibliography................................................................................... 173

Mario Faraone

Contributors ............................................................................................. 199

Index ........................................................................................................ 203

 WORKS BY THOMAS PYNCHON
(WITH LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS)

V. 1963. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company. (V).

The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott
Company. (CL).
Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. New York: Viking. (GR).
Slow Learner. Early Stories. 1984. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and
Company. (SL).
Contents: Introduction, 1-23. The Small Rain (The Cornell Writer,
March 1959): 25-51. Low-Lands (New World Writing, 16, March
1960): 53-77. Entropy (Kenyon Review, Spring 1960): 79-98. Under
the Rose (The Noble Savage, 3, May 1961): 99-137. The Secret
Integration (The Saturday Evening Post, December 1964): 139-193.
Vineland. 1990. Boston: Little, Brown. (VL).
Mason & Dixon. 1997. New York: Henry Holt. (MD).
Against the Day. 2006. New York: Penguin Press. (ATD).
Inherent Vice. 2009. New York: Penguin Press. (IV).
Bleeding Edge. 2013. New York: Penguin Press. (BE).

Appendix: Pynchon’s Juvenilia. 1989. In Thomas Pynchon: A

Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials. Ed. Clifford Mead.
Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press. 155-167.
Contents: The Voice of the Hamster. In Purple and Gold, 13 Nov.
1952, 2. 18 Dec. 1952, 3. 22 Jan. 1953, 2, 4. 19 Feb. 1953, 8. Ye
Legend of Sir Stupid and the Purple Knight. In Purple and Gold, 19
Mar. 1953, 2. The Boys. In Purple and Gold, 19 Mar. 1953, 8.
Mortality and Mercy in Vienna. 1959. Epoch, 9 (4): 195-213.
Togetherness. 1960. Aerospace Safety, 16 (12): 6-8.
A Journey Into the Mind of Watts. 1966. New York Times Magazine, 12
June. 34-35, 78, 80-82, 84.
Is It Ok to Be a Luddite? 1984. New York Times Book Review, 28 Oct., I,
40-41. (LU).
Introduction. 1983. In Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. By
Richard Fariña. Harmondsworth: Penguin. v-xiv. (IF).
viii Table of Contents

The Heart’s Eternal Vow. 1988. Review of Love in the Time of Cholera.
By Gabriel García Marquez. New York Times Book Review, 10 Apr. I,
47, 49.
Introduction. 1992. In The Teachings of Don B. By Donald Barthelme. Ed.
Kim Herzinger. New York: Turtle Bay. xv-xxii.
Nearer, My Couch, to Thee. 1993. New York Times Book Review, 6 June. 3,
57.
Introduction. 1997. In Stone Junction: An Alchemical Pot-Boiler. By Jim
Dodge. Edinburgh: Rebel Inc. vii-xii.
Foreword. 2003. In Nineteenth Eighty-Four. By George Orwell. New
York: Plume. vii-xxvi.

All the quotations from Thomas Pynchon’s texts are taken from the first
editions. Quotations from unpublished typescripts have been indicated in
the reference lists at the end of each chapter.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank all the people who have helped us in different
ways, all of them precious, and—what is more important—for free,
proving that the word solidarity still has some meaning, at least in the
Pynchon community. So we wholeheartedly thank David Coughlan, David
Cowart, Martin Paul Eve, Pawel Frelik, Ted Hand, Tiina Käkelä-Puumala,
Sascha Pöhlmann, Terence Reilly, David Seed, Jeff Severs. We thank
Joanna Pyke for her precious editorial interventions. Special thanks to
Lorenzo Lodovichi, who, inspired by visions of albino alligators, created
the image on the cover. We also wish to thank Franco Minganti and Paolo
Prezzavento, who were with us in Trieste. And, of course, thanks to all our
contributors, without whom this book would have never been possible.
 INTRODUCTION

DREAM TONIGHT OF THOMAS PYNCHON

PAOLO SIMONETTI

[F]or here, millions of mixed shades and

shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms,
reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie
dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like
slumberers in their beds.
—Herman Melville

In my younger and more academically vulnerable years, during one of the

first university lessons I ever attended, a renowned professor said
something that struck me as odd, probably because of its utter simplicity
and apparent superficiality: “If you open a literary masterpiece somewhere
in the middle”, he solemnly told an audience of candid freshmen, “you
will surely find something crucial to discuss; with great probability, there
is an element, a sentence, a concept, that can best enlighten the whole
book”. At the time I felt very clever, and thought that probably he did not
have time to plan a proper lesson, so he was relying on his expertise in
order to improvise a speech; I dismissed him as a botch, and went on with
my studies.
Years later, when I asked Umberto Rossi to join me in organizing and
editing a collection of essays on Thomas Pynchon’s V., we immediately
agreed on virtually everything, except for the title of the book. We were
looking for something that could sum up the multifaceted aspects of the
novel, as well as the manifold theoretical, structural, and thematic
approaches of the prospective essays. In the following months, both of us
proposed several tentative titles, but we felt that somehow the core of the
matter was still missing, just like the elusive V. of the novel. Then one
night, when I was on the verge of “overthinking myself into brainfreeze”
(IV 96), I remembered the weird predicament of that old professor
(wherever he is now, I wish him good luck!). On the spur of the moment, I
2 Introduction

opened my first edition of V. somewhere in the middle, and came up with

what felt like the perfect title for the collection.
“Dream tonight of peacock tails, / Diamond fields and spouter whales.
/ Ills are many, blessings few, / But dreams tonight will shelter you” (V
254): this is the first stanza of a poem/nursery rhyme that appears in
“Mondaugen’s Story”, the ninth and probably the most renowned chapter
of V., placed as it is in the very middle of the novel—the very same
chapter that Luc Herman, in the Cambridge Companion to Thomas
Pynchon, has declared to be “the novel’s strongest testimony to the force
of the historical imagination” (Herman 25). So representative is that
chapter that in 2009 the Italian publishing house Rizzoli, fostering the
arguable belief that “Mondaugen’s Story” could stand alone perfectly well
outside of its proper context, decided to publish it as a solo short story.
In the chapter, Stencil learns how Kurt Mondaugen, a young German
radio engineer who had arrived in South-West Africa in 1922, at the time
of Abraham Morris’s upheaval against British rule, ended up staying for
two and a half months in the house of Foppl, a veteran of the Herero wars
who had become a wealthy landowner. While the revolt breaks out in the
surrounding fields, the atmosphere inside the fortified house turns
increasingly surreal and oneiric: “[I]f dreams are only waking sensation
first stored and later operated on”, the narrator argues about Mondaugen’s
state of mind, “then the dreams of a voyeur can never be his own” (V 255).
Dreams and hallucinations figure prominently in the chapter, and
certainly they shelter neither the characters nor the reader. The text
presents a sustained ontological uncertainty among reality, memory, and
dream, so that one struggles to establish whether the events experienced by
or told to Mondaugen are reliable historical reconstructions, memories of
some other character, drug-induced illusions, fictional inventions, reveries
caused by the disease (at some time Mondaugen gets scurvy), or individual
projections.
The construction of such a dreamscape is only one of the many strategies
employed by Pynchon to represent the subjective, idiosyncratic, coercive,
and not always completely conscious mechanisms of historiography. As
Shawn Smith put it in 2005:

Mondaugen’s voyeuristic dreams are also Stencil’s dreams of V., which

are not his own because they exist to explain and interpret history.
Mondaugen’s point of view is also Stencil’s because, as the omniscient
narrator informs us at the end of the previous chapter, Mondaugen
“yarned” the story of “his youthful days in South-West Africa” for
Stencil’s benefit [...]. The Mondaugen who figures in this chapter, in other
words, is Stencil’s surrogate and his literary creation, because Stencil
 Dream Tonight of Thomas Pynchon 3

narrates the chapter through Mondaugen’s third-person limited perspective.

(Smith 33, 34)

In this multilayered palimpsest it is almost impossible to locate a stable

narrator, so that one of the novel’s prominent features, as Tony Tanner
aptly stated in 1982, is “a permanent instability in the relationship between
the interpreting mind and the varying fields of signification that it must
negotiate” (Tanner 41). From this point of view, “Mondaugen’s Story”
really stands for the whole novel.
In a 1969 letter to Thomas F. Hirsch (quoted by David Seed in The
Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon) on his own use of South-West
African materials in the ninth chapter of V., Pynchon revealed that he
came across The Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the
Rebellion of the Bondelzwarts “in a kind of haphazard fashion”, because
he was “actually looking for a report on Malta and happened to find the
Bondelzwarts one right next to it in the same, what the NY Public Library
calls, ‘pamphlet volume’” (Seed 240). Pynchon went on to state that since
then he had been fatally “hooked on it” and that “for some reason [he
couldn’t] leave it alone” (Seed 240); he was reluctant not to use the
additional material he found “long after” he had written V., and declared
that “hopefully this will all show up, before long, in another novel” (Seed
242). In this light, “Mondaugen’s Story” is twice as important, since it
came to Pynchon in a serendipitous way, and it ended up representing a
sort of prequel to Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), whose main theme is the
German rocket V-2, a redoubling of the “first” V.; some of its characters—
Mondaugen, Foppl, and especially Weissmann—would surface again
(personally or by name) in Gravity’s Rainbow, where the history and
culture of the Herero would play a crucial role.
Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails is also one of the many ideas Pynchon
half-seriously submitted to his editor at Lippincott, Corlies (“Cork”)
Smith, for the title of his novel. Other proposals included a Chandlerian
title such as Blood’s a Rover (in turn a verse from A. E. Housman’s 1896
poem “Reveille”, and then chosen by James Ellroy as a title for his 2009
crime fiction novel), a Fitzgeraldian one such as Down Paradise Street,
one with obvious Poesque echoes, Of a Fond Ghoul, and one reminiscent
of Faulkner, Footsteps of the Gone. These titles somehow reveal
Pynchon’s own “anxiety of influence”, as well as his conscious ambition
to take part in the American literary canon. Pynchon himself confessed
that one day in 1959 he attended a party at Cornell dressed as F. Scott
Fitzgerald—specifying that it was “not a masquerade party” and that he
“had been through a phase of enthusiasm” for him (IF x); in 1964 V.
earned him the William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first
4 Introduction

novels. Even if such modernist icons, as David Cowart wrote, “may have
supplied only postures to imitate with varying degrees of irony” (Cowart
191), nonetheless they were important and encumbering presences for
Pynchon, hardly to be dismissed by an ambitious debuting novelist.
Along with such “literary” titles, Pynchon proposed obvious failures
(probably his own idea of pranks), such as The Republican Party Is a
Machine, or And His Ass Falls Off—this last one deriving from a story
heard by Profane in the first chapter of the novel, about a boy desperately
trying to get rid of the golden screw he has as a navel; one day he finds out
in a dream the way to unscrew it, and when he wakes the screw is gone;
but then, “delirious with joy, he leaps out of bed, and his ass falls off” (V
40).
In turn, Cork Smith suggested more descriptive, though banal, titles:
The Yo-Yo World of Benny Profane, The Quest of Herbert Stencil, and a
long time favorite, World on a String (probably inspired by a 1932 popular
song composed by Harold Alden and then recorded also by Frank Sinatra
in 1953) that Pynchon nonetheless strongly disliked; finally, both author
and editor settled for the simplest and probably best solution, choosing the
by now famous letter followed by a period, that, as Tanner wrote, is “an
initial, a sign, a shape which might be seen anywhere” (Tanner 44), an
overturned Scarlet Letter without a precise connotation, a White Whale
impossible to pinpoint, an undifferentiated clue that though pointing in
several—infinite?—directions ends up leading nowhere.
The manifold ideas evoked by the poem, with the accent on the
protective but also creative power of dreams, as well as the suggestive
image of the multicolored tails/tales of the peacock that combine beauty
and violence (in Greek mythology, Hera placed Argus’s eyes in the tail of
a peacock as a constant reminder of his foul murder); the Melvillean
reference to spouter whales and the exotic splendour of the diamond fields,
that also recall sad scenes of slavery and violence; the horde of monsters
menacing the dreamer—vampires, banshees, ghouls, skeletons, ogres,
trolls, loups-garous (or werewolves), wraiths, harpies, goblins, along with
the invincible Angel of death; all these elements creatively mix symbolism
and masquerade, terror and magic, opposing a dreamlike, imaginative
dimension to the gloomy historical world depicted in the novel.
The cruelty described or hinted at in the historical chapters, the
grotesqueness of the most surreal contemporary scenes, the various
locations—real and imagined—in which the plethora of characters move
and act, all find an objective correlative in Dream Tonight of Peacock
Tails. After all, when we last see Stencil in the novel he is running in
pursuit of the umpteenth tenuous clue to V., one Mme Viola in Stockholm,
 Dream Tonight of Thomas Pynchon 5

“oneiromancer and hypnotist” (V 451). Maybe the only place where he can
find the riddle’s final solution is in a dream.

Since the publication of V. in 1963, Thomas Pynchon has received an

unparalleled amount of critical attention: more than forty monographs,
hundreds of articles and book chapters, a dozen websites, and even a
dedicated wiki where any reader can contribute his/her own notes for each
of his novels, not to mention a growing Facebook “secret” group, aptly
called W.A.S.T.E. In fact, Pynchon’s works are not a matter for academic
scholars exclusively; in the recent decades, rumors of the reclusive
author’s “sightings” have stirred the community of fans and aficionados in
unpredicted ways. Suffice it to mention here only the “Pynchon in Public
Day”, an event organized for the first time by Martin Eve and ‘John Dee’
on May 8, 2011, on the occasion of Pynchon’s 74th birthday, which has
become an annual “culture jamming festival” for fans all around the
world; Pynchon enthusiasts can post to the blog of the event pictures of
themselves with their faces covered by a Pynchon book, going about their
neighborhoods “carrying extremely heavy books, drawing horns on public
property and discussing topics that could potentially include German
rocketry, entropy and all manners of paranoia” (Nazaryan) as a journalist
from The New York Daily News put it.
If this were not enough, the announcement of a forthcoming Pynchon
novel is a cultural event to be endlessly debated in blogs, videos,
newsletters, social networks, and websites months and sometimes years
before the actual publication, as happened with Bleeding Edge, published
in September 2013 but talked about at least one year before. Nonetheless,
apart from J. Kerry Grant’s A Companion to V. (2001, more a series of
annotations for students’ use than a critical study), until now no
monograph or collection of essays entirely dedicated to V. has been
published.
At the 2013 International Pynchon Week held in Durham, UK,
Umberto Rossi and I presented a panel whose title, “V-Locations”, was
meant as a not too clever wordplay on Against the Day’s third section,
“Bilocations”; we asked for contributions dealing in creative and original
ways with the diverse places, cities, and “settings” depicted in the novel,
and the result was a thorough exploration of V.’s inner architectures, a
partial cartography of the novel’s spatial coordinates. Then, in September
2013, at the 22nd AISNA Conference in Trieste, Italy, we organized a
panel focused on “Rereading V. Fifty Years Later”, where scholars of
different cultural backgrounds and methodologies were invited to reassess
the novel’s place in the American literary canon by rereading it in the light
6 Introduction

of the most recent European and American political, economic, and

historical events. Predictably enough, the discussions revealed that
Pynchon’s reflections regarding emancipation, freedom, and culture
actually foreshadow some of the most topical issues and anxieties of the
new millennium.
In planning and putting together the present book, we deliberately
privileged a multidisciplinary and transnational approach, looking for
collaborations from as international and diverse an academic context as
possible. Taking a cue from the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication
of V., we asked scholars from Europe and the U.S.A. to contribute essays
in the two major areas just mentioned—a diachronic, historical axis, and a
synchronic, spatial plane—but at the same time leaving each scholar free
to work his/her own ideas through his/her own preferred theoretical and
methodological approach.
Unlike the earliest commentators on Pynchon’s oeuvre, who had only
three novels and a handful of short stories to ponder over, we can now see
with the benefit of hindsight a much larger picture of what the young
author of V. was able to achieve. So much so that maybe it is even too easy
to note how Pynchon’s first novel contained in nuce the traits of his
subsequent twofold output. Since the first publication of V., critics have
noted and commented on the novel’s peculiar intertwined double structure.
In 1988 David Seed published a two-column chronology, listing on the left
the events taking place in the novel’s present (from December 24, 1955 to
October 1956), and recording on the right the historical sections that
spread without any chronological order from 1898 to 1943. “The
metafictional question that Pynchon poses, but refuses to answer”, wrote
Shawn Smith, “is exactly how these two time schemes and points of view
fit together” (Smith 20).
Maybe these two time schemes, the contemporary frame and the
historical episodes, might fit together if we see the “historical” chapters of
V. as foreshadowing the three major and large historical works (Gravity’s
Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day), while the New-York-to-
Malta frame with Benny Profane and Stencil Jr. prefigures the so called
Californian trilogy (The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice)—
with the latest, Bleeding Edge (which is a New York novel set in the
twenty-first century and dealing with crucial historical and political issues)
somehow bridging the gap once again.
All in all, we might take the V of the title as hinting at the two
divergent, but not too different directions of Pynchon’s writing: the great,
encyclopedic, proliferating exploration of a (more or less) remote past, and
the more intimate memories, between fact and fiction, of a recent past—
 Dream Tonight of Thomas Pynchon 7

roughly 1958 to 2001 (the years of Pynchon’s own adult life). Maybe we
are just victims of the notorious textual trapdoors of a most complex
author, but by now we cannot fail to see that celebrated letter (also thanks
to how it was employed by another artist who was indeed inspired by V.,
Alan Moore) as a veritable emblem of Pynchon’s virtual realities,
considered as a multidimensional and multitemporal hypertext.
We think the contributions collected in this volume tell us something
about Pynchon’s way of working, as well as about our own ways of
reading and interpreting his novel. Luc Herman and John M. Krafft’s keen
analysis of the “Millennium” chapter, contained in the manuscript of V.
but not included in the published version of the novel, offers an
enlightening glimpse of the writer’s workshop, something even more
precious given Pynchon’s well-known reticence. The story Benny Profane
tells his friend Fina Mendoza—a story featuring, among other things, two
toy monkeys, an equivocal brewery, an insane asylum founded by “a
gentle Romanian anarchist, circa 1850”, an ominous yellow cloud, and a
toothless woman who may or may not be a witch—is Pynchon the folk
comedian at his best, and it shows the rapidly maturing writer struggling to
achieve a balance between farce and tragedy.
Tore Rye Andersen’s brilliant study of the paratexts of V. exposes a
hard-to-dismiss misunderstanding that has gone on since the first
publication of the novel; through a painstaking analysis of the covers and
the dust jackets of the first American and English editions of V., as well as
some of the jackets of the later editions, Andersen shows that book
descriptions can have “a significant impact on the early reception of a
novel, establishing a number of conversation points that are duly taken up
by reviewers”.
Mario Faraone shakes the dust off his old copy of Baedeker’s 1898
Egypt: Handbook for Travellers in order to reflect on the “mixture of
scholarly precise description and romantic visualization of the sights”
contained in the travel guide and on Pynchon’s brilliant imitation of that
style, which accounts for “a powerful way to evoke the golden age of the
Grand Tour, and for a narrative strategy to build the necessary atmosphere
in which the characters will like their experience”. As Shawn Smith aptly
argued, “the tourist experiences a perceptual disjunction. On the one hand
she accepts the illusion of objective detachment Baedeker writes into his
system. On the other hand, however, she is indeed in the thick of events,
whether she acknowledges it or not” (Smith 28). Moving from Anthony
Trollope’s short stories to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, from Victorian
travelers to professional spies, Faraone’s essay explores this and other
significant issues related to the fin de siècle setting of V.
8 Introduction

The “historical” section of the book ends with Stipe Grgas’s

momentous rereading of V. in the shadow of the European recession
developed from the American economic crisis of 2007-2008; according to
Grgas, Pynchon writes against the “sanitized narrative” of the
Tranquillized Fifties, creating a world in which “the ballast of the past
weighs heavily on the narrative present”. From his analysis of V., Pynchon
appears to be a writer of the Depression, who “anticipated today’s
‘precariatisation’ of labor”, and whose characters are entangled in a world
of “fleeting commodity” without any possibility of deliverance; “[t]he
incidence of the animate-inanimate dichotomy, the Gothic (magic) nature
of V. and, finally, the negative identification of the object of the search, all
provide evidence for placing Pynchon’s novel within this theoretical
framework”.
Starting from George Levine’s idea that “[t]o ‘make sense’ of the
narrative we must exclude most of the evidence” and “become tourists,
like the characters whose fate most absorbs us” (Levine 122), in the
second section of the book we travel through the various locations of the
novel, starting from the rather Pynchonian Florence depicted in V.’s
seventh chapter. Umberto Rossi clarifies some of the “meaningful
mistakes” in Pynchon’s nevertheless proficient Italian spelling, proposing
that they “may work as remarkably effective—and highly meaningful—
interlinguistic puns”, if not as allusions to the Italian “complex knot of
historical, political, architectural issues” that function as a synecdoche for
the structure of the whole novel. Rossi originally shows how the
fundamental opposition in Machiavelli’s The Prince between virtù and
fortuna reflects that of paranoia and anti-paranoia Pynchon proposes in
Gravity’s Rainbow, and that is crucial “for an understanding of history in
Pynchon’s fiction”.
The image of Paris as the romantic capital of love is challenged by the
title of Clément Lévy’s evocative tour; moving from a geocritical
standpoint, it helps us discover a very different city from the one depicted
by American expatriates such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Miller—a
“mysterious space” that remains in the background and has little to do with
Pynchon’s peculiar “Baedeker land”. Lévy identifies some of the historical
places mentioned by the author, showing nonetheless how in V.’s
fourteenth chapter the French capital merges with other cities Pynchon
evoked earlier in the novel, creating “a personal Parisian space” that,
though lacking “an action-filled plot”, is “above all based on the
sentimental relation between V. and Mélanie”—not necessarily a loving
one.
 Dream Tonight of Thomas Pynchon 9

Jennifer Backman takes upon herself the role of Virgil and leads us
pilgrims through “V.’s various underworlds”; by reading the novel “as an
Orphic text” and examining Pynchon’s “subterranean spaces” that “both
draw on classical myth and comment on contemporary culture”, Backman
suggests that “instead of one, cohesive Orpheus figure that descends into
the underworld, V. features a fragmented Orpheus, composed of multiple
characters”. Such a multiplicity prefigures the mythological poet’s final
dismemberment by the frenzied Maenads, but it ultimately reminds us of
“a set of issues and images” recurrent in Pynchon’s poetic. Pynchon’s
Orpheus resembles Ihab Hassan’s “Vanishing Orpheus”, who “leaves
behind a lyre without strings”, an instrument that “the moderns inherit”
and that can produce only a “song of silence”, which “responds to an
ancient sentence with intimations of transcendence, upward or downward”
(Hassan 6).
Finally, my essay deals with a spatial analysis of Malta as the “prime
location” of the novel, a privileged site in which the empty core of the
novel is brought to the fore. Taking my cue from Pynchon’s casual
mention of irony as a motive for putting his chapter set in 1919 Malta at
the end of the novel and calling it “Epilogue”, I suggest that Pynchon
wanted to deconstruct not only the function of myth as a meaning-giver
structure—something that Modernist works such as T. S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses had already attempted—but also
the cinematic imagination that has replaced myth in the twentieth century.
Mario Faraone has made every effort to provide the most complete and
up-to-date bibliography of V.-related critical material; he compiled it by
means of a thoroughly advanced consultation of the British Library and of
the National Congress Library OPACs, and accessing a number of digital
and paper resources, databases and online catalogues, including ABELL,
Academic Search Complete, Arts and Humanities Citation Index, EBSCO,
JSTOR, LION, MLA, PROJECT MUSE, ProQuest Central, and YWES. A
specific section about V.’s translations in foreign languages has been
added. The bibliography includes also V.-related essays, proceedings, and
garlands.
Umberto and I hope that the essays included in this collection will help
focus attention again on V., a too often underestimated masterpiece that,
probably even more than Gravity’s Rainbow, established Pynchon as one
of the great masters of American literature—comparable in terms of
importance and impact on the literary world to such giants as Herman
Melville and William Faulkner. By exploring the novel’s apparently
chaotic but meticulously organized structure, by outlining how Pynchon
developed V.’s seminal features in the remainder of his career, and by
10 Introduction

rereading his first novel in the light of recent U.S. and European history
and economics, we hope to afford Pynchon scholars as well as enthusiastic
fans new and original insights into a quest that, to quote Tanner again,
“may be analogous to—identical with—an attempt to trace out the
aetiology of twentieth-century [and we would add twenty-first century]
history” (Tanner 47).

References
Cowart, David. 2011. Thomas Pynchon & the Dark Passages of History.
Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. Print.
Grant, James Kerry. 2001. A Companion to V. Athens and London:
University of Georgia Press. Print.
Hassan, Ihab. 1982. The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward a
Postmodern Literature. Second Edition. Madison, WI: The University
of Wisconsin Press. Print.
Herman, Luc. 2012. Early Pynchon. In The Cambridge Companion to
Thomas Pynchon, eds. Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian
McHale. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 19-
29. Print.
Levine, George. 1976. Risking the Moment: Anarchy and Possibility in
Pynchon’s Fiction. In Mindful Pleasures. Essays on Thomas Pynchon,
eds. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston and Toronto: Little,
Brown and Co. 113-136. Print.
Nazaryan, Alexander. 2012. Pynchon in Public Day is Tomorrow:
Authorities Prepare for Widespread Allusion to Gravity’s Rainbow,
Postmodernism. The New York Daily News, May 7. Web.
[http://nydn.us/1D6kmfy]. Accessed 5 April 2015.
Seed, David. 1988. The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. Iowa
City, IA: University of Iowa Press. Print.
Smith, Shawn. 2005. Pynchon and History: Metahistorical Rhetoric and
Postmodern Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. New
York: Routledge. Print.
Tanner, Tony. 1982. Thomas Pynchon. London: Methuen. Print.
PART ONE

RE-VISIONS
 CHAPTER ONE

MONKEY BUSINESS:
THE CHAPTER “MILLENNIUM” REMOVED
FROM AN EARLY VERSION OF V.

LUC HERMAN AND JOHN M. KRAFFT

In the spring of 1962, Pynchon rewrote V., which he had first submitted to
his editor at Lippincott, Corlies (Cork) Smith, the preceding summer.
Their correspondence suggests that Pynchon had been waiting for
substantial comments from Smith before launching his own planned
revision. The clean typescript delivered to Smith in the summer of 1961 is
not known to be extant, but the typescript draft on which it was probably
based was eventually acquired by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center (Austin, Texas), where this early version of V. has been available
for study since 2001. Elsewhere, in an overview essay, we have described
how fast Pynchon honed his fiction-writing skills, turning an oversized
and sometimes clunky first version into a consummate novel (Herman and
Krafft 2007). In the present essay, we focus on typescript chapter 10, titled
“Millennium,” which was almost entirely removed from the published text
even though it contains another avatar of the elusive V.-figure(s) at the
center of the novel, both reinforcing and problematizing some of the
connections between past and present which that figure thematizes.
The 685-page typescript consists of thirty chapters. Chapter 10 takes
up pages 151 through 171. Pages 151, 154 and 155 are original Dittoes in
blue (Herman and Krafft 2007, 2). Page 151 has a smaller font than the
rest of the chapter, and its text does not fill the entire page. The smaller
font size combined with the blue Ditto color is unusual, but it does appear
elsewhere in the typescript, for instance, on page 1. The remaining pages
of the chapter are most probably photocopies of Dittoes (Herman and
Krafft 2007, 2). As in many other chapters, all pages of chapter 10 have
small corrections in pencil. Thus “Rocco” (followed by a comma) is added
as the very first word of the chapter, before “Profane and a stuffed monkey
with one arm torn off” (TS 151). Pages 154 and 155 have “-6-” and “-7-,”
14 Chapter One

respectively, at the top, but these page numbers have been struck out. Such
differences between pages 151, 154, 155 and the rest of the chapter
indicate that Pynchon used parts of earlier versions of the chapter when
composing the typescript draft we have, and provide ample evidence that
the Ransom typescript of V., while nearly identical in content, is not the
document Pynchon sent to Smith from Seattle in the summer of 1961 but a
copy of the working draft of that text (Herman and Krafft 2007, 2-3).
As contextualized by the preceding pages of the typescript,
“Millennium” consists largely of a story co-protagonist Benny Profane
tells his wannabe girlfriend Fina Mendoza. “Seesawing” in the rain with
Profane in New York’s Riverside Park at the end of typescript chapter 9,
she asks him about his past: “What was it like on the road” (TS 149). No
Sal Paradise despite Pynchon’s professed admiration for On the Road (SL
6-7), Profane answers with a story about road labor. According to Jules
Siegel, Pynchon himself did some roadwork in the summer during his
years at Cornell (his father “was commissioner of roads for the town of
Oyster Bay, Long Island” [Siegel 122]). That experience may have
prepared Pynchon to address this topic. Profane, for his part, doesn’t
“remember much of it,” but he does venture a tale about “one day [that]
stood out clear” (TS 150). He admits to himself that “[m]aybe the things
that made it up hadn’t all happened on the same day, maybe he had taken
things that happened and words from other days” to “ma[k]e it a better
story” (TS 150). He “suspect[s]” this is how “sewer stories [came] into
being” (TS 150; cf. V 120), and he knows it is “how he sometimes made
up myths to tell to girls” (TS 150; cf. V 142). Although he is not sexually
interested in Fina, he tells her his “street story” “to keep in practice” (TS
150).
Large parts of typescript chapters 9, 11 and 12 were combined into the
published novel’s chapter 6, “In which Profane returns to street level,”
which readily explains why the small portions of typescript chapter 10 that
Pynchon kept also ended up in chapter 6 of V. At the end of “Millennium,”
the story returns to the situation in Riverside Park: “Rain was coming
down very hard now, and still they seesawed, all soggy” (TS 168). Then,
on the way home, Fina talks about the Playboys, a street gang we have
seen in action in typescript chapter 9 and for which she serves as a kind of
Joan of Arc (TS 136 / V 136). The final page of the published novel’s
chapter 6 part I also deals with Fina and these young men. It integrates
snippets from the typescript, such as “[Profane] was sure that any love
between her and the gang was Christian, unworldly and proper” (TS 168;
cf. V 145), and the entire bathroom scene on typescript pages 170-171, in
which Fina asks Profane to deflower her. He refuses (although only two
 Monkey Business 15

pages earlier in the published novel he was about to have sex with Lucille,
another young woman who offered herself to him, on a pool table, when a
“rumble” intervened [V 143-144]). The typescript’s “Millennium” chapter
concludes with a rather juvenile passage that was also removed from the
novel:

[Profane] fell asleep thinking about it: what is it that attracts them. It was a
Mystery of Sex, he decided. He ticked off on the convolutions of his brain
all the girls in his life. There were not many—convolutions or girls. He
stopped when he reached Rachel Owlglass.
In the mountains: Summer, ’54. (TS 171)

Those last two sentences of typescript chapter 10 provide a bridge to

typescript chapter 11, “In which Rachel appears as a young centaur,”
which became the third section of the published novel’s first chapter.
If it had been up to Cork Smith, “Millennium” would have remained in
the published version of V. In his 22 March 1962 response to Pynchon’s
elaborate plan of revision dated 13 March, Smith is “sorry to see [the
chapter] go.” While he “grant[s] that it is not essential to the development
of the book,” he sees its “real function” as introducing “a character named
Veronica,” “obviously” implying “some connection with V.”—a
connection “it is fun to play around with.” As it happens, there is no
Veronica in the chapter, but there is a young girl’s stuffed monkey named
Valerie. On 24 March, Pynchon acknowledges a connection but does not
change his mind:

It had been my fuzzy and half-assed intention to hint in the Millennium

chapter that V. had indeed progressed so far into the inanimate as to have
become in 1955 (or whenever it was) a toy ape. However since Stencil
never finds out about Profane’s adventure with this ape, the point is not
worth a whole chapter to make. Out it goes.

One could still argue that, even if Stencil does not find out, the reader
might understand the culmination of V.’s development just a little bit
better with “Millennium” (or at least the 1955 toy monkey) kept in. In
chapter 11 of the published novel, Fausto Maijstral recounts events on
Malta during the Second World War, including the disassembly of the Bad
Priest, an impostor who is discovered to sport artificial feet, a glass eye,
and a star sapphire in her navel. Pynchon may have decided to remove
“Millennium,” and with it a further stage in the progress of V., because he
was keen on narrowing down the history of this female/inanimate alleged
agent to a construction on the part of Stencil—the character’s individual
16 Chapter One

and perhaps pathological enactment of the historical sublime, “a weak

hope and desire that history, the space of ontological order, exists
somewhere, but also the belief that human history will never reach it”
(Elias 160). On the other hand, if we take Maijstral’s testimony (as well as
evidence in the Epilogue Pynchon himself says in his 24 March 1962 letter
to Smith is not “‘told’ by Stencil”) as independently confirming some
details of Stencil’s idiosyncratic historiographic construction, we may
suppose Pynchon had decided to leave the status of that construction more
richly ambiguous, not to trivialize it by means of a V-initialed toy monkey.
The ultimate presentation of this construction may still have been
inspired by “Millennium.” Profane starts telling the story about his
roadwork at the very end of typescript chapter 9 (“‘I remember,’ he began,
‘one day back in ’55….’” [150; Pynchon’s ellipsis]), but the story appears
in chapter 10 as told by an unnamed third-person narrator in a voice unlike
Profane’s own. This calls to mind an important aspect of the novel’s
“Stencilized” (V 228) historical narratives that constitute the V. plotline,
beginning with a chapter set in Egypt in 1898. They are told by Stencil,
but in the third person, which Pynchon helps to naturalize in the published
novel by having Stencil refer to himself in the third person outside of these
narratives as well. In the entire typescript, however, Stencil still speaks of
himself in the first person. Pynchon explains the adjustment in his 19 April
1962 cover letter about the almost complete new version of the novel:
“The reason is simply to try and solve the technical problem of the
historical material and who’s narrating it. I know it’s a poor trick and it
doesn't succeed completely, but it’s better than nothing.” Maybe the
switch between typescript chapters 9 and 10 from first- to third-person
narration for Profane’s story inspired Pynchon to apply that person switch
to Stencil’s stories, not least because it reinforced the historiographic
relevance of Stencilization highlighted in the additional pages written to
introduce the published version of the Egypt chapter, “In which Stencil, a
quick-change artist, does eight impersonations,” the first of the historical
chapters in V. (see Herman 2005).
In these new pages, Pynchon’s narrator refers to another source for the
switch to third person, The Education of Henry Adams (1907, 1918),
whose autobiographical protagonist always refers to himself in the third
person. Stencil does not simply give up when facing the challenge of the
“multiple” (Adams 424) of the twentieth century; he intuitively tries to
come to terms with it by imaginatively multiplying himself. The result of
this multiplication is the “repertoire of identities” (V 62) that provides the
basis for the multiple focalization of the historical events in the Egypt
chapter. In the introductory passage with the explicit reference to Adams,
 Monkey Business 17

Stencil himself is said to see his constant self-reference in the third person
as turning him into one of the identities informing the historical
representation. The switch from first to third person may not lead to
historical Truth, but it nevertheless seems to constitute the beginning of an
intelligent response to the challenge of the period. Only by thinking of
himself in the third person and by turning this third person into a and not
the focalizer can he apparently start making sense of twentieth-century
history as it solicits his understanding (Herman 2005, 300).
“Millennium” has its historical aspects too, but it was obviously
conceived as part of the contemporary plotline about The Whole Sick
Crew set in New York in 1955-1956. (On typescript page 467, we learn
that Profane has also told this “street story” to Slab, the self-styled
“Catatonic Expressionist” [TS 64 / V 56] painter.) The chapter provides
additional backstory for Profane and illustrates once more his morbid self-
image as a schlemihl, albeit one who has occasional successes with
women. At the beginning of “Millennium,” Profane and his colleague
Rocco are roaming the streets of Squogue, on Long Island, “in an old
International dump truck” (TS 151). When they find a hole in the road,
Profane gets out of the truck, “dragging” his one-armed stuffed “monkey
in the dust” (TS 151). As Profane dreamily watches the release of “cold
blacktop patch” onto the road, his boots are covered “ankle deep” (TS 152)
with tar before he can react. His monkey is buried too, and “[t]hree little
kids” (TS 152) shoot pingpong balls at him with their toy guns. How much
more of a loser could he be? If the detail had been kept in the novel, the
monkey buried in cold patch would have provided a nice counterpart to the
frozen corpse of the spider monkey “staring up at [Hugh Godolphin]
through the ice” (V 205) of the South Pole in his narrative about Vheissu,
especially since this spider monkey appears to Godolphin as “a mockery
of life, planted where everything but Hugh Godolphin was inanimate” (V
206). Profane’s stuffed monkey is completely inanimate, but Profane
“tenderly” retrieves it from the patch, addressing it as a “‘schlemihl, too’”
(TS 153), before finishing the repair work on the road. Still, there is a hint
at its possible burial late in the story (TS 166, 167), when things have
turned strange and Profane no longer seems to care for the toy. Until that
point, however, his affection for the monkey is distinctly odd for a
character who, in the novel as a whole, is otherwise wary of the inanimate
and distressed by displays of a love for objects (cf. V 23-24). That is, like
the episode’s other motifs suggestive of children’s literature or coming-of-
age stories, this motif of the beloved companion is difficult to take at face
value.
18 Chapter One

Since it is too early to return to the city garage, Rocco and Profane
continue their routine inspection of the neighborhood, which affords
Pynchon opportunities to indulge in the “ponderous Social Commentary”
he so deplores in his 13 March 1962 letter to his editor when considering
his own pastiche of a family sitcom in typescript chapter 12 (inadvertently
referred to as chapter 27). The narrator describes “the development section
of Squogue”—poorly constructed streets with names “bearing vaguely
British connotations” (TS 153), streets with “a bleak and hostile look all
year round” (TS 154), houses that are “unimaginative one story Cape Cod
jobs” (TS 153)—with a degree of deprecation that mixes satire with
youthful arrogance. The sound of “Squogue” evokes the real Quogue on
eastern Long Island, but the details of the scene suggest instead a tacky
lower-class community near the south shore in Pynchon’s native Nassau
County on western Long Island. Its description here does not seem
focalized through the listless and somewhat simplistic Profane, who is an
even more adolescent and self-absorbed character in the typescript than in
the published novel; so if his story to Fina is somehow Stencilized, then
the narrator’s input is not quite in synch with that of the character, who is
supposed to affect the third-person narration. The published novel is more
haunting and sinister without such pedestrian narratorial comments—all
the more reason to get rid of them in accordance with Pynchon’s self-
criticism to Smith regarding the sitcom in the typescript. However, a
“British” allusion in the street name Northumberland Place in
“Millennium” has survived in Pynchon’s work. In the short story “The
Secret Integration” (1964), Carl Barrington, the protagonists’ imaginary
playmate, lives in the otherwise sterile and “cheerless” (SL 158)
development Northumberland Estates.
In “Millennium,” more social observation follows. With Profane
keeping an eye out “for jailbait,” the road workers make their way to the
“local warehouse for the Scheissvogel Brothers Brewery” (TS 154) on
Stony Bridge Lane. “Scheissvogel,” German for “shitbird,” is not exactly
an inviting name for beer. It also appears as the name of a German beer
garden, “Scheissvogel’s,” frequented by the Gaucho and his band of
Venezuelan anarchists in the historical chapter set in Florence. Typescript
chapter 15 is an almost final version of the Florence chapter in the
published novel (chapter 7, V 152-212), and already contains many
occurrences of the German name. The name’s presence in typescript
chapter 10 may constitute another indication, along with the
chronologically latest avatar of V., that Pynchon wanted to extend some
elements of the historical chapters into the contemporary New York
plotline. He may thus have wanted to suggest that the past as imagined
 Monkey Business 19

through Stencil’s historiographic efforts has concrete effects on the

contemporary society of the storyworld. However, the Scheissvogel
Brewery itself in “Millennium” evokes less lofty insights into the real
world, which may have given Pynchon reason enough to cut the episode
when rewriting the novel for publication even if he had once had more
complex intentions for it. In Profane’s story, the brewery is involved with
the local authorities and city workers in a “wonderful hustle” (TS 154):

[Y]ou had to have a city license to open a bar in Squogue and to get a city
license you had to make a private pact with the Mayor to serve
Scheissvogel beer. In return the brewery supplied free beer for all functions
held by the Sons of Italy, the Italian-American Citizens League, the
Republican party and the city of Squogue (which allotted 50% of its budget
yearly toward entertainment). (TS 154-155)

As a result, Stony Bridge Lane is constantly under repair. At the brewery,

Rocco and Profane run into another city worker, a “wild Irishman named
Leery,” and “three card-holding members of the Teamsters Union” (TS
155). The latter four use forklifts to play “Grand Prix” (TS 155), and they
all keep helping themselves to more beer, until they need to sober up for
their return to the city garage. It is tempting to suppose that such satire of
city workers (getting drunk, making mischief, wasting time) and city-
government corruption must owe something to Pynchon’s personal
experience as a summer employee, and to his personal knowledge as the
son of a local-government official and prominent Republican whose career
would in fact be touched by scandal in 1963 (“L.I. Aide”).
Meanwhile, Pynchon uses the passing story-time to describe the area
behind the brewery, which includes a housing development, Bolingbroke
Estates (another British allusion), and “the local booby hatch: Millennium
State Hospital” (TS 156). Bolingbroke is also the name of the guard at the
Long Island garbage dump in Pynchon’s short story “Low-Lands” (1960).
We don’t know which text, chapter or short story, was written first.
(Pynchon may have composed a whole cycle of Profane stories before
conceiving V. and then initially incorporated some of the former into the
latter.) Like Profane, Dennis Flange, the protagonist of “Low-Lands,” has
an acquaintance named Rocco. Surnamed Squarcione, he is a garbage
collector and so may have the same municipal employer as his namesake
in “Millennium.” While the names Northumberland and Bolingbroke in
“Millennium” falsely imply a certain quality of life, their combination may
also point to Shakespeare. In Richard II, Henry Percy, Earl of
Northumberland, helps the king’s cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, usurp the
throne to become Henry IV. But in I Henry IV, Northumberland is part of
20 Chapter One

a group of ultimately unsuccessful rebels against King Henry. Pynchon’s

use of these names in “Millennium” may hint at what Charles Hollander
has argued is Pynchon’s career-long concern with dynastic rivalry and
civil strife. The Shakespeare allusion could also be a roundabout way of
setting up Profane’s nondevelopment in this chapter against the coming of
age of Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, who is seen carousing with Falstaff
throughout I Henry IV but then distances himself from the latter in II
Henry IV.
With a sneer at the suburban Levittowns that became so popular in the
1950s, the chapter’s critical narrator suggests a preference for Bolingbroke
Estates: “It was not a housing development in the sense of the usual
artificial or ready-made environment (in which you feel the inhabitants are
more or less ready-made too). People bought lots and built on them” (TS
156). Maybe the individualism of the neighborhood is another remnant of
the past. The insane asylum is called Millennium after “a utopian
settlement founded by one Maiortheiu, a gentle Romanian anarchist, circa
1850” (TS 156). Social experiments like this were not uncommon in the
United States before the Civil War, and one of them, called Modern
Times, was actually founded (by the nonviolent anarchists Josiah Warren
and Stephen Pearl Andrews) in what is now Brentwood, New York, in
western Suffolk County on Long Island. Perhaps not coincidentally, as
Squogue (more precisely, its environs) is the location of Millennium State
Hospital, Brentwood is also the site of Pilgrim Psychiatric Center,
formerly Pilgrim State Hospital, once the largest facility of its kind in the
world, which opened in 1931 (“Pilgrim”). Modern Times lasted from 1851
to 1864, similarly to Pynchon’s Millennium community, which “lasted 10
years” (TS 156). Pynchon’s name for the utopian community, with its
connotations of happiness, prosperity and ideal government, flaunts just as
much optimism as does that of its possible model, a “citadel of enlightened
selfishness” (Wunderlich 142). The narrator’s description of the
Millennium community also matches the outsider view of Modern Times:
it was established “beneath an extensive stand of tall oaks which were
probably conducive to meditation, social vision, and uncomplicated
anarchist love” (TS 156). While the residents of Modern Times did discuss
politics and morality, it seems to have been the occasional nudist and a
young man advocating polygamy who gave it a bad reputation for the
practice of free love (Strickland). Pynchon’s career-long interest in
anarchism (Benton) already shows in this early passage, and here, as on
many later occasions, he reports the sad disappearance of this form of
utopianism. A fire ravaged the oak forest forty years after the entropic end
of the experimental community. The description of that disaster combines
 Monkey Business 21

the elegiac and the harsh: “Mother Nature, the old abortionist and hag,”
has repressed all but “the wretched scrub” that “covered what had been
[the] Millennium [community] and was now Bolingbroke Estates like a
skinrash” (TS 156).
Before returning to the scene at the beer warehouse, the narrator
continues his digression with an architectural description that veers into a
pedantic passage on dreams, Freudianism and Modernism. Millennium
State Hospital, built in the “American Phony Medieval” style, dates “from
around 1910” and amounts to a “dream-castle” with a difference: “There
wasn’t a straight line in the construction” (TS 157). No wonder: compared
to their antecedents, twentieth-century dreams somehow became so special
that “artistic types were projecting The Change on canvas, brick and
mortar, as well as more exotic materials” (TS 158). Pynchon name-drops
Gaudi, Redon, Munch, Ensor, and de Chirico (TS 157). The Italian must
have been one of his particular favorites, as he still appears twice in the
published novel—on the final page of chapter 10, when Paola pins Stencil
“between the black fireplace and a print of di Chirico’s street” (V 303) and
at the beginning of the next chapter, when Maijstral describes Fausto IV as
the author of “critical essays” on Hopkins, Eliot, and di Chirico’s 1929
novel, Hebdomeros (V 307). Although the second of those two references
is spelled correctly on typescript page 485, the two misspellings, di for de
Chirico, in the published novel might suggest Pynchon was not quite so
knowledgeable about the artist after all.
At the end of the passage on the architecture of the asylum, the
ponderous social commentator comes in once more to explain the current
situation: “But something—the Great Depression, the Technological
Revolution—intervened. […] Perhaps [it] introduced another field-change
into the structure of dreams. Because somehow dreams by ’55 were being
forgotten[…]. And this is why you felt uncomfortable around works like
Millennium State Hospital” (TS 158). (Obviously, the Second World War
also “intervened,” but that issue is addressed quite explicitly elsewhere in
the novel, in Maijstral's “Confessions.”) Delivered with the same lack of
reserve or subtlety as the narrator’s earlier interventions, this explanation
paves the way for a statement that might have fitted with the aura
surrounding the history of the twentieth century as construed by Stencil in
the published novel: “The Century has become prudish in its middle age
and these monuments to disquieting dreams once new are looked on as
excesses of a youth not yet aware of their latent horror” (TS 158). While
this three-page digression on the history of the Millennium State Hospital
considers both breaks and continuities between past and present, which are
central to V., the narrator’s historical imagination in the passage jars with
22 Chapter One

Profane’s diffidence to such an extent that its Stencilization again seems to

go too far—a good reason for Pynchon to drop it along with most of the
rest of the chapter.
Rocco proposes driving around a little more so he and Profane can get
sober before they have to be back at the city garage. At Profane’s
suggestion he follows the drunkenly befuddled Leery, who drives his
street sweeper beyond the Squogue city limits into the “forlorn country”
(TS 160) of Bolingbroke Estates and toward the insane asylum. It starts to
rain. “Well into Bolingbroke Estates,” Leery suddenly drives off the road,
“following some private impulse, some dream (who knew?)” (TS 160).
Apparently Pynchon wanted to keep the dream motif alive here at all
costs, so he follows this up with a misguided effort to make the asylum
even more relevant to the novel as a whole: “Directly ahead of [Rocco and
Profane] the skyline rose up in the screwball contours of Millennium State.
It looked black, evil, and almost animate” (TS 160-161; emphasis added).
As if on cue, Profane starts talking to his monkey, asking it about Leery’s
behavior. While the toy “looked scared, being so far from home” (TS 161),
it does not reply. This highly artificial mix of dominant motifs does not
contribute to the quality of the chapter, which, along with its other defects,
Pynchon may have realized by the spring of 1962. In his 24 March letter to
Smith quoted above, he addresses only his editor’s claim about the
function of the episode, but the very first of fourteen points in his 13
March letter detailing his revising plans is direct enough to suggest the
degree of his unease: “Cut out in its entirety chapter 10 (‘Millennium’).
Nobody will ever know the difference.”
Smith defends the chapter in his letter of 22 March by saying he is
“very fond of all that roaring around in the countryside,” presumably the
events in the vicinity of the asylum when the chapter takes an unexpected
turn in its second half. After Leery’s sweeper becomes stuck in wet sand,
the three men start looking around for “a phone somewhere” (TS 161).
With Leery singing verses from the Australian version of “The Wild
Colonial Boy,” they reach “a house of yellowing white clapboard,” where
a woman with “hair the same color,” “no teeth” and eyes “set further back
in her skull than they had seemed at first” (TS 162) invites them in with a
promise of hot cocoa. The description of the woman indicates that
Pynchon has shifted genres. If the city workers haven’t exactly walked
into a Gothic or Kafkaesque fairytale, they have entered a dreamlike
reality where the coordinates of their real world no longer apply. The
witchlike, perhaps mad, woman has a husband, who “‘is an attendant at
the castle,’” and “‘one lovely daughter, who is dusting upstairs’” (TS 162).
She whispers, “playful and malevolent,” “‘There is no phone, […] and if
 Monkey Business 23

there were, the lines would be cut. Haven’t you heard?’” (TS 162). When
“she cackle[s], ‘An escape, an escape. A keeper got loose’”—an
ambiguous reference in light of Profane’s simultaneous attempt to leave
the house—and Rocco suggests it should be “‘the other way around,’” the
hag thematizes the new story conditions: “‘This way, that way, the other
way,’ as if it were some spell she were [sic] chanting. ‘Upside down,
wrong side in, inside out, this side up, who knows which way round is
right side out. The cocoa is ready’” (TS 162). If Pynchon had piled up all
these explicit markers in a later fiction, we might well interpret them as
evidence of parody or pastiche—in this case, of magic realism, Gothic or
fairytale. At this early stage, however, with a lot of surrounding evidence
that he is still learning the novel-writing craft, we are not so sure. In the
effort to create an unusual form of fictional coherence, Pynchon the novice
brings his characters into a situation apparently supposed to illustrate the
forgotten idiosyncrasies of dreams and the asylum thematized earlier in the
unsubtle digression on architecture. But he provides so much so fast that
the parody threatens to undermine Pynchon himself.
Now that the stage has been set, the real action can begin, and Profane
is too profane not to oblige, at least for the time being. “The beautiful
daughter enter[s]” (TS 163) and addresses Profane as Christopher. Profane
protests, but his common sense reaction is not strong enough to reinstate a
realism already under siege:

“O, Christopher was a boy in my dream last night. He looked like you and
was holding a stuffed monkey by the hand, like you are. We were sitting
alone together on the ramparts up there”—she waved toward the castle—
“and you had a lute, and we sang all sad love songs to one another, though
I can’t remember the words. The sun had gone into eclipse.” (TS 163)

Even though the dream-boy holds a monkey rather than a bear, his name
may allude to Christopher Robin, owner of Winnie-the-Pooh, the stuffed
toy at the center of A.A. Milne’s famous children’s stories from the 1920s.
The girl too has a stuffed monkey, named Valerie. When she invites
Profane up to her room to see it, “Leery chuckle[s] obscenely,” and Rocco
reminds Profane, “‘we got to make a phone call’” (TS 163), but the new
generic logic seems to have overtaken our protagonist for now. He does
not care about the need that brought them to the house, and follows the girl
upstairs, apparently leaving the familiar coordinates downstairs with his
colleagues: “‘Drink your cocoa,’ Profane said” (TS 163).
Given that this scene forms part of a story Profane tells Fina as pickup
practice, it looks as if he is constructing himself here as passive yet
willing. If Fina’s registering this image motivates her later invitation to
24 Chapter One

deflower her, Profane’s “myth to tell to girls” has been efficacious despite
his having “no intention […] of screwing old Joan of Arc” (TS 150).
However, the rest of this romantic interlude could have given Fina pause,
because Profane does not follow through upstairs. Valerie proves to be “a
twin” (TS 163) of Profane’s monkey. The young people lie on the girl’s
bed and position the monkeys suggestively “in an embrace on the pillow”
(TS 163). “A tremendous clap of thunder” seems to quicken the action:
“The girl threw her arms around [Profane]” (TS 163), but, unexpectedly
perhaps, fails to animate him. He immediately falls asleep and finds
himself “in that same street-dream” (TS 163-164).
Profane’s street-dreams are familiar from the first chapter of the
published novel: “Profane had grown a little leery of streets […]. They had
in fact all fused into a single abstracted Street, which come the full moon
he would have nightmares about” (V 10). In one dream he experiences “his
own disassembly” (V 40) as it “tie[s] up with a story he’d heard once,
about a boy born with a golden screw where his navel should have been”
(V 39). The end of the dream foreshadows the disassembly of the Bad
Priest later in the novel:

To Profane, alone in the street, it would always seem maybe he was

looking for something too to make the fact of his own disassembly
plausible as that of any machine. It was always at this point that the fear
started: here that it would turn into a nightmare. Because now, if he kept
going down that street, not only his ass but also his arms, legs, sponge
brain and clock of a heart must be left behind to litter the pavement, be
scattered among manhole covers. (V 40)

The link between Profane’s recurring nightmare and the disassembly of

the Bad Priest demonstrates that Pynchon develops Profane as a man who
somehow continues the past. No wonder then that his story to Fina in the
typescript contains extensions of time gone by. The centrality of the dream
passage above, by the way, explains why, in his letter to Smith of 24
March 1962, Pynchon proposes “And His Ass Falls Off” for the title of the
novel. Smith jokingly replies on 28 March that he “might have a little
difficulty convincing [his] peers of its rectitude.”
“Millennium” also underlines the trouble Profane’s street-dream
regularly causes him: “But it happened once a month or so that the dream
would be more than annoying. It would be a nightmare” (TS 164). The
ensuing description combines the disquieting nature of twentieth-century
dreams mentioned earlier in the chapter with the pathology of the insane
asylum. “[S]ome organized assault is being directed” against the name of
the dreamer: “The persecutors are agents for a central power who is also a
 Monkey Business 25

name: usually an outlandish combination of syllables preceded by ‘The’”

(TS 164). While the importance of names (emphatically contrasted with
souls) is slightly unusual, the psychological affliction seems
straightforward enough, especially in view of Pynchon’s later work. The
worst part of Profane’s paranoia is his ignorance, or the absence, of a
motive: “always friendless in that street,” he cannot find out why the
“Dragglewitz” is out to “destroy [him]” (TS 164). Today this quaint
fantasy name inevitably evokes images from the Harry Potter series, by
J.K. Rowling, and Pynchon too seems to aspire to the epic proportions of
her genre: “They racked him with great waves of pain, took him for rides
on a celestial merry-go-round where no stars or planets shone, stacked
weights on his chest. They would evolve large, complicated plots” (TS
164). Suddenly taking a step back, the narrator then addresses us in a
heavy-handed effort to connect Profane’s dream with the larger concerns
of the novel:

But why? Why not. This is the same feeling we get, is it not, when we see
an earthquake, volcano eruption, typhoon; actually see and smell the
thousands of dead. It seems that motiveless evil, having nothing at all to do
with any human purposes, has set itself loose for a time. Because of our
curious tendency always to call human something which is not, we look on
this as evil, certainly. This is the reason we ask ‘Why?’ People have
reasons for what they do, why shouldn’t inanimate things? (TS 164)

Constructing a link between the inanimateness of the toy monkeys and

motiveless evil, Pynchon educes a version of the sublime that might
explain why V., who does not quite embody dehumanized evil but does
regularly turn up in situations of all-too-human violence, ultimately
becomes inanimate herself. This passage, therefore, would have spilt the
beans considerably—yet another reason (besides its puerility) not to regret
its being discarded in the spring of 1962.
The narrator follows up by limiting the meaning of paranoia more to a
clinical if not social condition rather than including the general search for
coherent explanations of oppression like Stencil’s explanation by means of
V. and, later, in Gravity’s Rainbow, Slothrop’s by means of Them:

So paranoiac is really a misnomer for Profane’s dream. A paranoiac

usually has such a high opinion of himself that there is good reason why he
should be persecuted: everybody, after all, hates a winner. And what there
is of him individual and inviolate is usually concentrated in the character,
soul, personality he is so fond of rather than in his name. (TS 164-165)
26 Chapter One

This distinction motivates the insistence on the name, but it makes the
description of Profane’s dream all the more overwrought and overcharged
with meaning of the kind readers might want to figure out for themselves.
A reference to “Edwardian tellers of ghost stories” in a final elaboration of
Profane’s nightmare of some “looming” “‘presence’” (TS 165) makes the
problem of overtness even worse. Still, dreams are quite significant in the
published version of the novel, as can be seen, for instance, in our analysis
of Pynchon’s late changes in the South-West Africa chapter (Herman and
Krafft 2006), including the addition of powerful nightmares. The final
sentence of the introduction to the Egypt chapter, also a late addition to the
text, suggests dreams even have considerable importance for Stencil’s
historiographic method. “The rest was impersonation and dream” (V 63)
underlines the imaginative quality of his narrative project. Needless to say,
these two instances are both more subtle and creative than the typescript
account of Profane’s monthly indisposition.
When Profane wakes up, the girl is “playing with the monkeys” (TS
165). Her father has come home, and Rocco and Leery have gone. Profane
leaves immediately, despite being reminded of the oddness, even danger,
of the world he has found himself in: “‘a keeper escaped [….] Keepers are
animals. They’re not human. You’d better not go out’” (TS 165). Outside
he sees “a great yellow cloud to the south” (TS 165). Pynchon uses a
similar weather detail in the Paris chapter, “V. in Love,” as well: one
night, “outside L’Ouganda,” “[t]o the South, the lights along the Champs
Elysées picked up the underbelly of a nauseous-yellow cloud” (V 398).
That cloud is still there on the next page, later in the same scene; even the
next day, when Kholsky enters the theatre, “yellow clouds” (V 405) hide
the setting sun. Chapter 28 of the typescript, an early version of the Paris
chapter (which would be substantially trimmed for the published novel),
already contains all three of those cloud references (TS 605, 606, 619). Is
the yellow cloud to the south in “Millennium” therefore to be read as
another sign that the past extends into the present? Difficult to say in the
case of a weather detail, but then this tiny atmospheric connection between
past and present requires the kind of attention and memory Pynchon might
well have expected from his best readers even at this early stage of his
career.
The cloud punctuates the rest of Profane’s story. First it provides a
backdrop for the unexpected reappearance of the girl, “waving [Profane’s]
monkey” (TS 166). But Profane—perhaps signaling a willingness, at last,
to put away childish things; to say signaling the end of even his little
remaining innocence might seem too formulaic—tells her to “‘[k]eep him,
[…] he’s dead anyway’” (TS 166). “[O]nly a silhouette against the golden
 Monkey Business 27

cloud,” the girl does not appreciate this return to common sense; Profane
compromises, albeit indifferently, saying “‘Let Valerie bury him’” (TS
166). He will see the monkey again shortly, in a clump of trees (TS 167),
but this may not signify that the girl has attempted to bury it. The sound of
“Leery roaring just over a small hill” draws Profane on, but the only
people he encounters are asylum inmates who reinstate the topsy-turvy
world by asking him whether he has seen Captain Mahogany, their
“‘escaped’” keeper (TS 166). Shortly a newly arrived inmate identifies
Mahogany as “‘my keeper’s brother’” (TS 166). Meanwhile, when the
inmates see flames in the distance, they suspect someone, presumably the
first-mentioned keeper (Mahogany), of “‘burning Mahogany’s house’” (TS
166). It would be risky in this topsy-turvy world to minimize or naturalize
the ambiguity here by simply assuming the existence of two brothers who
are both keepers, or by dismissing it as merely matter for a weak joke.
After more aimless and panicky running around in the rain, Profane
“found himself in front of the [girl’s] house again,” with the silent family
group staring at him and “[t]he yellow cloud [having] climbed a third of
the way to the zenith” (TS 167). When Rocco finally rejoins him and they
go back toward their truck and the road, “the yellow cloud had started to
fade back into the lowering curtain of rain” (TS 167). Even if we assume
the three city workers safely return to the real world, the aura of the
asylum and its surroundings remains in place. Profane has had more
contact with the uncanny than his colleagues, but he appears to be
untouched.
Pynchon illustrates this absence of effect and affect immediately after
the end of Profane’s story by underscoring his thoughtless, or deliberate,
rudeness. It is raining in the playground, as in the story, which makes
Profane need to urinate. Abruptly climbing off the seesaw, he “let[s] Fina
thud to the ground” (TS 168). She swears and starts to cry. Perhaps to
compensate, he “let[s] her tell him about the Playboys” (TS 168). As
mentioned at the beginning of this essay, elements of the following two-
plus typescript pages found their way onto page 145 of the published
novel. In the typescript, Fina “didn’t have any new information but the
way she told it got him worried” (TS 168). In the novel, “St. Fina of the
Playboys” arrives just in time to prevent a rumble with another gang (V
144). In both versions, Profane is led to think about the connection
between the girl and the gang (“Punks are punks” [TS 168 / V 145]), which
creates a very specific concern: “she was (Profane feared) overdue to get
gang-banged” (TS 168) / “Fina could find herself on the receiving end of a
gang bang, having in a way asked for it. She was overdue now” (V 145). In
the typescript, however, Profane’s ruminations are much more elaborate.
28 Chapter One

They include not only a contrast between his own short-term ethics and the
assumption that Fina “thought on a long-term basis,” but also backstory on
a gang-bang Profane “and five other shipmates had […] engaged in […] in
a transient hotel off the Rue Victoire in Nice” (TS 168).
The description of this event takes up an entire typescript paragraph
and includes yet another instance of the motif of the inanimate. Its
sarcastic first sentence, “This delightful social phenomenon was not
unknown to Profane” (TS 168), announces the presence once more of the
chapter’s social commentator, who prompts a few lines later, “let us
remember” (TS 169). But Profane’s own thoughts on the situation come to
the fore as well. Contrary to “a real gang-bang, where the screwee is non-
professional and preferably virgin” (TS 169), the one in Nice involves “a
professional who worked a careful clockwork round of American bars”
(TS 168-169). Since Profane, in the narrator’s words, “could go all
sentimental in a microsecond over any pretty woman no matter what her
income or how she made it,” he becomes uneasy about “the more un-
cricket aspects of the scene” (TS 169) while he is waiting his turn. Yet he
takes it, “and everything was all right till he realized she was responding,
which is against the rules or at least the definition of gang-bang. The
participant underneath is supposed to be passive. The verb screw takes an
object” (TS 169). At this point Pynchon has started working toward
mention of the inanimate. Quite the social commentator himself now,
Profane knows the woman’s response might be “just a part of every
French prostitute’s act, natural to her as it is to any woman not an
American to want a man to at least feel he is male instead of some neutral
object whose curious appendage is one of the more distasteful aspects of
matrimony” (TS 169). Still, it is ultimately not Profane but the woman
who is reduced to an object. When the two of them roll off the bed, “all
desire left him,” for which Profane has two possible explanations: either
“she had broken the rules or […] like an inanimate object she had
happened into his schlemihl’s path and tripped him up” (TS 169).
Profane’s choice of the second explanation returns the text to his
companion in New York: “Now Fina, like every woman he knew, had
happened to him like an object. But how had she happened to the
Playboys? Like an angel, probably” (TS 169). When he and Fina meet two
Playboys in the street on the way to her apartment, Profane’s concern
about her immediate future reaches its climax: “He wanted to cry. She
looked so small and defenseless” (TS 170).
As mentioned before, Pynchon kept the entire bathroom scene that
follows (TS 170-171) in the published version (V 145). As in the Nice
gang-bang, Profane hesitates in front of a beckoning woman (“After all, if
 Monkey Business 29

it wasn’t him it might be that whole godforsaken wolf pack” [TS 170 / V
145]), but this time he declines an offer he never wanted in the first place.
The scene takes place “[A] few evenings” (TS 170) after he has told Fina
his roadwork story, so fickle Profane can hardly be motivated by the
anxious sense of Fina’s vulnerability that overcame him right afterward.
Novel and typescript motivate his decision by emphasizing Fina’s naive
good nature and the ensuing obligation on Profane’s part not to make a
moral mistake. While the section in the published novel ends with Fina
apologizing and shutting the bathroom door behind her, the typescript
chapter ends with Profane’s inconclusive thoughts about what attracts
women to men as “a Mystery of Sex” (TS 171), reinforcing both his
simplicity and the moral attitude he has just displayed toward Fina.
Cork Smith tried one last time to rescue “Millennium.” On 5 April
1962 he wrote to Pynchon that he was still “brooding about [its]
amputation” and proposed that Stencil be allowed to have heard the story
somehow, whereupon he “gets hung up on the story and thinks there is a
connection between the story and V.” But while Smith was still having fun
playing around with such a connection, Pynchon stood firm on the
chapter’s inessentiality. Besides, Smith’s plea must have come too late.
Pynchon delivered the finished novel (all except Chapter 9, “Mondaugen’s
Story”) only two weeks later. In the 19 April cover letter, he explains that
even though he also “liked” the chapter, he couldn’t “make it operational
as against an ‘effect,’” and for Stencil, “it would only be adding one more
instance.” As rapidly as Pynchon matured as a writer during the course of
revising his first novel, might a more mature, more experienced writer
have devised a way to make “Millennium” an operational part of an even
richer V.? That question may be fun to play around with, but we think the
decision to cut the episode was the right one. Pynchon’s last comment is
appropriately ambiguous. “Only one more instance” could imply either
that his elaboration of Stencil’s quest already demonstrated ample satirical
excess, or that it had already achieved thought-provoking sufficiency.
Readers have been arguing about which, debating the novel’s relative
measures of farce and tragedy, for half a century.

References
Adams, Henry. 1990 [1907]. The Education of Henry Adams. Intro. Leon
Wieseltier. New York: Vintage / Library of America. Print.
Benton, Graham. 2012. Unruly Narratives: The Anarchist Dimension in
the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic
Publishing. Print.
30 Chapter One

Elias, Amy. 2005. Metahistorical Romance, the Historical Sublime, and

Dialogic History. Rethinking History 9 (2-3): 159-172. Print.
Herman, Luc. 2005. Thomas Pynchon’s Appeal to the Canon in the Final
Version of V. In Reading Without Maps? Cultural Landmarks in a
Post-Canonical Age. A Tribute to Gilbert Debusscher. Ed. Christophe
Den Tandt. Brussels: PIE-Lang. 291-303. Print.
Herman, Luc and John M. Krafft. 2006. From the Ground Up: The
Evolution of the South-West Africa Chapter in Pynchon’s V.
Contemporary Literature 47 (2): 261-288. Print.
—. 2007. Fast Learner: The Typescript of Pynchon’s V. at the Harry
Ransom Center in Austin. Texas Studies in Literature and Language
49 (1): 1-20. Print.
Hollander, Charles. 1990. Pynchon’s Politics: The Presence of an
Absence. Pynchon Notes 26-27: 5-59. Print.
L.I. Aide Concedes Possible Padding. 1963. New York Times, 8 October.
Web.
Pilgrim Psychiatric Center. 2014. New York State Office of Mental
Health. Web.
[http://www.omh.ny.gov/omhweb/facilities/pgpc/facility.htm].
Accessed 16 April 2015.
Pynchon, Thomas. 1961. Untitled typescript of V. Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. TS.
—. 1962a. Letter to Corlies M. Smith. 13 March. TS.
—. 1962b. Letter to Corlies M. Smith. 24 March. TS.
—. 1962c. Letter to Corlies M. Smith. 19 April. TS.
—. 1990. Of a Fond Ghoul: Being a Correspondence Between Corlies M.
Smith and Thomas Pynchon. New York: Blown Litter. Print.
Siegel, Jules. 1977. Who is Thomas Pynchon … And Why Did He Take
Off with My Wife? Playboy, March: 97, 122, 168-174. Print.
Smith, Corlies M. 1962a. Letter to Thomas Pynchon. 22 March. TS.
—. 1962b. Letter to Thomas Pynchon. 28 March. TS.
—. 1962c. Letter to Thomas Pynchon. 5 April. TS.
Strickland, Carol. 1989. Legacy of Modern Times, an L.I. Utopia. New
York Times, 30 July. Web.
Wunderlich, Roger. 1992. Low Living and High Thinking at Modern
Times, New York. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Print.
 CHAPTER TWO

CHERCHEZ LA FEMME:
THE COERCIVE PARATEXTS
OF THOMAS PYNCHON’S V.

TORE RYE ANDERSEN

Zeroing in on V.
Like so many other traditional publishing houses in recent decades, the
American publisher J. B. Lippincott has been completely absorbed into
and rendered more or less invisible by a transnational media conglomerate
(in this case the Dutch conglomerate Wolters Kluver). Before its ultimate
fate as an anonymous minor publishing branch in a major media
corporation, Lippincott had managed to leave several lasting marks on the
landscape of American fiction. Even though the publishing house dated its
history back to 1792, J. B. Lippincott & Co. was not officially established
until 1836 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Originally, the publishing house
specialized in Bibles and prayer books, but eventually they diversified into
fiction, history and biography, publishing such notable authors as Henry
Adams, Jack London and Zora Neale Hurston. One of Lippincott’s
greatest successes was the publication in July 1960 of Harper Lee’s
runaway bestseller To Kill a Mockingbird, the profits of which allowed
Lippincott to sign other, more experimental authors like Thomas Pynchon.
Pynchon’s short story “Low-lands” was purchased by Lippincott’s young
associate editor Corlies “Cork” Smith and published in their literary
magazine New World Writing in 1960, and on the basis of this story
Pynchon landed himself a contract with Lippincott for an untitled novel.1
When Pynchon’s debut novel V. was published three years later, in
March 1963, it was clad in a striking dust jacket that expressed the novel’s
enigmatic title perfectly. The dust jacket has since entered book design
history as an example of a successful marriage between literary content
and material form, and it is not hard to see why: V. was about V., and V.
32 Chapter Two

was all over the jacket—what could be more fitting, more simple? In light
of this seemingly effortless fusion between story, title and book design, it
is worth remembering, however, that the title V. (and hence the dust jacket
design) was not decided upon until the very last minute. As it is evident in
the editorial letters between Pynchon and Cork Smith (collected in the
unauthorized Of a Fond Ghoul, 1990), a large number of alternative titles
were suggested during the writing and editing process. The title of this
anthology, Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails, is one of Pynchon’s own
suggestions that also included creative ideas (and obvious duds) such as
Blood’s a Rover, And His Ass Falls Off, and The Republican Party Is a
Machine. Cork Smith also joined in the naming game, tossing off possible
titles such as The Yo-Yo World of Benny Profane and World on a String
(the latter title long a contender). It is altogether fascinating to follow these
two intellectual giants as they increasingly desperate throw suggestions
back and forth while managing to skirt around what in retrospect seems
the only possible title for the novel.
Possible dust jacket designs were also discussed in their correspondence.
In a P.S. to a letter from 23 February 1962 Cork Smith once again asked
Pynchon what he thought about World on a String as a title, before adding:
“We should get going on a jacket sketch for which the title is, of course,
essential. Have you, by the way, any jacket ideas?” Pynchon replied in a
letter from 13 March 1962, declaring himself “leery” of Smith’s title
suggestion (since it was already the title of a popular song, and since it did
not have much to do with the book). As for the jacket, Pynchon wrote:
“The only jacket idea I have is a nice four-color reproduction of di
Chirico’s Enigma of the Hour. But I suppose that is Not Done.” Smith
replied reassuringly a week later: “I will look into the di Chirico business
and let you know. Sure it’s done” (20 March 1962). As it turned out,
however, it was not done.
Pynchon’s letters to Cork Smith and a number of contemporary letters
to Faith and Kirkpatrick Sale (held by the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center) make it evident that he has been very concerned with the
paratexts and the material appearance of his books right from the outset.
This interest has lasted and if anything increased throughout his career.
Pynchon has written his own jacket copy since at least Vineland, he
appears to be closely involved in the design of his book covers,2 and he
both wrote and narrated the book trailer for Inherent Vice. The evidence
indicates that Pynchon is extremely aware of the significant effect
paratexts and the material appearance of books have on our perception of a
literary work. Each material incarnation of a literary text has a certain
“body language” which inevitably affects our reading of the text. This
 Cherchez la Femme 33

paratextual guidance mechanism has long been implicit knowledge in the

publishing business, where editors and designers have taken great care to
ensure that the material form of the literary work ensures that it reaches its
target audience.
Only in recent decades, however, has literary criticism begun to pay
attention to the various ways in which literature’s materiality interferes
with its meaning. Gérard Genette’s seminal Paratexts: Thresholds of
Interpretation (originally published in 1987) was one of the first books to
offer a theoretical framework for describing these matters, and Genette’s
comprehensive typology of different kinds of paratexts remains very
useful. Writing roughly at the same time as Genette, the bibliographers D.
F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann also made important contributions to
the study of the complex relation between material form and literary
meaning. In an influential series of lectures in 1985 McKenzie argued that
the book was an ‘expressive form’ that affected our reading of its contents,
and Jerome McGann proposed a material hermeneutics where our habitual
interest in the ‘linguistic’ codes of literature (the semantic content with
which literary scholars are traditionally concerned) could and should be
supplemented with an increased awareness of literature’s ‘bibliographical
codes’ (typefaces, bindings etc.), since both sets of codes were essential
for the processes of literary interpretation.3 In recent decades, a number of
theoretical reflections on the co-authoring function of paratexts and
material form have thus appeared, but in the early 1960s such reflections
were yet to surface, and the 25-year-old Pynchon’s evident concern for
these matters seems largely a matter of intuition.
In the early days of his career, Pynchon still did not have the requisite
clout to ensure that his own design suggestions were carried through.
Despite Cork Smith’s promise to look into the feasibility of Pynchon’s
jacket idea and his reassuring “Sure it’s done”, Lippincott eventually
ignored the young author’s idea—and who knows how it would have
affected the legacy of Pynchon’s debut novel, had it been called And His
Ass Falls Off and garbed in a run-of-the-mill de Chirico-jacket? After
Pynchon’s and Smith’s epic exchange of more or less inane title
suggestions, the perfect title V. eventually materialized, and rather than
following Pynchon’s jacket idea Lippincott thankfully chose to leave the
design of the book to seasoned professionals. The dust jacket was designed
by the German-born artist and graphic designer Ismar David (1910-1996),
who spent the first third of his career in Jerusalem where he made a major
impact on modern Hebrew typography. The remainder of his career was
spent in New York City where he continued his typographical work, but
where he also designed more than 200 book jackets for leading American
34 Chapter Two

publishers, including Alfred A. Knopf, Viking Press, Little Brown and J.

B. Lippincott.4
David’s book jacket for V. was typical of his distinctive linear style of
illustration, but it was not met by Pynchon’s approval. In a letter to Faith
Sale from 1 October 1962 he exclaimed: “Ahhrrgghh. I was afraid
something like that had happened with the jacket. Next time (if there is a
next time) I will (D.V. [deo volente]) design my own”. Pynchon may have
been piqued that Lippincott had chosen to ignore his jacket idea, but it is
nevertheless difficult to understand his apparent dissatisfaction with Ismar
David’s iconic jacket, whose practically perfect expression of the essence
of V. is almost on a par with Francis Cugat’s famous jacket for The Great
Gatsby.5

Permutations of the Twenty-Second Letter

The dominating feature of the front panel of the dust jacket is the huge
letter V which is drawn in a way that makes it appear solid and three-
dimensional. We all know that language and reality or words and things
are not the same, but the white three-dimensional V on the front cover of
Pynchon’s novel is so imposing that it becomes a monument, a tangible
thing in the world, rather than just a two-dimensional sign. On most
illustrative dust jackets we find both a title and an illustration, but in this
case the monumental V serves a double function as both title and
illustration. This title/illustration draws our attention in several directions
at once. On a vertical axis, the open arms of the V point upward, whereas
the shape formed and contained by the arms and the upper serifs most of
all resembles an arrow which points downward, boring into the material of
which the letter is formed. On the horizontal axis, the shadows on the
three-dimensional V indicate some invisible light source from the left that
draws our attention to the space beyond the margins of the illustration.
As called for by the title of Pynchon’s novel, the three-dimensional V
is followed by an equally three-dimensional full stop which suggests that
there is something more to V. than the letter itself. The full stop tells us to
go on: It indicates that V. is an abbreviation for something, an incomplete
sign demanding completion and a riddle awaiting an answer. This visual
riddle rests on a light brown plain that is marked by a number of white
lines whose import is ambiguous. The lines may be furrows in a field, or
they may be longitudes or latitudes on a featureless map, and like the letter
V they thus oscillate between concrete reality and abstraction. Adding to
their ambiguity is our uncertainty whether the lines are parallel or whether
they are converging. From our vantage point, the lines do seem to be
 Cherchez la Femme 35

converging, but this convergence may be an optical illusion induced by

our perspective. If they are indeed converging—if they will eventually
form a set of Vs in reverse—they will only do so beyond the horizon,
beyond our sight, just like the connections between the novel’s various
manifestations of V. never take place within the pages of the novel itself:
They are the result of Stencil’s or our own projections beyond what is
immediately apparent.
Above the plain and behind the V is a sky whose colors subtly grade
from purple to blue, suggesting sunrise or sunset – an ambiguity as to the
time of day that reoccurs in both the orange sky on the dust jacket for
Gravity’s Rainbow and on the cover image for Inherent Vice. The latter
image is a painting by Darshan Zenith which is titled “Eternal Summer: A
‘Retired’ Caddy Hearse Greets Daybreak at a Beach Surf Shop”, and while
the title of the painting unambiguously points to sunrise, the setting and
topic of Inherent Vice clearly imply sunset: In the Western state of
California, the sun always sets over the sea, just as a major topic of the
novel is the figurative sunset of the sunny and surfadelic 1960s. Sunrise or
sunset, Pynchon has always been fond of the twin knife-edges of dusk and
dawn—two transitional states that usually carry positive connotations in
his work, and that are represented on the covers of three of his novels. In
trying to pin down the exact time of day on the covers of V., Gravity’s
Rainbow and Inherent Vice, we can perhaps lean on Slothrop’s Sodium
Amytal hallucination in Gravity’s Rainbow: “It’s either dawn or twilight”
(GR 67).
At the bottom of the front panel, the genre of the book and the name of
the author unobtrusively appear. Rather unusually, the two elements are
bundled into one single phrase in black caps: A NOVEL BY THOMAS
PYNCHON. Normally, these two pieces of information are kept distinct
on book covers. On Pynchon’s three latest novels, for instance, the name
of the author appears in large letters roughly the size of the title, whereas
the genre label ‘A novel’ is printed in a different and much smaller font,
but on the cover of V. the author and the genre are jammed together in one
phrase and thus placed on the same visual and discursive level. It is not
unusual for author names to take up relatively little space on the covers of
debut novels, where the name of the author is not yet an incentive to buy
the novel. V. obviously adheres to this pattern, to the point where the
author name is no more important than the genre label and where it
certainly does not deflect attention from the enigmatic cover image.
36 Chapter Two

V.: A NOVEL by THOMAS PYNCHON. Copyright (c) 1961, 1963 by Thomas

Pynchon. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
 Cherchez la Femme 37

The use of the letter V as a design element appears not only on the dust
jacket, but also in the design of the physical book beneath the jacket. The
book itself was designed by Marshall Lee (author of the classic
Bookmaking: The Illustrated Guide to Design and Production from 1965),
who like many other book designers considered dust jackets to be
ephemeral items covering the durable objects of books. In his essay from
1951 “What Is Modern Book Design?” Lee even wrote that a book jacket
was merely “a temporary protection and sales device meant to be torn
from the book the moment it is sold” (quoted in Susina 132). Modern book
history and book collecting has proven him wrong: A book without its
original jacket cannot be considered complete, and a number of recent
books have duly recognized the importance of dust jackets.6 For Marshall
Lee, however, Ismar David’s wonderful jacket was simply a colorful piece
of paper to be discarded in order to get to the lasting book beneath.
And it should be acknowledged that Marshall Lee’s design of V. the
book is in many ways just as successful as David’s dust jacket. Upon
removing (but not discarding!) the jacket we discover 31 different versions
of the letter V debossed into the lavender cloth of the front board. These
31 typographical permutations of the twenty-second letter in the alphabet
are themselves arranged in a rough V-shape, in a fractal logic where the
individual parts of the pattern mirror the larger pattern. Like in the plot of
the novel itself, V. is omnipresent on the cover and appears in many
different guises, some harking back to the 19th century and some deriving
from the 20th century. The story of V. thus seems to bleed over from the
pages and on to the cloth boards that contain them. In modern publishing,
these boards are usually reserved for more neutral uses, such as the
emblem of the publishing house or the initials of the author,7 while
elements from the plot rarely migrate to the boards.
The deployment of V as a design element continues in the pages within
the covers. Like the cloth cover, the half-title page contains a large V
composed of smaller Vs (this time all in the same font), and on the title
page we find an even larger V, which once again dwarfs the name of the
author. Significantly, the name and location of the publisher are also
arranged in a V-shape. The name of the publisher practically always
functions as an outer frame around the work, but in this case the
publisher’s name is subordinate to the logic of the work. This remarkable
design choice recurs in the colophon, where the copyright information is
also shaped like a V (and which—if held to the light—is contained by the
empty V on the title page). Copyright information is first and foremost a
legal measure meant to affirm the rights of the author and publisher to the
work at hand, but in Marshall Lee’s design this legal framework is caught
38 Chapter Two

up in the plot of the novel in a move that blurs the boundaries between
materiality, paratexts and semantic content. The chapter titles of the novel
are also V-shaped, and the bottom tip of each V-shaped chapter is itself a
V. And upon reaching the end of the novel on page 492, the story ends not
with the sinking of Mehemet’s xebec, but—naturally—with the letter V.
V. is not safely contained within the story, but escapes into the material
and paratextual elements that are meant to hold her. The novel V. begins
and ends with a V, and the whole story is thus cradled within the arms of
that ubiquitous twenty-second letter that has since become an emblem for
all of Pynchon’s work to such an extent that the movie poster for Inherent
Vice contains an obvious V and full stop in the form of a slender pair of
woman’s calves and the ship The Golden Fang, respectively.
The pervasive use of the letter V in material aspects of the book that
are usually considered exterior to the contents is quite original, and similar
design strategies inform the first editions of The Crying of Lot 49 and
Gravity’s Rainbow: The Crying of Lot 49 features debossed muted post
horns on the front board and the acronym W.A.S.T.E. in a band across the
end papers, and Gravity’s Rainbow has a parabola debossed into the
orange cloth of the prohibitively expensive hardcover version of the first
edition. Important themes in all three novels (and in the rest of Pynchon’s
work, for that matter) are paranoia and ambiguity. Characters usually do
not know where the real world ends and where their own projections and
conspiracy theories begin, and these blurred boundaries between self and
surroundings are—deliberately or not—underscored by the physicality of
these three books.
Such reflections on the co-authoring function of literature’s material
aspects may sound arcane to some. New Criticism, whose methods of
close reading in many ways still define how literature is taught at
universities, tends to regard a book as a neutral container of the text
which—like wine in a bottle—can be poured into other containers without
changing the content. But, as Paul Duguid has argued, such a mode of
thought attempts to separate what cannot be separated: “Rather than to
think of wine in bottles, each of which has a separate identity, it is more
useful to consider information and technology [in this case: books] as
mutually constitutive and ultimately indissoluble” (Duguid 501). Duguid
goes on to suggest that we conceive of the relation between physical book
and literary content as analogous to the relation between dancer and dance:
“you don’t get one without the other” (ibid.). In a similar theatrical vein,
Peter D. McDonald has proposed that we think of different editions of a
literary work as different performances of a play: “Each act of book
production—selection of materials, design, typesetting, and so on—is
 Cherchez la Femme 39

itself a creative process, involving interpretive decisions that effect and

constrain meaning” (McDonald 224). Sometimes these interpretive
decisions are made independently of the semantic content of the literary
work, and at other times (such as the case of V.) they are deeply informed
by this content and attempt to reflect it to such an extent that the medium
and the message become inextricably intermeshed. Like in Gravity’s
Rainbow’s description of blasted Berlin, “Inside is outside” and “outside
has been brought inside” (GR 373).
Back to the outside, then, to Ismar David’s dust jacket. On the spine of
the jacket we find a smaller version of the front cover’s three-dimensional
V as well as the name of the author and the publisher. The back panel of
the jacket is taken up by the seventeen chapter titles that are arranged not
in a V, but in two neat columns. These chapter titles (which reappear in the
front matter of the book) are the only ones of their kind in Pynchon’s
collected work. The chapters in all the other novels are either separated by
mere numbers or by typographical devices (such as the squares in
Gravity’s Rainbow), but in V. they have elaborate titles that recall the
chapter titles of 18th and 19th century novels—Henry Fielding’s Tom
Jones (1749) being a typical example of this literary convention.
Traditionally, such chapter titles have often functioned as small summaries
of the chapter they head, and in that way they have to some extent pre-
empted our reading of the chapter, telling us what it contains instead of
allowing us to discover it for ourselves. In V. they are employed
differently, being enigmatic rather than neutrally descriptive. Chapter titles
like “In which Stencil, a quick-change artist, does eight impersonations” or
“She hangs on the Western wall” do not reveal as much as conceal; they
pose riddles and effectively rouse our curiosity.8
Like many other design features of the first edition of V., the allocation
of chapter titles to the back panel of the dust jacket is quite unusual for its
time. The back panel is usually reserved for either laudatory blurbs or a
photo of the author, but on V. (and all other novels by Pynchon) we find
neither. The story of Pynchon’s invisibility is of course well-known and
need not be rehearsed in this context, but it should be stressed that even
back in the less publicity-fixated 1963, the absence of author photos from
dust jackets was quite uncommon. Faced with the absence of the author’s
face on the back panel, the 1963 reader would most likely turn to the inner
back flap of the dust jacket, where author photos were often also located,
but in the case of V. he or she would once again be disappointed, having to
make do with a short biographical description: “Thomas Pynchon was
born on Long Island. He is a graduate of Cornell University and is now
living in Mexico”. As brief as this description may seem, it is actually very
40 Chapter Two

revealing compared to the biographical descriptions on the first editions of

Pynchon’s later novels. Since Gravity’s Rainbow, this description has
merely consisted of a chronological list of Pynchon’s books (“Thomas
Pynchon is the author of...”), and the biographical information is thus in
reality bibliographical, turning Pynchon into an abstract function (author)
rather than a real person located in physical space. The bio on V., on the
other hand, contains information about Pynchon’s place of birth, his
education and his current whereabouts, indicating that he is an actual
human being with a history and an existence beyond his literary
production.
On the front inner flap of the jacket we are once again faced with a
three-dimensional V. in front of the briefest outline of a horizon—a
simplified version of the front cover motif, sans colors and sans
furrows/longitudes. In case we had forgotten, the author name and the
genre label reappear, but at the bottom of the flap we encounter two new
pieces of information: the name of the jacket designer Ismar David, and
the price of the book ($5.95 – what year is this again?). As important as
these bits of information may be, the most crucial text on the front flap is
without a doubt the publisher’s introduction to the novel. As I have argued
elsewhere, the publisher’s book description is one of the most controlling
aspects of the paratext (Andersen 2012). Its selection of which elements of
the books to emphasize and which elements to ignore effectively
constitutes a set of blinkers that tell readers where to look, and which
therefore channels our perception of the work into certain predetermined
grooves. Book descriptions can thus have a significant impact on the early
reception of a novel, establishing a number of conversation points that are
duly taken up by reviewers. I will quote the book description in full:

This will almost certainly be the most original novel published in 1963. It
is a wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men. One of
them is looking for something he has lost; the other never had much to lose
and so isn’t looking for it. But no two readers will agree about this book
because, like life itself, it is big, mysterious, and absolutely fascinating.
(Continued on back flap)
Thomas Pynchon’s creative imagination appears to be boundless. Set
in various and wonderful places (New York, Alexandria, Cairo, Paris,
Florence, Malta, Africa), peopled with vivid characters, V. is indescribably
original. In a madcap, sometimes sad, frequently hilarious way, it captures
the ruthlessness and multiplicity of the modern world. Incident piles on
incident until, in what amounts to almost a revelation, the pattern of the
book and the century it describes emerge with a terrible beauty.
As for the “V.”, the unknown lady of the title, she is somebody’s
mother, somebody’s mistress, and a world gone mad with despair. Neither
 Cherchez la Femme 41

the reader nor the American novel will remain unchallenged and
unchanged by this astonishing book.

In the lack of panegyrical blurbs on the back cover, the publishers have
apparently deemed it necessary to pepper the book description with their
own generous dose of superlatives. Biased adjectives like “fascinating,”
“wonderful,” “hilarious,” and “astonishing” are densely interwoven
through the text, and the original nature of Pynchon’s novel is underscored
twice, perhaps in an attempt to counteract the supposed indescribability of
this originality with a bit of redundancy.9 In addition to the almost
breathless nature of the hyperbole, the book description is also somewhat
marred by an obvious self-contradiction: If “no two readers will agree
about this book”, how can “the pattern of the book and the century it
describes emerge with a terrible beauty”? Does the book remain
confusing, or does a clear pattern eventually emerge, allowing readers to
agree after all?
These blemishes notwithstanding, the first two paragraphs of the book
description do succeed in conveying a decent impression of the nature of
V., in a way that does not unnecessarily emphasize certain elements of the
work at the cost of others. The description of the plot is relatively vague,
and the main focus seems to be on the general nature of the work rather
than on its specific contents. Even though V. has two relatively well-
defined main characters in Herbert Stencil and Benny Profane, neither of
these protagonists is mentioned by name in the description, which
deliberately emphasizes multiplicity—“set in various and wonderful
places” and “peopled with vivid characters”—instead of specificity.10
Right until the final paragraph, that is....
The first two paragraphs underscore the ambiguous nature of V., and
this ambiguity of course also features prominently in Pynchon’s story
itself. As readers of V. undoubtedly recall, Herbert Stencil’s quest for the
identity of V. involves a number of V-manifestations, including
Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus, the city Valletta, the rat Veronica,
Machiavelli’s concept of virtù, V1 rockets, the mythical country Vheissu,
as well as a number of women whose name begins with a V. Stencil’s
quest and the reader’s interpretative activity to a large degree consist of
trying to connect these disparate phenomena into a meaningful pattern, but
despite the claim of the book description, this pattern is never made
manifest within the pages of the book. “There is more behind and inside
V. than any of us had suspected”, as old Stencil wrote in his enigmatic
note (V 53), and the reader is invited to take part in Herbert Stencil’s
reflections on how all the V-words ultimately join up in a master plot. At
one point an increasingly bewildered Stencil muses:
42 Chapter Two

Truthfully he didn’t know what sex V. might be, nor even what genus or
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 with The Big One,
the century’s master cabal, in the same way Victoria had with the Vheissu
plot and Veronica 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 Has No Name was as yet unrealized, though V. might be no more a
she than a sailing vessel or a nation. (V 226)

This is Pynchonian paranoia and ambiguity at its best. The passage

raises more questions than it answers, and V.’s identity is left masterfully
unclear in Stencil’s speculations. Ismar David’s cover image and Marshall
Lee’s book design effectively underscore this ambiguity, as do the first
two paragraphs of the book description. But when we reach the third
paragraph of the book description, much of this carefully constructed
ambiguity is dismantled without further ado: V. is referred to as “the
unknown lady of the title”, and any idle speculation that V. may refer to a
rat, a city, a historical force or a painting is blown to smithereens. The
book description then goes on to describe V. as “somebody’s mother,
somebody’s mistress”, and even though it subsequently attempts to
reestablish a degree of ambiguity by stating that V. is also “a world gone
mad with despair”, this weak salvage attempt does nothing to dispel the
notion by now instilled squarely in the reader’s mind: V. is a woman.
The towering, three-dimensional V on the front cover, the many
typographical variations of V debossed in the lavender cloth, and Stencil’s
quest all blur the boundary between fiction and material reality, and they
all pose a riddle: who, what or where is V.? While the final paragraph of
the book description does not completely answer the riddle, it limits the
terms of the question significantly and even provides a partial answer.11 In
that sense, the intentionalities expressed by different elements of the
paratext and the plot are working against each other: Some parts of the
paratexts attempt to maintain ambiguity, while others seek to dispel it.
Such warring intentionalities are not a rare sight in the publishing
business. We tend to think of literature as an art form that springs fully
formed from an individual author, but in reality literature is a collaborative
art form that in addition to the author involves editors, book and jacket
designers, typographers, printers, marketing departments etc. Each of these
actors makes their own contribution to the work as it is transformed from
an idea in the author’s mind to a mass-produced saleable commodity, and
while the contributions of the actors often result in a harmonious whole,
sometimes their intentionalities pull in different directions. As John Bryant
 Cherchez la Femme 43

has stated in The Fluid Text, the complex route from initial manuscript to
eventual publication is littered with “sometimes synergistic sometimes
oppositional creativities” (Bryant 8).

Consolidating V.’s Womanhood

Warring intentionalities aside, the first edition of V. is a fine example of
creative book design that made Pynchon’s debut novel stand out in the
bookstores of 1963. While V. did not sell as staggeringly well as To Kill a
Mockingbird, the novel was still a solid success. Before Pynchon made it a
habit to refuse literary awards, V. won the Faulkner First Novel Award,
and the first edition was reprinted three times before the paperback edition
was released by Bantam Books in March 1964 as a so-called Bantam
Ninety-Five (named for its cover price of 95 cents).
The image on the front cover of the paperback edition is clearly
patterned on Ismar David’s illustration for the first edition: A three-
dimensional V. stands on a plain that is marked by parallel lines running
off towards the horizon. If anything, Bantam’s variation of this motif is
even more striking than Lippincott’s: In order to stress the tangible nature
of the enigmatic letter, the V. on the front cover of the paperback appears
to be carved from solid rock. On the one hand, the letter is thus even more
monumental—and monument-like—than the one on the first edition. On
the other hand, this solidity is cast into doubt as the monument seems to be
crumbling. Cracks and fissures have begun to appear in the rock, flakes of
granite are spalling off, and it seems only a matter of time before the
whole edifice will collapse, like the statue of Ozymandias in Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s poem of the same name which concludes with the famous lines:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and Despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. (Shelley 107)

The surrounding plain and sky are likewise more dramatic on the
paperback. The pale sky from the first edition has been supplanted by a
dark and stormy sky, and Ismar David’s light brown field is transformed
into a brooding, blasted plain, dotted with clumps of indistinct matter and
leading to an ominous row of volcanoes at the horizon: This plain
evidently does not lead to a gentle sunrise/sunset, but to a sinister Mordor-
like realm—perhaps a dark incarnation of Vheissu?
44 Chapter Two

Upon the twin granite slabs of the crumbling V.’s serifs rest six lines of
text, three of which are taken up by the publisher’s blurb-like phrase “The
overwhelming first novel by one of the boldest talents of our time—
Thomas Pynchon”. Like on the first edition, Pynchon’s name is relegated
to the same discursive level as the genre of the book, and in this case, the
name is even more inconspicuous, buried as it is in the middle of six
surrounding lines of text.12 The last three lines consist of excerpts from a
review in the New York Herald Tribune, emphasizing some of the same
qualities that Lippincott stressed in their own original book description.
Bantam’s degenerating V-monument would surely have been even
more imposing without the six lines of prose borne by its serifs, but in
reality those lines do not draw our attention away from the dramatic letter.
The same cannot be said, however, of yet another visual element on the
paperback cover. The granite V. is not the only thing standing on the
blasted plain: In front of the V. and obscuring part of its lower half stands
a lone woman in bare feet and a blue dress! A strong wind from the left
blows her red-golden hair across her face and causes her long dress to
billow. From the same direction, an unknown light source (the moon?
glowing lava?) conjures up long shadows from both the woman and the
V., contributing to the ominous mood of the illustration.
Even though we cannot see the face of the woman and her exact
identity therefore remains enigmatic, Bantam’s cover nevertheless does
exactly what the final paragraph of Lippincott’s book description did: It
tells us emphatically that V. is not a what or a where, but a who; more
specifically, a woman. This unambiguous gesture is enforced by the book
description on the back cover of the paperback:

Who was V.? Was she Victoria, the high-priced courtesan? Was she
Hedwig, the sixteen-year-old girl with hip-length, blond hair, whose only
purpose in life was to tantalize and ravish the whole race of man? Was she
Mélanie’s notorious lover? Was she Herbert Stencil’s long-lost mother? What
strange part did she play in the lives of Benny Profane, Rachel Owlglass, Dr.
Eigenvalue, Bloody Chiclitz, and the rest of the “whole sick crew”?

The questions are many, but in comparison with the first edition, the
complexity of the over-all riddle has been reduced. Whatever the answer
may be, V. is definitely a woman, and Stencil’s reflections on page 226 of
the novel (quoted above) are rendered irrelevant. The ambiguity in the
novel and in Ismar David’s and Marshall Lee’s contributions to the design
of the first edition is completely obliterated by this paperback cover that in
effect limits our analytical field of possibilities, pre-empting part of our
interpretation. On the front cover of the first edition, we still had a real
 Cherchez la Femme 45

choice as to the identity of V., but the paratexts of Bantam’s paperback

make that choice for us (and thus take it from us).13

V. Bantam, 1964. Reprinted with permission from Penguin Random House LLC.
46 Chapter Two

Once introduced on the front cover of V., the mysterious woman was
not easily banished again, and in time she grew larger than the V. of the
title. The second and third printings of the Bantam paperback retained the
dramatic illustration from the first printing, but the fourth printing
(released in 1968) replaced the illustration with an image of a woman
whose face and upper torso take up half of the front cover. In order to
drive home the point, the back cover tells us that “V. is the story of a
bawdy, sometimes macabre, always fascinating search for a mysterious
woman.” While the womanhood of V. is certainly more underscored than
ever on this cover, it is difficult to see the relation between the novel itself
and the somewhat generic cover illustration, which could just as easily
have graced The Crying of Lot 49 or for that matter any other novel
involving a woman at some point. Bantam seems to have realized the
weak link between the cover image and Pynchon’s novel, and in later
printings they reintroduced the image of the woman and the V. on the
darkened plain which remained in use until 1986, when Harper & Row
acquired the paperback rights for V. and The Crying of Lot 49. The first
three paperback versions of V. published by Harper (in 1986, 1990, and
1999) all employed variations of the motif of the mysterious woman: On
the 1986 edition, we see the whole body, but not the head, of a woman in a
shoulderless white dress and black gloves. V.’s identity is hidden, but V. is
certainly a woman. The edition from 1990 seems to draw its inspiration
from Bantam’s paperback, showing us a woman whose hair blows across
her face from our left (her right), obscuring it in the process. The 1999
edition uses the same illustration (latterly reversed, for some mysterious
reason). All three versions thus conform to the same basic pattern, with a
faceless woman as the defining image.

Where Did ‘What’ Go?

In Peter D. McDonald’s terms, the multiple American material
performances of the literary text V. all express the same basic tenet
regarding the nature of V., and this paratextual consensus has contributed
to a critical consensus, where the equation V.=woman is rarely questioned.
A paradigmatic example of this consensus would be Kenneth Kupsch’s
article “Finding V.”, which begins by invoking the novel’s riddle-like
nature and then goes on to claim that: “Up to now, Pynchon supporters and
detractors alike have tended to evade the question ‘Who or what is V.?’
and have assumed it to be either purposely insoluble or simply irrelevant”
(Kupsch 428). To the extent that Kupsch is right, the evasion of the
question may be due to the fact that the cover images of the various
 Cherchez la Femme 47

editions of V. provide at least a partial answer, and in his reading of the

novel, Kupsch seems to take his cue from this answer. As a preface to his
attempt to provide what he calls “the correct solution to the question of
V.”, he rhetorically repeats the question that critics, according to him, have
been evading for 35 years, but in his repetition the question has suddenly
been reduced: “I should like to present the answer to the question “Who is
V.?” (Kupsch 432). To which I might add: Where did ‘what’ go? ‘What’ is
apparently an irrelevant entity to the “correct solution” which Kupsch
pieces together from the various female manifestations of V., while he
manages to ignore e.g. Veronica the rat, Valletta and virtù and proceeds—
in the almost smug tone of a master detective who has solved the mystery
that the local constabulary was too dense to comprehend—to claim “that
Vheissu is not the answer to the question” (Kupsch 444). Such cocksure
pronouncements are, I would argue, not invited by the deliberate
ambiguity of Pynchon’s text (after all, as Thomas Schaub reminds us in
his 1981 book, Pynchon is the Voice of Ambiguity), but they are in some
sense legitimized by the womanizing paratexts of the novel, which tell us
what to look for and obscure other equally important aspects of the novel
from our sight.
The art critic Joseph Grigely has proposed that we consider a literary
work a “nontangible idea represented by a sequential series of texts”
(Grigely 177). In other words, Grigely regards a literary work as not a
stable category but as a dynamic entity that is continually shaped and re-
shaped by the constantly evolving sum of its material manifestations. A
similar idea informs John Bryant’s The Fluid Text (2002), where Bryant
proposes a new theory of the literary work:

Simply put, a fluid text is any literary work that exists in more than one
version. It is ‘fluid’ because the versions flow from one to another. [...]
Literary works invariably exist in more than one version, either in early
manuscript forms, subsequent print editions, or even adaptations in other
media with or without the author’s consent. The processes of authorial,
editorial, and cultural revision that create these versions are inescapable
elements of the literary phenomenon, and if we are to understand how
writing and the transmission of literary works operate in the processes of
meaning making, we need first to recognize this fact of fluidity and also
devise critical approaches, and a critical vocabulary, that will allow us to
talk about the meaning of textual fluidity in writing and in culture. (Bryant
1-2)

I believe Grigely’s and Bryant’s idea of the literary work as a fluid

entity that is constantly negotiated by different material incarnations—or
different performances—of a literary text to be a fruitful way of thinking
48 Chapter Two

of how literary meaning is created. New material contexts and new

paratexts add new inflections that interpose an extra interpretational layer
between the reader and the words of the author, and this layer invariably
affects our notion of the work.14 In the case of V., however, the paratexts
on most American editions of the novel all point more or less in the same
direction and thus tend to decrease rather than increase the fluidity of the
work.15 This is not necessarily a bad thing—sometimes it is nice to agree
on something—but as a reader who values the freedom to make my own
interpretational choices I sometimes get the sense that the paratexts of the
different editions of V. attempt to lead me along a certain, ever-narrowing
route, just like the cattle in Chicago in Against the Day:

From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had
often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike
patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being
rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a
progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate
that led to the killing-floor. (ATD 10)

And on this killing-floor, I hear a voice—not necessarily Pynchon’s—

monotonously intoning: V. is a woman, V. is a woman, V. is a woman...

Notes
1
For more details on this story, see Howard 2005.
2
Raquel Jaramillo, the designer of the jacket for Mason & Dixon, has revealed that
Pynchon “worked closely with her on the design of the jacket, being very fussy
about the look of the type” (Jingo n.p.), and according to Tim Ware he trawled the
internet for “the right image of the Inherent Vice cover” (Ware n.p.). Furthermore,
it seems very likely that Pynchon suggested the cover image for the American
paperback edition of Against the Day, Tullio Crali’s painting Nose-diving on the
City. Crali’s futuristic painting has clearly inspired a description in the novel of Kit
and Renzo nose-diving on Torino (ATD 1070), and it hardly seems likely that
Penguin’s designers discovered this covert reference on their own.
3
For other recent discussions of the materiality of literature see Hayles, Matthews
and Moody, and Andersen.
4
For a discussion of Ismar David’s career and some of his book jackets, see
Beletsky.
5
Reproductions of this and many other covers of V. mentioned in this article can
be found in Mead.
6
See e.g. Drew and Sternberger, Matthews and Moody, and Bertram and Leving.
7
On the front board of Vineland, Little, Brown has debossed its logo, while the
front board of Mason & Dixon carries the legend TP.
 Cherchez la Femme 49

8
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) uses elaborate chapter headings in a
similar fashion.
9
On the front cover of the Advance Reading Copy of V. (flimsily bound in brown
wrappers), the novel is likewise described as a book that “will almost certainly be
the most original novel published in 1963”, but this pre-publication version of the
book description then goes on to invoke James Joyce’s Ulysses (“the most
important piece of fiction written since Ulysses”). This comparison was removed
from the first edition, perhaps due to the realization that invocations of other
authors clash somewhat with the claim of indescribable originality.
10
The decision to focus on a multifarious cast instead of individual characters
reappears in the book description of Against the Day.
11
The paratexts of the British first edition of V. (published by Jonathan Cape) are
much more consistent in the attempt to maintain a carefully wrought ambiguity.
The British book description begins: “Who, where, what is V.? A gay young
woman trifling with lives, a lost country or the obsessional search for meaning in a
world gone mad?” The rest of the book description does not provide any answers.
This article primarily focuses on the American editions of V., but a paratextual
analysis of the British editions would tell a somewhat different story than the one
being told here.
12
On later printings of the Bantam paperback, when Pynchon’s name had become
a selling point in itself, the author name appears in a much larger typeface that
makes it pop out from all the praise.
13
A similar example of a pre-emptive cover illustration can be found on the latest
British edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The central mystery of
that novel concerns a mysterious monster spreading terror at Hogwarts, and the
novel is essentially a whodunit. Much of the pleasure of reading the book thus
consists of guessing along with Harry and his friends: Which monster perpetrated
these awful crimes? Only in the final pages of the novel is it disclosed that the
monster is in reality a basilisk, but readers of the latest edition of the book need not
read that far, since Bloomsbury has thoughtfully smacked an image of Harry’s
culminating battle with the basilisk on the front cover.
14
For a more elaborate discussion of this mechanism, see Andersen 2013.
15
The woman has finally disappeared from Harper’s latest version of the
paperback (issued in 2005), whose cover is adorned with an image of cobbles
clearly meant to connote the Street. While this almost non-figurative cover refrains
from answering any riddles, it is a matter of too little, too late. The cat is out of the
paratextual bag, and it takes more than a single cover to revoke V.’s by now firmly
established womanhood.
50 Chapter Two

References
Andersen, Tore Rye. 2012. Judging by the Cover. Critique, 53 (3): 251-
278. Print.
—. 2013. Distorted Transmissions: Towards a Material Reading of
Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Orbis Litterarum, 68 (2):
110-142. Print.
Beletsky, Misha. 2011. The Book Jackets of Ismar David. Rochester: RIT
Press. Print.
Bertram, John & Yuri Leving. Eds. 2013. Lolita: The Story of a Cover
Girl. Blue Ash: Print Books. Print.
Bryant, John. 2002. The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for
Book and Screen. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Print.
Drew, Ned & Paul Sternberger. 2005. By Its Cover: Modern American
Book Cover Design. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Print.
Duguid, Paul. 2006. Material Matters: the Past and Futurology of the
Book. In The Book History Reader. Eds. David Finkelstein & Alastair
McCleery. London: Routledge. Print.
Fielding, Henry. 1992 [1749]. Tom Jones. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth
Classics. Print.
Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Print.
Grigely, Joseph. 1991. The Textual Event. In Devils and Angels: Textual
Editing and Literary Theory. Ed. P. G. Cohen. Virginia: The
University Press of Virginia. Print.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 2002. Writing Machines. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press. Print.
Howard, Gerald. 2005. Pynchon From A to V. Bookforum. Web.
[http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html].
Accessed 6 April 2015.
Jingo, Neddie. 2006. Tibetan Ampersands. Chumps of Choice (blog), 7
December. Web. [http://chumpsofchoice.blogspot.it/2006/12/tibetan-
ampersands.html]. Accessed 6 April 2015.
Kupsch, Kenneth. 1998. Finding V. Twentieth-Century Literature, 44 (4):
428-446. Print.
Lee, Harper. 1960. To Kill a Mockingbird. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Print.
Lee, Marshall. 1965. Bookmaking: The Illustrated Guide to Design and
Production. New York: Bowker. Print.
McCarthy, Cormac. 1985. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the
West. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Print.
 Cherchez la Femme 51

McDonald, Peter D. 2006. Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature:

After Theory?. PMLA, 121 (1): 214-228. Print.
McGann, J. 1991. The Textual Condition. Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press. Print.
McKenzie, D. F. 1999. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Print.
Matthews, Nicole & Nickianne Moody. Eds. 2007. Judging a Book by Its
Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction.
Hampshire: Ashgate. Print.
Mead, Clifford (1989) Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and
Secondary Materials, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press. Print.
Pynchon, Thomas. 1962a. Letter to Corlies M. Smith. 13 March. Print.
—. 1962b. Letter to Faith Sale. 1 October. Print.
—. 1990. Of a Fond Ghoul: Being a Correspondence Between Corlies M.
Smith and Thomas Pynchon. New York: Blown Litter. Print.
Rowling, J. K. 2013. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. London:
Bloomsbury. Print.
Schaub, Thomas. 1981. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press. Print.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1956. Shelley: Selected Poetry, London: Penguin.
Print.
Smith, Corlies M. 1962a. Letter to Thomas Pynchon. 23 February. Print.
—. 1962b. Letter to Thomas Pynchon. 20 March. Print.
Susina, Jan. 2010. The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature,
New York: Routledge. Print.
Ware, Tim. 2009. Cover Art by Maui, Hawaii artist Darshan Zenith. Web.
[http://www.thomaspynchon.com/inherent-vice.html]. Accessed 10
December 2014.
 CHAPTER THREE

TRAVELING AND SPYING

INTO BAEDEKER’S LAND:
(RE)LIVING AND (RE)TELLING
THE GREAT GAME, POLITICAL TOURISM
AND OTHER VICTORIAN INTELLIGENCE
ACTIVITIES IN THOMAS PYNCHON’S V.

MARIO FARAONE

Non domandarci la formula che mondi possa aprirti,

sì qualche storta sillaba e secca come un ramo.
Codesto solo oggi possiamo dirti,
ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo.
—Eugenio Montale

There is an old joke concerning two tourists puzzled in front of a painting,

wondering about its title and the identity of its author. One asks: “What
painting is this?”, and the other, after consulting his Baedeker guide and
his Cook’s timetable, answers: “Well, since today is Saturday and it’s
10.30 a.m., we certainly are in Museo Revoltella in Trieste, and this must
be Giovanni Fattori’s Bivacco.” The joke, moderately funny and certainly
old style, reveals a lot about the scheduling of activities and the reliability
of information—two of Late Victorian tourism main issues, common to
the activity of intelligence and espionage as well, and very important for
the treatment of knowledge communication in Thomas Pynchon’s V.
The late Victorian and fin de siècle setting of a substantial part of V.,
especially the chapters belonging to the so-called “Stencil’s sub-plot”,
represents a brilliant innovation for the treatment of time past—a narrative
issue of the utmost significance in 20th century novel writing. History itself
plays a significant role in the novel, waving from the contemporary events
54 Chapter Three

of 1956, to late nineteenth century Egypt, at the time of the British

protectorate; to Florence in the early years of the new-born Italian
kingdom; to South-West Africa at the time of the German colonization in
1
1904 and 1922; to Europe during WWI and WWII. The present analysis
seeks to investigate the structural and narrative functions of two
characters, Sidney and Herbert Stencil, as well as the sub-plots connected
to them, in the light of Pynchon’s palpable debt towards the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century travel narrative, detective story and spy fiction
genres.
Issues such as conspiracy and reason of state, espionage and exotic
traveling, structurally and thematically run through the pages of the novel,
portraying a series of hints, continuously echoing one another, trying to
weave a complex web of connections between time present and the
various times past. One of these connections is certainly embodied by the
search for the nature and identity of V., a search that represents both a
structural and a thematic frame in the almost Joycean interactions between
characters and time periods, in an inter-textual and intercultural context.
On Pynchon’s narrative stage, the Grand Tour and the Great Game seem
to interact, with the help of diplomacy and intelligence, in an attempt not
only to “bring light into darkness”—according to the much quoted
Victorian imperialistic tagline—but also to bring light into a dark story of
mysteries and ambiguities, symbols and allegories, which lies at the very
root of contemporary culture.

2
What have spy fiction, detective novel and travel writings most in
common? Above all, they are formulaic genres, showing more or less
fixed patterns to which later works conform more or less slavishly, now
and then showing innovations in structure and plot. Among these
formulaic elements are exoticism, the perception of danger, a sense of
conspiracy, an increasing necessity of movement, both physical and
intellectual, a romanticized view of foreign lands and cultures. As for the
last issue, surely the most palpable evidences of any influence of the travel
narrative genre are present in V.’s third chapter, the one set in 1898 Egypt
at the time of the Fashoda crisis. The group of “tourists” described in the
early pages represents a specimen of the classical Victorian and Edwardian
British travelers abroad and, in the various individual types descriptions,
one cannot miss to spot a taste of those irony and parody present in similar
situations portrayed by Anthony Trollope in some of his short stories, as
for instance in “An Unprotected Female At the Pyramids” (1861), in
 Traveling and Spying into Baedeker’s Land 55

which the author satirizes the stereotypical behaviours and outstanding

oddities of the middle-class Victorian travelers to Egypt. This is how
Trollope humorously describes Miss Dawkins, the main character of the
story, a perfect example of the Victorian female travelers—at least in the
Victorian eyes full of prejudices—frequently appearing in such narratives,
“unprotected” because unchaperoned:

And then there was Miss Dawkins. Now Miss Dawkins was an important
person, both as to herself and as to her line of life, and she must be
described. She was, in the first place, an unprotected female of about thirty
years of age. As this is becoming an established profession, setting itself up
as it were in opposition to the old world idea that women, like green peas,
cannot come to perfection without supporting-sticks, it will be understood
at once what were Miss Dawkins’s sentiments. […] she had no idea of
being prevented from seeing anything she wished to see because she had
neither father, nor husband, nor brother available for the purpose of escort.
She was a human creature, with arms and legs, she said; and she intended
to use them. And this was all very well; but nevertheless she had a strong
inclination to use the arms and legs of other people when she could make
them serviceable. (Trollope 239)

A similar use of humour to create and convey an atmosphere is

certainly present in Pynchon’s description of the European tourists in
Alexandria, at least as they are perceived by the various observers who
happen to witness their “playing their parts” in public. And the humour is
further implemented by the continuous shifting in the observer perception
about the identity of the observed tourists. For instance, this is how
Goodfellow, Victoria and Porpentine appear to P. Aïeul, a café waiter in
Place Mohammed Ali, in Alexandria:

His lone customer, an Englishman, perhaps a tourist because his face was
badly sunburned, sat all tweeds, ulster and expectation looking out on the
square. Though he’d been there over coffee not fifteen minutes, already he
seemed as permanent a landscape’s feature as the equestrian statue of
Mohammed Ali itself. Certain Englishmen, Aïeul knew, have this talent.
But they’re usually not tourists. Aïeul lounged near the entrance to the
cafe; outwardly inert but teeming inside with sad and philosophical
reflections. Was this one waiting for a lady? How wrong to expect any
romance or sudden love from Alexandria. No tourists' city gave that gift
lightly. […] Another fat Englishman, fair-haired, florid—didn't all
Northerners look alike?—had been striding down rue Cherif Pacha in a
dress suit and a pith helmet two sizes too large. Approaching Aïeul’s
customer, he began blithering rapidly in English from twenty yards out.
Something about a woman, a consulate. The waiter shrugged. Having
56 Chapter Three

teamed years back there was little to be curious about in the conversations
of Englishmen. But the bad habit persisted. […] This fat one was out to
seduce the girl, Victoria Wren, another tourist traveling with her tourist
father. But was prevented by the lover, Bongo-Shaftsbury. The old one
tweed—Porpentine—was the macquereau. The two he watched were
anarchists, plotting to assassinate Sir Alastair Wren, a powerful member of
the English Parliament. The peer’s wife—Victoria—was meanwhile being
blackmailed by Bongo-Shaftsbury, who knew of her own secret anarchist
sympathies. The two were music-hall entertainers, seeking jobs in a grand
vaudeville being produced by Bongo-Shaftsbury, who was in town seeking
funds from the foolish knight Wren. Bongo-Shaftsbury’s avenue of
approach would be through the glamorous actress Victoria, Wren’s
mistress, posing as his wife to satisfy the English fetish of respectability.
Fat and Tweed would enter their consulate tonight arm-in-arm, singing a
jovial song, shuffling, rolling their eyes. (V 63-65)

Though proving more or less entirely wrong upon hindsight, Aïeul’s

shifting hypothesis about the identities of the travelers and the motives
behind their conduct offer a good excerpt from the catalogue of the so
called “Baedeker generation” of tourists traveling abroad, those preparing
their trip aforehand by reading their Baedeker, possibly the most important
and most read among the renowned main tourist guides at the end of the
19th century, the one Pynchon himself states to be “the major ‘source’ for
[‘Under the Rose’]”, and consequently for V.’s third chapter.2 The issue of
the “Baedeker travelers” directly concerns the travel narrative thread in V.,
and “baedekering” (so to speak) reality is an important topic in travel
writing at the end of the 19th century. In fact, Derek Gregory underlines
the intimate connections between reading and sightseeing, therefore
stressing the importance of the fashion of travel writing and of travel
guides for the average middle class Victorian tourists abroad, particularly
in Egypt, a land of great expectations and magical encounters, which had
to be constructed in the imagination before being experienced through
sight on the site:

Travellers prepared for their journeys by studying in advance, and they

also took large number of books with them. In the middle decades of the
nineteenth century those who hired a dahabeeah—a large house-boat with
cross-sails—soon discovered that books were […] “an essential to the
pleasure of the voyage”. But they were scarcely light reading. [In his The
Attractions of the Nile and its banks (1868) Reverend Alfred Charles
Smith] declares that “the volumes selected for the library of the dahabeah
[…] will be principally confined to those which treat of Egyptology as well
as of those more distant countries whence the Nile takes its rise; in all of
which, and the speculations and discussions thereupon, the traveling
 Traveling and Spying into Baedeker’s Land 57

Hawager [foreigner] will soon be deeply absorbed”. […] From the middle
of the century guidebooks were incorporated into the canon, and these
were no lightweights either. (Gregory 117-118)

By and by, the act of reading anywhere at all times and in all conditions,
passes from being simply a fashion to becoming a proper ritual for the
traveler, and guides such as Baedeker’s Handbook for Lower Egypt (1st
ed. 1877) rise from mere handy companions to intercultural and
intellectual bibles, practical and portable little helpers in daily negotiating
a life changing experience. In Egypt and the English (1908), the British
traveler and academic Douglas Sladen claims that

The only fault […] with the cabins is that the electric light goes out at
eleven, for on the Nile, more than anywhere else, you want to do a good
deal of reading at night. All the best books on Egypt are in the ship’s
library. If you read three or four hours every night you would not exhaust
all that good writers have written upon the places you see on the voyage,
and you can only read at night, because by day you are passing something
of interest every few minutes, whether it be a city, or a Nile village, or an
exquisite palm grove, or picturesque incidents of native life, or the birds
[…]. (Sladen 1908, 414-415)

Whether it is a plain “Baedeker informed” saunter or a more

sophisticated “Baedeker based” exploration, Baedeker is still the word:
traveling abroad and reading travel guides become inextricable and
fashionable actions, enabling the Victorians to reiterate abroad social rites,
as it happens in V. to Victoria and her family when they are attending a
reception in the Austrian Consulate or enjoying a dinner at Fink restaurant
in Alexandria; and to live more fully the expectations held from the
beginning and the many marvels they bump into whilst traveling. Reading
is a way for the traveler to interpret the code provided by a still unknown
and yet fascinating new world around:

By dinner-time most people are tired—tired of doing nothing if there has

been no excursion; tired of long rides over the hot Desert, and hard sight-
seeing, if there has been an excursion. They sit down with great content to
a good dinner, and when it is over move out to the marquee which has been
improvised out of the lounge for their coffee and cigarettes and a little light
chatter; and, if they are wise, read their guide-books. On our steamer
nobody played bridge except the two clergymen and their wives. Most
people had no time for the Devil’s picture-books; they were reading their
guide-books; you are lost in Egypt if you do not read up. (Sladen 424)
58 Chapter Three

Following the often changeable but always popular fashion of

traveling, travel guides become more and more sophisticated in describing
classical and new routes to be followed, and sights and landscapes to be
seen: a must for the successful traveler, to be romantically enjoyed on the
road and meticulously detailed in the notes jotted down in the traveler’s
diary, and often embellished and furthermore romanticized in the yarns to
friends, relatives and acquaintances once back home. A proper style of
narration is developed by guide writers, a mixture of scholarly precise
description and romantic visualization of the sights, such as in the
following account of the route from Keneh (Qena) to Thebes (Luxor) in
the 1898 Baedeker fourth edition:

On the left bank, as we draw near Thebes, rise high limestone hills,
presenting precipitous sides to the river, from which, however, they are
separated by a strip of fertile land. The right bank is flatter, and the
Arabian hills retreat farther into the distance. Before reaching the point
where the W. chain projects a long curved mass of rock towards the river,
we see to the left first the great obelisk, and the pylons of the temple of
Karnak, half-concealed by palm trees. When we clear the abrupt profile of
the W. cliffs […], we may catch a distant view of Luxor towards the S.E.
None of the buildings on the W. bank are visible until the steamer has
ascended as high as Karnak; then first the colossi of Memnon and
afterwards the Ramasseum and the Temple of Der el-bahri come into view.
The telegraph-posts and wires, which here obtrude themselves upon the
view, seem strangely out of place beside the majestic relics of Egypt’s
golden period. As we gradually approach Luxor, we distinguish the flags
flying above the white houses on the bank and from the consular dwelling.
[…] In a few minutes more the steamer halts, close to the colonnades of
the mighty temple of Amenophis III. (Baedeker, 225)

A style Pynchon very brilliantly imitates in more than one passage of

“Under the Rose” and V., as for instance in the two distinct, yet
complementary descriptions of the express train route bringing the British
and German tourists party from Alexandria to Cairo:

Their silence continued for twenty-five miles. The express passed by farms
which began to look more and more prosperous, fellahin who worked in
the fields at a faster pace, small factories and heaps of ancient ruin and tall
flowering tamarisks. The Nile was in flood: stretching away from them, a
glittering network of irrigation canals and small basins caught the water,
conducted it through wheat and barley fields which extended to the
horizon. The train reached the Rosetta arm of the Nile; crossed high over it
by a long, narrow iron bridge, entered the station at Kafr ez-Zaiyat, where
it stopped. (SL 123-124)
 Traveling and Spying into Baedeker’s Land 59

The railway from Alexandria to Cairo describes a rough arc whose chord
points southeast. But the train must first angle north to skirt Lake Mareotis.
[…] The site of the ancient Eleusis—a great mound, looking like the one
spot on earth fertile Demeter had never seen, passed by to the south. At
Sidi Gaber the train swung at last toward the southeast, inching slow as the
sun; zenith and Cairo would in fact be reached at the same time. Across the
Mahmudiyeh Canal, into a slow bloom of green—the Delta—and clouds of
ducks and pelicans rising from the shores of Mareotis, frightened by the
noise. Beneath the lake were 150 villages, submerged by a man-made
Flood in 1801, when the English cut through an isthmus of desert during
the siege of Alexandria, to let the Mediterranean in. (V 78-79)

Pynchon’s descriptions are cleverly outlined and well informed,

offering a strong sense of visualization. Yet, descriptions such as these
have a double purpose: they account for a powerful way to evoke the
golden age of the Grand Tour, and for a narrative strategy to build the
necessary atmosphere in which the characters will live their experience.
Because on that train from Alexandria to Cairo around Lake Mareotis, the
train conductor “Waldetar squeezed past a German with blue lenses for
eyes and an Arab deep in conversation” (V 78), and these characters so
vaguely described are suitable representatives of V.’s belonging also to the
spy fiction genre.

3
In fact, as evident and influential as they may appear, the Grand Tour
and the travel narrative threads are but a part of the complex structure of
V. in its entirety, and of the third chapter in particular. Upon observing an
apparently “flirtatious equilibrium” between Victoria, Goodfellow and
Bongo-Shaftsbury at the Fink restaurant in Alexandria, the professional
cadger Maxwell Rowley-Bugge “came to the awareness reluctantly. In
Baedeker land one doesn’t often run across impostors. Duplicity is against
the law, it is being a Bad Fellow. But they were only posing as tourists.
Playing a game different from Max’s; and it frightened him” (V 74). And
this “different game” is one of the first hints that the Great Game, namely
the spy narrative genre, plays (no pun intended) a relevant role in
Pynchon’s architectural plan in V.: Goodfellow and Porpentine turns out to
be agents of the British Intelligence, while Bongo-Shaftsbury and
Lepsius—together with Moldweorp, who only appears in the “Under the
Rose” version—belong to the opposite side, namely the German counter-
intelligence trying to operate some mischievous plan in Egypt, in order to
60 Chapter Three

break the already extremely fragile balance existing between the European
powers.
The term Great Game is allegedly coined in 1840 by the intelligence
officer of the British East India Company Captain Arthur Conolly in a
letter to Major Henry Rowlinson, the newly appointed political agent at
Qandahar: “You have a Great game, a noble game in front of you” (Yapp
181). Conolly often travels in disguise under the name “Khan Ali”—a
word-play on his true name—and he is active in Central Asia from 1829 to
1842, when he is captured in Bokhara by the local Emir, and there
beheaded together with his fellow British officer Lieutenant Colonel
Charles Stoddart, on the charge of being both spies of the British Empire,
which indeed they are (Hopkirk 1). The term is mostly known for being at
the core itself of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), a novel set in the British
Raj between 1893 and 1898. The main protagonist is Kim (born Kimball
O’Hara), an Irish orphan who lives a vagabond existence, and is recruited
by Mahbub Ali, a Pashtun native operative of the British secret service,
and literally thrown to play the Great Game under the guidance of Lurgan
Sahib, a master spy active in Simla under the cover of a gem trader:
“Mahbub’s eyes lighted […]. Even Lurgan’s impassive face changed. He
considered the years to come when Kim would have been entered and
made to the Great Game that never ceases day and night, throughout India.
He foresaw honour and credit in the mouths of a chosen few, coming to
him from his pupil.” (Kipling 279-280). While originally used as a
definition for the intelligence and counter-intelligence activity between
British and Russian Empires to outplay each other in the control of the
power in the Central Asian exchequer—a vital geographical and economic
sector for the survival of British supremacy in the Indian sub-continent—
between the end of the nineteenth and the twentieth century the term Great
Game rapidly refers more and more to any espionage activity involving
European countries, acting as a synonym of espionage. The term enters the
academic stage fairly early, almost certainly via J.W. Kaye’s History of the
War in Afghanistan (1857) and Lives of Indian Officers (1867), and it
becomes a recurrent issue in detective, spy and intrigue novels in the so
called Belle Epoque age, writings in which war and espionage are often
treated in terms of English Sportsmanship. And it appears very often in
John Buchan’s novels starring Sandy Arbuthnot as the hero character, such
as Greenmantle (1916), The Three Hostages (1924), The Courts of the
Morning (1929), and The Island of Sheep (1936). And Buchan’s novels
bring us straight back to Pynchon.
In his 1984 introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon himself asserts the
influence of both the travel narrative and spy story genres in his writings,
 Traveling and Spying into Baedeker’s Land 61

above all in the short story “Under the Rose” (1961). Pynchon is
intellectually honest enough to recognise the somewhat “external” nature
of such influence at least in the short story: “The net effect [of reading a
lot of spy fiction, and novels of intrigue] was eventually to build up in my
uncritical brain a peculiar shadowy vision of the history preceding the two
world wars. Political decision-making and official documents did not
figure in [“Under the Rose”] as much as lurking, spying, false identities,
psychological games” (SL 18). Pynchon quotes some of the most
outstanding writers of spy fiction and novels of intrigue of his epoch, such
as John Buchan whose The Thirty-nine Steps (1915)—set during May and
June 1914 in a Europe closer and closer to the outburst of the Great War—
may be considered one of the masterpieces of the genre. Pynchon also
refers to E. Phillips Oppenheim, a really prolific author among whose
more than one hundred and fifty novels and short stories stand out titles
such as The Great Secret (1908) focused on an international conspiracy,
and The Spy Paramount (1934) set in Fascist Rome; and Helen MacInnes,
also very prolific, author of relevant titles such as Above Suspicion (1941),
the adventure of a young British couple who seeks a British anti-Nazi
agent in Germany in the summer of 1939 while seemingly on a vacation;
and Assignment in Brittany (1942), a tale of espionage in Nazi-occupied
Brittany in the summer of 1940.
Because of the extreme vagueness of Pynchon’s statement, though, it
would be extremely difficult to exactly identify which Oppenheim’s and
MacInnes’ novels he is referring to; and he is as much vague in making
reference to another writer he considers influential for “Under the Rose”,
that is Geoffrey Household, a master of the “hunted vs. hunter” spy fiction
sub-genre, author of the classic Rogue Male (1939), the story of an
unnamed Briton who engages himself in trying to shoot an European
dictator, interested only in the hunt for its own sake, but then involved in
an even greater and riskier set of events. According to John L. Simons,
though, it is Fellow Passenger (1955, aka Hang the Moon High) rather
than Rogue Male Household’s possible influence for Pynchon short story
and then V.’s third chapter. And, in Simons’ opinion, once again irony
seems to be what Pynchon shares with Household: “[Fellow Passenger’s
ironic structure] makes its hero the center of an intricate web of factitious
circumstances and events of which he would perhaps not care. The
accusation against [the hero] Claudio Howard-Wolferstan have been
devised by men trained to unearth plots and conspiracies, even if, as here,
they do not exist.” (Simons 85). Besides, I believe that also the picaresque
structure of Howard-Wolferstan events in Household’s novel may have
62 Chapter Three

influenced Pynchon in planning and developing the chaotic and hectic

chase led by Herbert Stencil to track down and identify the lady V.
The concurrent influence of both the travel narrative and the spy fiction
is very clear in the general atmosphere of exotic fascination, conspiracy,
treason, danger and plot/counterplot which can be perceived all along the
novel, above all in the chapters connected to Stencil’s quest for V. The
nature of this quest, whether metaphorical or real, makes it possible for
Pynchon to add to the spy story patterns and stereotypes, those of the
detective novel as well.

4
Herbert Stencil, the “century’s child” (V 52), is the son of Sidney, a former
secret agent of the British Foreign Office, active in the Mediterranean area
between the end of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth
century. Entirely by chance—as appears to be the case for the majority of
events in V.—Herbert finds in his father’s Florence journal for April 1899
a curious reference to a mysterious lady or place defined by the initial “V.”
only. From this feeble clue, he starts an almost twenty year long stubborn
and desperate quest to track down, identify and finally meet (or reach,
should it turn out to be a place rather than a person) this V. To do so, he
travels to several countries where lady V. could have appeared, and
follows many other similarly feeble and inconsistent clues, most of which
could turn out to be significant, but could also represent red herrings in the
tradition of the classical spy and detective stories plots. The use of the
conditional is mandatory, because the main reading ciphers of V. are
indeterminacy, vagueness, uncertainty, imprecision, obscurity, in general
lack of reliable information through which (and around which) Herbert
Stencil can organize his quest.
The form itself of the Stencil/V. narrative thread is discontinuous,
fragmentary and heterogeneous, and this is structural to Pynchon’s intent
to achieve the general sense of indeterminacy constantly present
throughout the entire novel. Pynchon makes use of a wide range of
narrative techniques, but probably the tone he most frequently employs is
a personal form of the multiple points of view technique, derived from
Modernism. The shifts in the narration more or less correspond to shifts in
perception that the reader experiences in receiving the discussed materials,
and on the reliability of the narrated events. Pynchon’s skilful use of this
technique allows him to attain another interesting and stimulating goal, the
deep involvement of the reader in the Great Game of investigation and
detection; the reader constantly tries to reconstruct the various stages of
 Traveling and Spying into Baedeker’s Land 63

the quest, to gather clues and valuable pieces of information in order to

solve the puzzle. If V. tells the story of the “stencil-detective”—however
shattered and chaotic it may seem—it also tells the story of the “reader-
detective”, a story which—for better or for worse—accounts for a
substantial part of the maze the novel represents. In fact, George Levine’s
statement about the narrative technique in “Under the Rose” may be
applied to the multiple point of views employed in the different chapters
and sub-plots of the novel: “Each narrator is […] preoccupied with a
private life into which the tourists [and spies] intrude themselves briefly.
Since the narrator’s stories seem not to be connected, we, as readers, are
seduced into piecing together the tourists’ story […] we become Stencil, or
Stencilized, in our attempt to make order of the various fragments”
(Levine 121-122).
But if Stencil’s sources were reliable or at least verifiable, one would
be allowed to try to understand the general pattern existing behind an
amount of apparently loosely connected events. On the contrary, Pynchon
is clever enough to convey a general sense of uncertainty, based both on
Stencil’s failure in convincingly connecting clues and revelations, and on
the unreliability of the sources which passes through Stencil’s sometimes
morbid, more often creative, always imperfect way of relating them. This
is certainly due to Pynchon’s adherence to one of Nabokov’s major
lessons, which Susan Strehle has conveniently defined “actualism” as
differentiated from “realism”:

The subjectivity of actualism distinguishes [Pynchon’s fiction] from both

of the traditions it revises. Because they write about a world that is not
solid, clean or simply knowable, actualists must abandon the realist’s
confident presumption to mirror nature. In place of omniscience and
impersonal detachment, manipulated to produce the illusion of an
uncreated picture of “slice-of-life”, actualists expose the personal and
subjective nature of their representations, particularly through a self-
conscious artifice that undermines the credibility, as “literal” reality, of the
created world. (Strehle 34)

According to Strehle, therefore, Pynchon follows Nabokov’s actualist

idea that Art doesn’t mirror nature, but is rather the object itself of its own
representation, and fiction always explores its own artistic process,
showing that the ultimate level of objectivity in representing life is
impossible to achieve, because “reality is relative to the observer, whose
angle of vision limits his knowledge” (Strehle 35). The subjectivity of all
patterns imposed on reality is perfectly clear to the late nineteenth century
mind of Sidney Stencil, the spy of the Victorian age, at least as it emerges
64 Chapter Three

from Herbert’s yarn to doctor Eigenvalue of his father’s account of the

1899 Florence events, focusing on a possible Situation of international
crisis:

Oh, The Situation. The bloody Situation. In his more philosophical

moments [Sidney Stencil] would wonder about this abstract entity. The
Situation, its idea, the details of its mechanism. He remembered times
when whole embassies full of personnel had simply run amok and
gibbering in the streets when confronted with a Situation which refused to
make sense no matter who looked at it, or from what angle. […] He had
decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed
in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment.
(V 189)

By definition, among several other issues, espionage is strongly based

both on the existence of a sense of paranoia and on the continuous fear of
conspiracies: spies exist not only to unravel existing political and military
plots, but very often also to investigate imaginary ones. In this sense of
political and paranoid voyeurism, spying may be considered a structural
method to find patterns or meanings where none seems to exist. Although
one of spies’ main aims is to uncover some hidden truth, the very act of
spying very seldom completely achieves it, because in spying nothing is
certain, everything is variable, a sort of “inherent vice” of the profession
itself, that is the impossibility of reaching a definitive objective certainty
about anything due to the impossibility of trusting any evidence as
definitively objective.3 Exactly because reality is relative to the observer,
whose knowledge is limited to a particular point of view, spying as part of
observing reality and events is unreliable because it is imperfect and
uncertain in its methods, incomplete and fragile in the acts of collecting
data and information. And this is particularly true in the actions of Herbert
Stencil, a character presenting peculiar traits of the spy, of the detective
and of the tourist, without actually being entirely any of them.
How does the reader get to know the events, anecdotes, and plots
belonging to the espionage/detective thread in the novel? Essentially
through Stencil’s quest and research, through his distorted, incomplete and
often unreliable reading of historical documents and personal journals, as
well as through his casual overhearing of confessions, revelations and
gossips. These “sources”, which in any spy novel would represent the very
core of the intelligence plot and of the actions of the hero, in V.
continuously reveal a lack of certainty and expose the impossibility of
 Traveling and Spying into Baedeker’s Land 65

taking sound decisions and practical actions. A brief overview of the main
issues emerging from Stencil’s sources enables us to examine the nature
and reliability of Stencil’s own gathered materials, and may help in
clarifying this issue:
Egypt 1898 (V 63-94): Sidney’s journals. Beside the fact that Sidney’s
character is completely absent from Herbert’s report, Herbert admits that
“he’d only the veiled references to Porpentine in the Journals. The rest was
impersonation and dream” (V 63), impersonations that, like dreams, prove
to be essential both to Pynchon’s narrative shift technique, and to Stencil’s
own necessity “to keep Stencil’s in his place [… to] appear as only one
among a repertoire of identities” (V 62). The narrative voice at the
beginning of the third chapter even goes as far as defining Stencil’s
general narrative technique a “[f]orcible dislocation of personality”,
further noticing that this “is not exactly the same as seeing the other
fellow’s point of view” (V 62). Stencil achieves a detached self by
impersonating eight different narrators: seven are witnesses of some parts
of the actions and of some portions of the dialogues—Aïeul, the
Alexandrian cafe waiter; Yusef, the anarchist factotum; Maxwell Rowley-
Bugge, the crippled, peregrine and penniless; Waldetar, the train
conductor; Gebrail, the Arab taxi-driver; Girgis, the ageing acrobat and
burglar; Hanne, the German barmaid—and the eighth is a third-person
omniscient narrator, which relates Porpentine’s death. In this way,
Pynchon stresses the factual impossibility to gain unity of vision and
clearness of perception in the narration, and this is furthermore evident if
one compares the third chapter with its antecedent, the 1961 short story
“Under the Rose,” which shows a classical and traditional third person
omniscient narration. As Richard Patteson states, “Stencil imagines not
only the details of what may have happened, but the way in which his
father might have learned what might have happened” (Patteson 21),
offering therefore an entirely personal and, therefore, completely
unverifiable account of the events.
Florence, April 1899 (V 156-212): the account of “how his father had
come to hear of the girl V.” (V 155) is related by Herbert Stencil to dr.
Eigenvalue, and the point of view remains indeed single. But when
Herbert’s sixty pages long yarn is finished, and Eigenvalue says: “You
followed up, of course. On-the-spot investigation” (V 155), Herbert,
referring to himself in the third person, merely states “Yes. But found
hardly more than Stencil has told you” (V 156). And in the chaotic and
sophisticated amount of events narrated in his story, there are several hints
that his narrative could either be partially or entirely invented, or at least
may consist in “a false memory, a phony nostalgia” (V 156). According to
66 Chapter Three

Eigenvalue’s considerations expressed by the narrative voice, this is due to

a problem of perspective of the point of view from which we examine
history: “[W]e are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a
fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, woof of pattern anywhere else.
[…] We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition.
Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least
see” (V 155-156).
South-West Africa, May 1922 (V 229-279): Mondaugen’s account of
what happened during the Foppl’s farm siege, and his report (possibly
altered by his illness) of Foppl’s reminiscences of the truculent genocide
of the native Herero population perpetrated in 1904 by Von Trotha’s
troops, are firstly heard by Herbert Stencil from the voice of the German
(and ideologically Nazi) engineer Mondaugen, but they are then related by
the same Herbert Stencil to doctor Eigenvalue, who relates them for the
reader in the ninth chapter, therefore becoming of second and third hand
respectively. It is a structural narrative technique very similar to the one
employed by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, but it is not as much
reliable in its content.
In fact, at the end of chapter 8, introducing Stencil’s oncoming yarn,
the narrating voice indeed declares that “Stencil listened attentively” and
that “the tale proper and the questioning after took no more than thirty
minutes”, but it also openly states that “at Eigenvalue’s office, when
Stencil retold it, the yarn had undergone considerable change: had become,
as Eigenvalue put it, Stencilized” (V 228). Besides, interrupted by
Eigenvalue who wonders whether Mondaugen conversed with Foppl and
the lady V. in German or in English, Stencil replies nervously: “I only
think it strange that he should remember an unremarkable conversation, let
alone in that much detail, thirty-four years later. A conversation meaning
nothing to Mondaugen but everything to Stencil” (V 249), therefore
conveying a general sense of uncertainty, if not of unreliability, to
Mondaugen’s account itself.
We are not able to determine the amount and the consistency of this
“stencilization” of the original story, an obstacle to be taken into
consideration because, according to Stencil, in this account the lady V.
appears under yet another camouflaged identity, that of Vera Meroving,
definitely inclined in accepting and supporting the ideals of race-purity (V
75) and de-humanization (V 81) of Mankind already exposed by Bongo-
Shaftesbury in the Egyptian episode. Therefore, we are withhold any
certainty about the reliability of the events occurred during Foppl’s farm
siege, about the effective participation of the lady V. in the said events,
and about its/her true identity in this time span. In other words, Stencil
 Traveling and Spying into Baedeker’s Land 67

could very well have altered Mondaugen’s yarn and forced it in order to
conform to his own plot of conspiracies and mysteries.
Moreover, by downsizing the value of Stencil’s narration, Eigenvalue’s
statement about the yarn having been “Stencilized” appears to connect this
episode even more to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, because, right at the
beginning of Marlowe’s account, the unknown sailor who is listening to
his narration briefly and sardonically comments, dispatching it as “one of
Marlow’s inconclusive experiences” (Conrad 11).4
Malta, 1940-3 (V 304-346): Fausto Maijstral’s diary of the Malta siege
years. These manuscripts are sent by Fausto to his daughter Paola, read by
Herbert Stencil and reported verbatim in the novel. The degree of
reliability is therefore higher, although Fausto often exposes events and
personal considerations in a chaotic and obscure manner. Moreover, his
continuous commenting in one paragraph on what he has just written in
the previous one, while moving among Fausto’s I to IV personalities or
stages of personal transformation and development, conveys a good range
of doubts and uncertainties to most of the events described in his
manuscript.
Paris, 1913 (V 393-414): the narrating voice openly states (V 409) that
“Stencil’s dossier has it on the authority of Porcépic himself, to whom V.
told much of the affair” (V 409). This means that Stencil comes to know
about the events from Porcépic’s narration of V.’s confessions, later
integrated by police records, and by old people’s gossip around
Montmartre. Therefore, at best it is second hand material, and not even
complete, because V. only told Porcépic “much of the affair”, not all of it.
Stencil may have not necessarily “stencilized” these events, but they could
also have reached him already altered, distorted, faked—therefore not
entirely reliable.

6
It seems evident that the sources themselves cannot be reliable. Not
only it seems impossible to fully understand the intimate and inner reasons
of every single and individual plot, but it is also evident that Stencil’s idea
of fully connecting, precisely tracing and unequivocally interpreting
several international crisis and cloak-and-dagger activities is doomed to
fail. In other words, contrary to the etymological meaning of his name,
Stencil is not able to create a unique pattern out of a number of almost
entirely different experiences. Generally speaking, all these sources are
“stencilized”, that is, treated with plenty of liberty and imagination by
Herbert Stencil, both in examining and in reporting them to other
68 Chapter Three

characters. Instead of selecting from a maze of clues those helpful to track

the way out, which is the correct attitude for both the spy and the
detective, Herbert Stencil acts like Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s
Middlemarch who continuously tries to enlarge and to alter his exegetic
scheme of myths and religions in order to include every single occurrence
he meets, looking for the key to encompass all mythologies. In other
words, instead of re-formulating his theory in the light of new correct
instances, Stencil forces those already gathered into his theory in order to
show that all the instances always lead to one possible and final solution,
which, nevertheless, keeps escaping him.
Conversing with Eigenvalue at the beginning of the seventh chapter,
Stencil states that “[V] has yielded him only the poor skeleton of a dossier.
Most of what he has is inference. He doesn’t know who she is, nor what
she is. He’s trying to find out” (V 155). This is yet another hint that his
investigations are very limited, because he doesn’t appear to have any real
“evidence”, just a bunch of “inferences”, a limitation which was already
highlighted by the narrative voice right at the beginning of the third
chapter: “Around each seed of a dossier, therefore, had developed a
nacreous mass of inference, poetic license, forcible dislocation of
personality into a past he didn't remember and had no right in, save the
right of imaginative anxiety or historical care, which is recognized by no
one.” (V 62) Tony Tanner is probably right asserting that in the novel
“[t]he point is that Stencil finally sees evidence of V everywhere; but if V.
can mean everything, it means nothing”. And this happens because
“Pynchon is dramatising the dangerous tendency to allow an obsession to
take over one’s reading of reality, so that one may begin to see plots and
connections everywhere, and fantasized inventions present themselves to
the mind as interpretative perceptions” (Tanner 48). Obsession, paranoia,
suspicion are all traits of modernity, and all connotative traits of both the
spy and the detective. Moreover, Stencil’s reasoning is not always lucid
enough. Let us consider that, ever since 1945, “Herbert Stencil had been
on a conscious campaign to do without sleep. Before 1945 he had been
slothful, accepting sleep as one of life’s major blessings. [… Later] he
began to discover that sleep was taking up time which could be spent
active” (V 54-55), an important clue revealing the lack of intellectual
clarity leading to possible misinterpretations and/or intentional alterations
of the different sources this twentieth century amateur detective and spy
consulted and reported in the course of his quest.
His sleuth and spy skills appear to be limited not only by personal
deficiencies, but by a stubborn and short-sighted approach to reality as
well. Though his father Sidney may have been an excellent spy, Herbert is
 Traveling and Spying into Baedeker’s Land 69

certainly not one, nor is he a good detective, as Eigenvalue openly tells

him (V 153). Cooley correctly points out that while “Stencil senior is an
accomplished spy, Stencil junior [is] an inept and paranoid pseudo-spy
who cannot bear to come too close to the truth he seeks, lest it destroy his
identity as ‘he who searches for V.’” (Cooley 315). I believe this to be the
main reason why Herbert accepts most of the clues he fortuitously meets
without further questioning them, and he builds a set of personal
certainties more or less entirely out of the blue. Just to show a good
example of this, let us consider the set of false teeth in Eigenvalue’s office.
As soon as Herbert sees them, he immediately declares that “[i]t would be
something she’d wear” (V 154) and, though Eigenvalue replies “I made
them […] anybody you’d be looking for would never have seen them” (V
154), Herbert remains so firmly convinced of his original deduction to
recruit Benny Profane to break into Eigenvalue’s office at night and steal
the set of teeth (V 391). As a matter of fact, V. is actually described
wearing a set of false teeth, at least in the 1913 Paris episode (V 412), as
Herbert gets to know from Porcépic’s narration—the same set (or isn’t it
the same?) the Maltese children extract from the mouth of the agonizing
Bad Priest in the 1943 Malta siege (V 343)—but there is absolutely no
evidence that the 1913 set is the very same 1956 one in Eigenvalue’s
office.
In Pynchon’s novel, it seems palpable that the significance of a single
fact or of a set of events is mainly based on the perspective of the
observer. But what does this observer, be it a spy or a detective or both,
actually understand of reality, not having a full vision of it? And, is reality
eventually understandable? Is it comprehensible in full, or even in part? If
we believe that Herbert’s quest is “a legacy from his father” (V 155), that
the necessity of pattern-making is something that runs in the family, we
have to remember that Sidney’s intelligence activities are performed in the
light of understanding “the Situation”. Tiina Käkelä-Puumala rightly states
that

unlike his son, the elder Stencil understood better the things he could not
understand. To Sidney Stencil the metaphor that characterizes the world is
the Situation: a political or historical situation, in which several
intelligence services gather information for their own purposes. […] The
Situation is something beyond chaos and order: it cannot be reduced to any
kind of conceptual order and yet it has elements that are connected with
each other, that tempt each other, creating causal and temporal chains that
are not controllable by the human subject. (Käkelä-Puumala 76-77)
70 Chapter Three

But Herbert has not received this skill from his father. Partial
comprehensions of reality not leading to a full understanding of it, or in
other words incomplete acquisition of information of a conspiracy not
providing to the reader a full knowledge of the same, appears to be staged
in the shifting of perspectives in the third chapter. What immediately
appears to be relevant is that, as much as any of the seven distinct points of
view, plus the pseudo-objective omniscient narrator, confers to the
narrative something valuable to understand what is happening in Egypt in
1898, none is provided with a clear and full perspective of all the events
themselves. Therefore, the eight points of view, detached and pseudo-
objective as they may be, offer a conclusion which is not entirely
supported by what the reader has witnessed so far. And this is due to the
fact that they are not “objective” but merely Stencil’s “impersonation and
dream” (V 63). Stencilized, that is.

7
The “difficulty of knowing what happens and the impossibility of
knowing why” (Patteson 27) are reiterated even in the last two chapters as
well, and “what” and “why” are the minimum targets to be achieved by
both the spy and the detective, in the process of fulfilling their duties,
gathering information and clues, and unravelling truth. The novel appears
to communicate that achieving a full understanding of reality—that is a
full knowledge of the conspiracies—is beyond modern man’s possibilities.
By repeating three times in different occasions that his quest for the lady
V. “isn’t espionage” (V 53, 62, 153), Herbert Stencil hints at the fact that
what he is trying to achieve is far from being something “as respectable
and orthodox as spying” (V 62), because in his hands “the traditional tools
and attitudes were always employed toward mean ends: cloak for a
laundry sack, dagger to peel potatoes; dossiers to fill up dead Sunday
afternoons; worst of all, disguise itself not out of any professional
necessity but only as a trick, simply to involve him less in the chase, to put
off some part of the pain of dilemma on various ‘impersonations’” (V 62);
in other words, portraying the noble art of spying as something degraded
and low due to the contemporary lifestyle, lacking romantic approaches
and splendid goals to achieve. But were they so splendid during his
father’s time, during the previous generation of spies and agents?
Pynchon seems to think that they were not. There are several spies in
V., deviously conspiring to provoke a final European Armageddon or
frantically trying to avoid it: on the 1898 Egyptian stage, Porpentine and
Goodfellow are working for the British Foreign office, while Lepsius and
 Traveling and Spying into Baedeker’s Land 71

Bongo-Shaftesbury are at the German service. But there are also spies in
1899 Florence: Sidney Stencil, Moffit and Hugh Godolphin working for
the British; Ferrante and the other agents of the Italian secret police;
Mantissa, Cesare and the Gaucho probably operating for the Venezuela
consulate. In 1922 South-west Africa, Kurt Mondaugen is a cover agent
trying to unravel the secret of sferics, the disturbances on the radio waves,
while Lieutenant Weissman and Vera Meroving (who could be another
identity of V.) are operating to support a white supremacist ideology. And
in 1919 Malta, Stencil and Demivolt are operating to prevent the island
from becoming a satellite of Fascist Italy, while Veronica Manganese, (yet
another possible version of V.) allied with Evan Godolphin, is working
with Mussolini to prevent Malta from being a British allied naval base.
But as much as all these people investigate, plot, and spy, none of them
seems able to achieve a full understanding of what is really hidden behind
the several versions of the Great Game they are playing, or why the reason
of state is leading Europe (and the world) to progressively more and more
bloody and dehumanizing catastrophes. They romantically or ideologically
perform their parts on a stage that is no longer Shakespearean or
Elizabethan, and has long ceased holding the mirror up to nature. Their
main fault appears to be an amateur conduct of their activities if
confronted with the new vision of the world emerging from the beginning
of the twentieth century. Sidney Stencil, while talking with Carla Maijstral
at the end of the 1919 Malta episode, epiphanically perceives it: “There
were no more princes. Henceforth, politics would become progressively
more democratized, more thrown into the hands of amateurs. The disease
would progress. Stencil was nearly past caring” (V 489).
Amateur sleuths and spies versus a world of professional intriguers,
operating deceptions and violence: they simply can’t win. Herbert
Stencil’s fragmentary detective approach to the complexity of reality, and
Porpentine and Goodfellow’s romanticized and softened vision of
intelligence and international politics may best be commented upon by a
statement expressed in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989)
by the American delegate, Mr. Lewis, who—attending an international
conference aiming at keeping peace in 1930s Europe and at the same time
helping Germany, much punished by the Treaty of Versailles—comments
on the political action of Lord Darlington, the host and organizer of the
conference, who behaves very naïvely, missing altogether the conspiratorial
intention of the German delegates:

You gentlemen here, forgive me, but you are just a bunch of naïve
dreamers. And if you didn’t insist on meddling in large affairs that affect
the globe, you would actually be charming. Let’s take our good host here.
72 Chapter Three

What is he? He is a gentleman. […] Decent, honest, well-meaning. But

[…] an amateur. […] and international affairs today are no longer for
gentlemen amateurs. The sooner you here in Europe realize that the better.
All you decent, well-meaning gentlemen, let me ask you, have you any
idea what sort of place the world is becoming all around you? The days
when you could act out of your noble instincts are over. Except of course,
you here in Europe don’t yet seem to know it. Gentlemen like our good
host still believe it’s their business to meddle in matters they don’t
understand. So much hog-wash has been spoken here these past two days.
Well-meaning, naïve hog-wash. You here in Europe need professionals to
run your affairs. If you don’t realize that soon you’re headed for disaster. A
toast, gentlemen. Let me make a toast. To professionalism. (Ishiguro 102)

Notes
1
For a thorough analysis of the treatment of history in the novel, see the second
chapter of David Cowart’s Thomas Pynchon: The Dark Passages of History (40-
56).
2
The short story “Under the Rose” (1961) is a primitive version of V.’s third
chapter. In his 1984 introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon indeed claims that he
refers to Karl Baedeker’s guide to Egypt for 1899, but no edition of the guide for
that year was ever published. So, the one he found in the Cornel Co-op was
probably a 1899 reprint of the 1898 “Fourth Remodeled Edition”, the very first to
bring together the two previously separated parts, that is “Lower Egypt, with the
Fayum and the Peninsula of Sinai” and “Upper Egypt, with Nubia as far as the
second cataract and the western oases” respectively.
3
I owe my considerations about the “inherent vice” of the spy profession to the
enlightening reading of Paolo Simonetti’s 2013 essay “A Mystery’s Redemption”.
4
Reflecting on Eigenvalue’s interruption of Stencil narration (V 249), Ronald
Cooley speculates about “the problems of verisimilitude and narrative authority,
already significant in Conrad. […] Stencilization would seem to be an even more
extreme case of what might be called Marlowization—the tyrannical imposition of
one consciousness upon another’s experience—a process with clear imperialist
overtones” (Cooley 314).

References
Conrad, Joseph. 1988 (1899). Heart of Darkness. A Norton Critical
edition, ed. Robert Kimbrough. London and New York: Norton &
Company. Print.
Cowart, David. 2011. Thomas Pynchon: The Dark Passages of History,
Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press. Print.
Cooley, Ronald W. 1993. The Hothouse or the Street: Imperialism and
Narrative in Pynchon’s V. Modern Fiction Studies 39: 307-325. Print.
 Traveling and Spying into Baedeker’s Land 73

Egypt: Handbook for Travellers. With 22 Maps, 55 Plans, and 66 Views

and Vignettes, ed. Karl Baedeker, fourth remodelled edition, 1898.
Leipsig, Karl Baedeker; London: Dulau and Co. Print.
Gregory, Derek. 1999. Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the Cultures of
Travel. In Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing. Eds. James
Duncan and Derek Gregory. London: Routledge. Print.
Hopkirk, Peter. 2006. The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia,
London: John Murray. Print.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. 1990. The Remains of the Day London: Faber & Faber.
Print.
Käkelä-Puumala, Tiina. 2007. Other Side of this Life: Death, Value and
Social Being in Thomas Pynchon’s Fiction. Helsinki: Yliopistopaino.
Print.
Kipling, Rudjard. 1901. Kim. London: Macmillan & Co; New York:
Doubleday, Page & Co. Print.
Levine, George. 1976. Risking the Moment: Anarchy and Possibility in
Pynchon’s Fiction. In Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon,
eds. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.
113-136. Print.
Patteson, Richard. 1981. What Stencil Knew: Structure and Certitude in
Pynchon’s V. In Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. Richard
Pearce. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall. 20-31. Print.
Simonetti, Paolo. 2013. A Mystery’s Redemption: Thomas Pynchon and
the “Inherent Vice” of Detective Fiction. Thomas Pynchon & the
(De)Vices of Global (Post)Modernity, ed. Zofia Kolbuszewska. Lublin:
Poland, Wydawnictwo KUL. 287-296. Print.
Simons, John L. 1985. Pynchon on Household: Reworking the Traditional
Spy Novel. Pynchon Notes 16: 83-88. Print.
Sladen, Douglas. 1908. Egypt and the English, showing British public
opinion in Egypt upon the Egyptian question: with chapters on success
of the Sudan and the delights of travel in Egypt and the Sudan,
London: Hurst and Blackett. Print.
Strehle, Susan. 1983. Actualism: Pynchon’s Debt to Nabokov. Contemporary
Literature 24 (1): 30-50. Print.
Tanner, Tony. 1978. V. and V-2. In Pynchon: A Collection of Critical
Essays, ed. Edward Mendelson. Twentieth Century Views: Englewood
Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall. 16-55. Print.
Trollope, Anthony. 1861. Tales of All Countries. 1st Series. London:
Chapman & Hall. Print.
Yapp, Malcolm Edward. 2001. The Legend of the Great Game.
Proceedings of the British Academy 111: 179-198. Print.
 CHAPTER FOUR

RE-READING V. IN THE EMERGENCY

OF THE CRISIS

STIPE GRGAS

Does your shrink ever talk about the economy down there?
—Thomas Pynchon

1
My re-reading of Thomas Pynchon’s first novel takes for granted the fact
that the original reading cannot be retrieved. That first reading has been
submerged, modified, if not erased by the accrual of later readings and by
the thinking that these readings activated. Needless to say, the same holds
for every act of returning to a text that one has read in the past. More
relevant to my argument, the experience of reading V. today is inevitably
affected both by the books Pynchon published after V. and by the
circumstances in which the present re-reading is being done. Namely, if
we approach Pynchon not as the author of one specific book, but as a
name authorizing a series of novels, then the (re-)reading of each one is
overshadowed by the whole oeuvre. This is why I will begin my account
with a glance at Pynchon’s last three books, which thematize the crisis-
ridden present historical conjecture in different ways. Just as the present
economic crisis reveals the totalizing power of the economy, my
recuperation of this problematic in V. seeks to show that, rephrasing the
epigraph above, Pynchon not only deep down but everywhere in his novels
has been talking about economics. In what follows I will bring to the fore
themes that, far from being arbitrary, Pynchon has worked with throughout
his oeuvre, themes that, I hold, have a significance that transcends merely
literary concerns.
76 Chapter Four

2
In his review of Against the Day (2006), Bernard Duyfhuizen wrote that
“Pynchon's politics have rarely been so clearly displayed” and that in this
novel “he lays bare a fundamental flaw in the American capitalist myth”
(Duyfhuizen). Without repeating here my earlier reading of Against the
Day (Grgas 2010), I merely note that the “laying bare” continued in his
next two novels. I will generalize and propose that the insistence on
“baring” the capitalist myth has to be acknowledged outright, and that its
consequences must be reckoned with when retrospectively engaging with
all of Pynchon's work. If this is kept in mind when reading Inherent Vice
(2009), one registers how the problematic of capital percolates through the
narrative as something that “you can’t avoid” (IV 351), just like an
inherent vice. That reader takes cognizance of Pynchon's conjuring up
changes in the economy that baffle a visiting Marxist economist from one
of the Warsaw Pact nations, who on television “appeared to be in the
middle of a nervous breakdown”:

“Las Vegas”, he tried to explain, “it sits out here in the middle of desert,
produces no tangible goods, money flows in, money flows out, nothing is
produced. This place should not, according to theory, even exist, let alone
prosper as it does. I feel my whole life has been based on illusory premises.
I have lost reality. Can you tell me, please, where is reality?” (IV 232)

I quote this passage from Inherent Vice not only to indicate that Marx will
be a part of my argument but to show how Pynchon voices an
epistemological crisis amidst the latest mutation of capital. If in Inherent
Vice Pynchon did not take fully into account how his genealogy of
emergent technologies—a leitmotif in this novel—impacts the nature of
money, he makes the imbrications of technology and money the thematic
centre of Bleeding Edge (2013). As I have argued elsewhere (Grgas
2014a), in his last novel Pynchon provides a mapping of what Peter
Sloterdijk has diagnosed as “the current capitalist-informatic ecumene”
(Sloterdijk 51), the ecumene in which I am re-reading V. Needless to say,
such a summary of Pynchon’s last three novels does not do justice to their
complexity. This was not my intention. Rather, I wanted to indicate the
themes I believe Pynchon has brought to the fore, or laid bare, in his latest
work. Following up on these contentions I will formulate my argument as
follows: returning to V. in the midst of the current ecumene and after what
I see as Pynchon’s self-exposure in his last three novels, I find that the
economic theme were already inscribed, albeit in varying degrees of
straightforwardness, in his first novel.
 Re-reading V. in the Emergency of the Crisis 77

3
The circumstance in which I am re-reading V. and offering an exposition
of that experience is the economic crisis. The ubiquity of this diagnosis is
such that I need not dwell upon it here. However, I use the word
“emergency” in the same sense that Andrea Micocci uses it in his book
The Metaphysics of Capitalism (2009). There he writes: “Economics has
acquired today a perfect centrality, comparable to that central architectural
position that once upon a time seemed to belong to theology” (Micocci xi).
Seemingly hyperbolic, Micocci poignantly encapsulates oft-remarked
characteristics of capitalism. For example, Cornelius Castoriadis holds that
the distinguishing feature of capitalism is the position of the economy in
society and adds, “In short, all human activities and all of their effects
come to be more or less viewed as economic activities and products, or at
the least, their economic dimension is viewed as their essential, most
valuable feature” (Castoriadis 50). The present crisis, the context of my re-
reading V., has uncovered brutal forces that put us in a state of emergency.
Micocci points out two ways of conceptualizing the “emergency”. He
writes that the first “consists in looking at it as the ‘strong’ and
undeferrable occasion to seek sudden and ad hoc solutions for what is
occurring” (Micocci ix). Literature does not offer solutions, and neither
does Pynchon. But Micocci points out another mode:

The second way consists instead in seeing in the “emergency” what

emerges from past times which we cannot stop. This second approach
observes in the event that has taken place what is simultaneously originary
and lasting. It perceives in the event the presence of an originary
foundation that was hidden and that, after having invisibly accompanied
every evolution of the phenomena investigated, only now manifests itself
in ultimate and simplified forms. (Micocci ix)

Extrapolating from Micocci’s philosophical-economic purchase on

capitalism, I expand the earlier formulation of my argument: if Pynchon’s
last three novels narrativize the “ultimate and simplified” forms of
capitalism, they and the current ecumene they engage with also beckon us
to seek what is “originary and lasting” in Pynchon’s oeuvre—that is, the
“originary foundation that was hidden”. In other words, what Pynchon
does in the last three novels is to bring to the fore the originary
problematic area of his writing. Going back to V. after having read his last
three novels, I argue that the economic theme foregrounded in these later
works was anticipated and prefigured in his first novel.
78 Chapter Four

4
The very first paragraph of V. yields evidence to this contention. I have in
mind the singer on East Main Street “with a guitar and an empty Sterno
can for donations” (V 9). The opening chapter contains additional traces of
these themes. Thus, we read that “Since his discharge from the Navy
Profane has been road-laboring and when there wasn't work just traveling,
up and down the east coast like a yo-yo” (V 10). Other evidence can be
mounted such as “working tables all up and down East Main” (V 11),
“Navy wives are out of their civvies and into barmaid uniforms” (V 11),
“From eight to nine on payday nights” (V 13), and “pimping business” On
the very next page we read: “Pappy ended up borrowing 500 for 700 from
Mac the cook’s slush fund to bring Paola to the States. Maybe it had been
a way to get her to America—every Mediterranean barmaid’s daftness—
where there was enough food, warm clothes, heat all the time, buildings all
in one piece” (V 14). If these references to the economy have been
submerged in readings privileging a different focus—readings which, for
example, projected Pynchon as the high priest of postmodernism – then I
am contending that the evidence of Pynchon’s last three novels and the
emergency of the economic crisis that accompanies us when we return to
the text today demand that we give them due heed. If we keep in mind
these early markers of the economic theme, we will be perceptive of how
it insinuates itself into other, less straightforward, levels of the text.
Thus the year 1955, announced at the very beginning of V. (V 9), will
be read not as a neutral temporal marker but as an indicator of the Great
Boom of 1945-1970, the longest sustained period of economic growth in
the history of American capitalism. Within that time frame the Fifties have
been regularly evoked as a lost Arcadia, a time of social and economic
equilibrium. However, as elsewhere in his oeuvre, Pynchon writes against
this sanitized narrative. The world of the Fifties that Pynchon creates in V.
is counterpoised athwart such idealized representations. For example,
instead of future-orientated optimism, the cultural norm of the decade,
Pynchon’s novel registers the ballast of the past. In this way, Benny
Profane is named “the Depression Kid” (V 358). Furthermore, Profane’s
friend sings “the old Depression song, Wanderin’” (V 34) and later in the
text “the Great Depression” (V 101, 141), or “the Depression of the ‘30’s”
(V 117) is explicitly named. These references indicate Pynchon’s
awareness that the world is crisis-prone and that the ballast of the past
weighs heavily on the narrative present. Furthermore, I argue that the “fact
of economic depression” (V 277) has to be reckoned with when
determining the dominant tonality of the novel:
 Re-reading V. in the Emergency of the Crisis 79

On the way downtown on the subway he decided that we suffer from great
temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in. Because he felt
now as if he were living in some private depression days: the suit, the job
with the city that would not exist after two weeks more at the most. All
around him were people in new suits, millions of inanimate objects being
produced brand-new every week, new cars in the streets, houses going up
by the thousands all over the suburbs he had left months ago. Where was
the depression? In the sphere of Benny Profane’s guts and in the sphere of
his skull, concealed optimistically by a tight blue serge coat and a
schlemihl’s hopeful face. (V 148)

If one dimension of the novel's tone is Pynchon’s characteristic black

humour, then we can say that the frolicking and laughter, the “hopeful
face” in V., are always overshadowed by something that in Inherent Vice,
as already mentioned, “you can’t avoid” (IV 351). I will return to this in
due course. For now I merely indicate how the Depression heavily figures
in articulating Benny Profane’s voice in the novel. Not only does the
passage show how Profane’s levity is haunted by the memory of hard
times, but the text mentions “inanimate objects”, which gesture to themes
showing how the novel engages the economy on a deeper than
phenomenal level. Before I deal with this issue, I will give examples of
such hints at the economic sphere.
Contributors to Woodmansee’s and Osteen’s book on “the new
economic criticism” (1999), the theoretical paradigm within which my re-
reading of V. can be situated, insistently bring up and discuss the theme of
money. Money is doubtlessly an all-too-obvious fulcrum when we address
the “intersection” of economics and literature. In lieu of a theoretical
exploration of the issue, I will cite a number of instances of how money
appears in Pynchon’s novel. In addition to the earlier references to
“donations” and the borrowed “500”, others are easily found: “flat broke”
(V 47), “bank balance” (V 49), “income” (V 54), “penny-pinching” (V 69),
“a fiver” (V 76), “a thousand-odd bucks” (V 128), “17,000 francs” (V 157),
“ten soldi” (V 168), and so on throughout the text. There is also mention of
“300 bills” and a comment about usury that is attributed to Ezra Pound’s
Cantos (V 354). The latter exemplifies the way money in Pynchon is not
merely a means of exchange but an indicator of social differentiation. Its
neutrality is compromised. Wondering about Esther Harvitz, “whom she
had helped out of more financial crises than either could remember”,
Rachel Owlglass asks herself: “What is it […], is this the way Nueva York
is set up, then, freeloaders and victims? Schoenmaker freeloads off my
roommate, she freeloads off me. Is there this long daisy chain of
victimizers and victims, screwers and screwees?” (V 49). On the next
page, Rachel ruminates: “Screwer and screwee. On this foundation,
80 Chapter Four

perhaps, the island stood, from the bottom of the lowest sewer bed right up
through the streets to the tip of the TV antenna on top of the Empire State
Building” (V 50). Simply put, it is obvious that Pynchon does not only
thematize social difference, but he takes sides and in different ways
narrates, to use a formulation from late in the novel, his love for “the
dispossessed, the wayward” (V 358).
Returning to V. today, the reader recognizes that Pynchon had
registered issues and topics that dominant self-representations of the
United States had made disappear. Working against these self-
representations, Pynchon inscribes the topic of class, a topic downplayed
in American exceptionalist rhetoric. In the surrealistic sewer sequence we
read of an “AF of L way of running things” (V 115), of “Marxist
tendencies” (V 119) which refer back to a passage depicting Father
Fairing’s work during the Depression: “‘[T]hen I cannot see how this
differs from Marxist communism, which you told us is Godless. To each
according to his needs, from each according to his abilities’. I tried to
explain that there were different sorts of communism: that the early
Church, indeed, was based on a common charity and sharing of goods” (V
119). Not only can these comments be easily passed over in reading
Pynchon's intricate text, but the very nature of the work depicted there can
obfuscate the issue of class. Namely, the work that various characters in
the novel are engaged in is piecemeal, if not phantasmal, jobs. Such are the
alligator hunters in the New York sewer system, “nomads from the end of
a bean-picking season” (V 113) on their “sporadic work binges” (V 124),
who at a certain point “started working part-time” (V 146). Instead of the
solid jobs of the sanitized vision of the fifties, we can say that Pynchon
anticipated today’s “precariatisation”1 of labor.
In addition to the transformation of jobs, Pynchon’s V. anticipates
other later developments. The dictate to spend more and more money in a
consumerist society is one of these. Rachel has 13 dollars left a week after
basic expenditures and this fact prompts the question: “What for, for high
heels she breaks on subway gratings, for lipstick, earrings, clothes. Food,
occasionally. So now, 800 for a nose job. What will it be next. Mercedes
Benz 300 SL? Picasso original, abortion, wha” (V 50). Returning to the
sewer sequence, we ought to recall that the alligators were originally
bought as pets at Macy’s, but when the children grew bored with them
they were flushed down the toilets (V 43). What the sewer workers are
engaged in is the disposal of the wastage created by the consumerist
society. To take another example of how Pynchon was registering
economic change, I cite the comment that Chiclitz of Yoyodyne is “one of
the biggest defense contractors on the east coast, with subsidiaries all over
 Re-reading V. in the Emergency of the Crisis 81

the country” (V 152). In an off-handed manner Pynchon is here making a

reference to the growing role of the industrial-military complex in the
United States economy of the time. Finally, today’s reader returning to V.
recognizes the extent to which Pynchon mapped into the novel a world-
system perspective. A passage near the end of the novel states:

Workers from England got a colonial allowance: local yardbirds received

only normal wages. Most would like to emigrate, after hearing glowing
reports from the Maltese Labour Corps and other crews abroad of higher
pay outside Malta. But the rumour had started, somehow, that the
government was refusing passports to keep workers on the island, against
any future requirement. “What else can they do but emigrate?” Maijstral
digressed: “With the war the number of Dockyard workers swelled to three
times what it was before. Now, with Armistice, they’re already laying off.
There are only so many jobs here outside the Dockyard. Not enough to
keep everyone eating”. (V 467)

The above excerpt is from the sequence of the novel that takes place on
Malta, just one of the many sites in Pynchon’s oeuvre with which he maps
an interconnected world. Another example of this interconnection has an
uncanny resonance today: “‘No petrol, indeed’, said Johnny Contango.
‘They’re blowing up oil refineries all over the Middle East’. Nasser it
seems having gone on the radio, urging a sort of economic jihad” (V 436).
Pynchon’s evocations of the Great Depression, his references to money,
his thematization of social differentiation and consumerism, as well as his
mapping of the narrative onto a global setting, can all be put forward as
evidence of the economic theme in his first novel. Next I will show that
this theme is not restricted to the phenomenal level of the narrative but that
it permeates two less evident dimensions of the novel.

5
The first of these dimensions concerns a word pattern in Pynchon’s text:
the recurrent use of “animate” and “inanimate”. The relation between the
two concepts is encapsulated, for example, by Kenneth Kupsch, who cites
Edward Mendelson and his contention that the recurrent pattern of the
dichotomy elaborates “the decline of the animate into the inanimate”
(Kupsch 428). Although this accords with my argument I do not agree
with Kupsch’s contention that this is a “simple idea” (428). On the
contrary, if we proceed to consider it, the pattern summons a thinking that,
as I will show, ultimately challenges the very possibility of ideation. But
before I expound on this, let me draw attention to a passage in which the
82 Chapter Four

economic theme, always latent when Pynchon uses the terms “animate”
and “inanimate”, is brought out into the open.
In the eight chapter of V. the two words are not only juxtaposed, but
their significance is spelled out:

Profane sighed. The eyes of New York women do not see the wandering
bums or the boys with no place to go. Material wealth and getting laid
strolled arm-in-arm the midway of Profane’s mind. If he’d been the type
who evolves theories of history for his own amusement, he might have said
all political events: wars, governments and uprisings, have the desire to get
laid as their roots; because history unfolds according to economic forces
and the only reason anybody wants to get rich is so he can get laid steadily,
with whomever he chooses. All he believed at this point, on the bench
behind the Library, was that anybody who worked for inanimate money so
he could buy more inanimate objects was out of his head. Inanimate money
was to get animate warmth, dead fingernails in the living shoulderblades,
quick cries against the pillow, tangled hair, lidded eyes, twisting loins… (V
214)

Although the formulation “history unfolds according to economic forces”

is obviously grist to the mill of my argument, the passage might seem not
to carry the weight I will be assigning to it. The prurient levity can easily
detract from the gravity of what is being said. The reader who takes the
recurrent dichotomy lightly will assign the musings only to Profane and to
his celebration of flesh and sexuality. However, as regularly happens in
Pynchon, below the flippancy lurks a profounder insight. On the side of
the animate there are Profane’s life values, while on the side of the
inanimate—subsuming words such as “material wealth”, “money”, and
“buy”—there are the powers that seek to eviscerate them. Profane exists at
the point where the latter forces are in the ascendency.
The second dimension concerns the narrative structure of the novel.
Just as the linguistic pattern of repetition in Pynchon's novel is marked by
the economic theme, I hold that its narrative structure is also pertinent to
the topic. If the search motif is the organizing principle of the narrative,
then the work of identifying the object of that search, V., can be said to be
one of the main inducements to foray through the text. It would be an
understatement to say that Pynchon plays tricks with that compulsion. In
the elder Stencil’s journal, for example, under the entry “Florence, April,
1899”, we find the following: “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” (V 53). I note two things in this negative description. First, the V.
entity is depersonalized, it is something that transcends human embodiment,
 Re-reading V. in the Emergency of the Crisis 83

and, second, it is something that frightens, that the human stands in awe
of. A reference to V. that appears shortly after this one implicates the
economic theme: “Work, the chase—for it was V. he hunted—far from
being a means to glorify God and one's own godliness (as the Puritans
believe) was for Stencil grim, joyless; a conscious acceptance of the
unpleasant for no other reason than that V. was there to track down” (V
55). In addition to the homology between work and the chase, Pynchon is
here alluding to Max Weber’s account of the rise of capitalism. It is
indicative of his strategy that he does this in an aside. Put otherwise: the
economic presence that insinuates itself in my rereading of V. is here not
explicitly named, it is adumbrated, left dangling, it is a “sillage”2 created
by a seemingly haphazard juxtaposition of words, statements, concepts.
In order to substantiate this claim, I offer other examples in which the
object of the search is named. The first is from the fifteenth chapter:

Eigenvalue kept cool. Stencil even went to see him—perhaps as a test of

the guts he’d need to confront whatever of V. was still on Malta. They
discussed the concept of property and agreed that a true owner need not
have physical possession. If the soul-dentist knew (as Stencil was nearly
sure he did), then “owner”, Eigenvalue-defined, was Eigenvalue; Stencil-
defined, V. It was a complete failure of communication. (V 422)

This passage is permeated by the economic nexus; in the name there is the
play on the concept of “value”. The discussion of property and ownership
is also clear. If the novel works towards a definition of V., it is revealing
that Pynchon maps the object of the search onto the said nexus. Let us also
recall the conversation between the elder Stencil and a female embodiment
of V. Here Stencil refers to an earlier distinction between the “Right and
Left, the hothouse and the street” (V 468), and contends that these
antinomies “in V. were resolved, by some magic” (V 487). The crucial
utterance in this conversation, one to which I will return below, is the
remark “How pleasant to watch Nothing” (V 467). I underline that the
word “nothing” appeared in an earlier section of the novel, where Signor
Mantissa asks what Godolphin had seen in Vheissu (one of the signifiers
of V., indicatively a site of English colonial expansion). His answer is the
following: “‘Nothing’, Godolphin whispered. ‘It was nothing I saw’” (V
204). Before discussing the significance of this negative identification, I
quote a remark that accompanies the last reference to V. in the novel:
“Even in Florence … he had noted an obsession with bodily incorporating
little bits of inert matter” (V 488). I propose that Pynchon is here flippantly
alluding to the compulsion of capitalism to incorporate, to ever expand, to
turn everything into a commodity. If the sole reference to Marx in V. (V
84 Chapter Four

119) seems to be too incidental to warrant a reading beckoning to his

philosophy, I contend that the incidence of the animate-inanimate
dichotomy, the Gothic (magic) nature of V. and, finally, the negative
identification of the object of the search all provide evidence for placing
Pynchon’s novel within this theoretical framework.

6
To begin with, the complaint voiced by Profane in the above quoted
passage points to the perversity of dead things (inanimate) holding sway
over the living (animate). The following passage from Marx’s Grundrisse
not only shows his explanation of what is at stake in this relation, but it
also introduces the topic of the Gothic as it relates to the economy:

Capital posits the permanence of value (to a certain degree) by incarnating

itself in fleeting commodities and taking on their form, but at the same
time changing them just as constantly; alternates between its eternal form
in money and its passing form in commodities; permanence is posited as
the only thing it can be, a passing passage—process-life. But capital
obtains this ability only by constantly sucking in living labour as its soul,
vampire-like. (Marx 646)

Leaving aside for a moment the dynamics of capital itself, Pynchon’s first
novel does depict a world of “fleeting commodities”; and if there is an
authorial position in the text, it is one that bewails the diminishing
possibility of the living. The processes depicted in the novel amount to an
inversion of values in which the object world is displacing the human
world. This is the crux of Profane’s bafflement: “anybody who worked for
inanimate money so he could buy more inanimate objects was out of his
head” (V 214). Likewise, Profane earlier puts “himself deliberately in the
way of hostile objects, as if he were looking to get schlimazzeled out of
existence” (V 24). A closely related notion appears in brackets shortly
afterward: “Inanimate objects could do what they wanted. Not what they
wanted because things do not want; only men. But things do what they do,
and this is why Profane was pissing at the sun” (V 26). The power of the
inanimate is rendered in more concrete fashion elsewhere; for example:
“others—on the highways, in the factories— undid the work of nature with
automobiles, milling machines, other instruments of civilian disfigurement”
(V 101).
The “vampire-like” work of the inanimate sucking in the life of the
animate is, of course, an image that expresses the Marxian reading of what
takes place in the production process. As far back as 1982, and long before
 Re-reading V. in the Emergency of the Crisis 85

Derrida had made the word “spectre” ubiquitous in theoretical discourse,

the figure of the vampire, as well as the monster, sorcerer and spectre, in
Marx had been discussed by Darko Suvin in the article “Transubstantiation
of Production and Creation: Metaphoric Imagery in the Grundrisse”. His
explanation of this imagery strongly reverberates with what I see as being
at stake in Pynchon’s dichotomy: “Thus we have arrived at an image-
cluster in which the product of a certain subject is unnaturally born out of
that subject as not simply an objectified reality (like a baby) but as a
malevolent usurper, taking its ‘vital spirits’ or vitality from the subject,
quite oblivious of having been endowed with its soul by the subject”.
Likewise, he goes on to assert that: “This is not too bad an approximation
of a classical horror-fantasy or Gothic tale” (Suvin 105-106).
In my article on the triad of American Studies, capital and the Gothic
(Grgas 2014b) I used as an epitaph the following excerpt from Gravity’s
Rainbow:

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all
just to keep the people distracted … secretly, it was being dictated instead
by the needs of technology … by a conspiracy between human beings and
techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying,
“Money be damned, the very life [insert name of Nation] is at stake”, but
meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my
funding, funding, ahh more, more. (GR 521)

I quoted Pynchon to show how Gothic elements or their equivalents can be

found outside of the genre itself. I draw attention to the fact that the Gothic
appears in a text which explicitly has to do with the economic problems. In
his article “Is It O.K. to be a Luddite?” Pynchon wrote: “When times are
hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don't
we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the
Badass—the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero—who will resist
what otherwise would overwhelm us?” (LU 40) and went on to explicitly
mention the Gothic genre. Brett Paice has sifted through Pynchon’s work
up to and including Against the Day for evidence of the “postmodern
American gothic”. Pynchon’s last two novels can also be mustered as
evidence. Among other things, the White Fang that floats ominously off
the California coastline in Inherent Vice is described in the Gothic mode.
The Deseret Building (“the whole place is a haunted house,” BE 365) and
“phantomware” in Bleeding Edge belong to the same complex of images
and themes. The imbrication of the Gothic with economic matters comes
to the fore in Pynchon’s referencing capitalism as in the following remark:
“Post-late capitalism run amok, ‘United Aerospace Corporation’, moons of
86 Chapter Four

Mars, gateways to hell, zombies and demons” (BE 138-139). Although in

the article “Is It O.K. to be Luddite?” Pynchon wrote that the Gothic was
part of a broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason (LU 41) I think
that he, more interestingly, reverts to the Gothic when he is baffled by the
enormity of forces that “overwhelm”, to use his word, the human in his
narratives. As I will argue later in this chapter, I find a futility of resistance
in Pynchon. But first, I will return to V. and argue for both the presence of
the Gothic in the novel and for its relevance in thinking capital.
Although the word itself appears only once in V. (“the grand Gothic
pile of inferences”, V 226), I hold that Gothic features are manifest in the
object of the search in V. To recognize this we need a comprehensive
definition of what the Gothic signifies. In his theorizing of the Gothic for
the twenty-first century, Gary Farnell makes the following contention:

Gothic is the name for the speaking subject's experience of approaching the
Thing. This Thing (with an upper-case T) is as it has been described in
Lacanian theory (fashioned from the writings of Kant, Hegel, Freud, and
Heidegger): a phantasmatic construction of an unnameable void at the
centre of the real, which as such both resists and provokes symbolisation.
This Thing, then, is not of the order of signifiers within the symbolic order,
hence its actual unnameability except as the Thing. (Farnell 7)

To return to V., that “unnameable void” is the tentative cause of the above-
mentioned “complete failure of communication” (V 422) between Stencil
and Eigenvalue. Let us call it the “spectre of capital,” to use the phrase that
subtitles Vivek Chibber’s book on postcolonial theory. Chibber maintains
that this “deeper motor force” (Chibber 38) was elided by postcolonial
critics who went to great lengths “to avoid lapsing into economic
reductionism [… whisking] economic analysis out of the picture
altogether” (Chibber 123). My economic reading of V. does not espouse
such a reductionism. Rather it seeks to draw attention to a “deeper motor
force” that economic reductionists regularly fail to register.
Timothy Gilmore’s recent reading of V. (2012), particularly his
discussion of “the (non-)essence” of V., illustrates how the elision of the
economy takes place. Gilmore contends that in thinking the riddle of V. it
is important to ask the following question: “what is the real, in Lacanian
terms, of my own desire and of how my narrativity both produces, and is
produced by, it?” (Gilmore 2). Though I acknowledge the ingenuity of
Gilmore’s argument, I am disappointed that he does not develop the theme
of “capitalism and technics” which he mentions near the beginning of the
article (Gilmore 4). In other words, I am contending that the “nothing” of
V. that Gilmore, for example, has read through Lacan can be addressed by
 Re-reading V. in the Emergency of the Crisis 87

going to Marx. Furthermore, I hold that the latter needs to be retrieved if

today, as Slavoj Žižek rightly comments, the inexorable “spectral logic of
Capital […] has reached an unprecedented peak far beyond what Marx and
Engels were able to imagine” (Žižek 217). Would it be too far-fetched to
say that as early as V. Pynchon was narrating the spectre that Marx’s
analytics could not imagine?3
My excavation of the different dimensions of the economic in V. can
easily be subsumed under standard Marxist analysis of capitalism. But
what I find more pertinent is the surplus that cannot be contained by that
analysis. That surplus, that “unnameable void”, as Farnell names it, is the
“nothing” that insinuates itself behind the riddle of V. I hold that such a
“(non-)essence” is central to the issue of capital and in Pynchon relates to
the other economic references I have drawn attention to. If the economic
phenomena that I unearthed in the first part of my reading of V. can be said
to register capitalism as a concrete social formation, then the animate–
inanimate dichotomy ultimately leads us to the point where Pynchon can
hardly utter what he sees as underpinning the ontic level of a particular
societal organization. The latter is Žižek’s formulation: it appropriately
describes the phenomenal evidence that I culled from Pynchon’s novel.
Consequently, the “nothing”, to call upon Žižek again, can be seen as
Pynchon’s attempt to express “a more fundamental transcendental-
ontological principle […] in the technological hubris of capitalism, its mad
dance of self-enhancing productivity” (Žižek 144). I point out that when
describing what he sees as the fateful shift from “socio-political analysis to
philosophico-anthropological generalization” (Žižek 144) Žižek brings up
Heidegger. I make note of this because I maintain that Heidegger’s
thought ought to supplement Marx not only when we attempt to think the
“nothing” in Pynchon’s V., for example, but when we try to grasp the
conjecture in which it is here being read.
In the afterword to his Capital and Technology: Marx and Heidegger,
Michael Eldred explains why we need both these thinkers: “We
understand very well what technology and capital are, and at the same
time, we don’t. We have overlooked something, we have skipped over it
and taken it for granted as self-evident, even trivial” (Eldred n.p.). Two
brief quotes from Eldred enable me to pursue my argument. He writes: “In
1844 Marx can only state that capital is counterpoised to the labourers as
an alien power: he cannot yet grasp capital in its uncanniness
(Unheimlichkeit)”, and “The endless, self-augmenting circling of value as
capital cannot be grounded ultimately on the contradiction in the value-
form itself between particularity and universality, but represents the final
grounding of the essence of capital in a groundlessness” (Eldred n.p.).
88 Chapter Four

Rereading V., I find that both the “uncanniness” of capital and its
“groundlessness” have been inscribed into Pynchon’s first novel. The
Marx that can be brought to bear on Pynchon’s works is not only the Marx
whom Pynchon names, nor only the Marx who analyzes the processes of
capitalism, but also the Marx whose entire oeuvre can be read, as Ozren
Žunec has argued,4 as being “an engaged destruction of the foundational
features of philosophy”, an oeuvre that works with “principles that oppose
all of classic ontology” (Žunec 271). From the perspective of this
“relatively coherent and yet unsystematic meontology”,5 Žunec maintains
that capitalist society is a kind of “spectral” object—an all-annulling
thrust—whose only constant is change and transformation:

A society which knows the commodity and which appears in “the world of
the commodity” does not have any kind of form, nothing stable and
differentiated. That society is interminable flow, transformation and
change, production and exchange, or the production, exchange and the
“spectral-object” form not of something that is, of whatsoever is
determined or of any kind of being, but of what in traditional ontology is
opposite to these: of Nothingness itself. (Žunec 286, my translation)

I acknowledge that Žunec’s articulation of the meontological moment in

Marx’s thought has been a powerful influence on my attempts to think the
emergency of the economic crisis. It triggered my reading of the “nothing”
in V. and played an important role in presencing the absence, to paraphrase
Charles Hollander, in Pynchon’s work. If not only V. but, I would wager,
the entirety of Pynchon’s oeuvre evinces, as Hollander writes, a literary
trail “established with coded signposts pointing all along the way” but
“never—never—flatly named” (Hollander 5) I would add that in his last
three novels Pynchon does name it, and that we have a right to call it
capital.
Some might argue that my emphasis on the economic theme detracts
from the complexity and intricacy of Pynchon’s writing. I would expect
such a censure to come particularly from those who work to make the
presence of capital invisible. Pynchon has not been one of these. Quite the
contrary: not only in his few public comments but throughout his writing
he has registered both the forms of capital that he has lived through and
the history of its emergence both in the United States and elsewhere. Of
course, others have commented on this element in his work. For example,
William Spanos has written that “Pynchon’s ‘metaparodic’ self-reflexive
texts […] overtly acknowledge their complicity with late capitalism and by
so doing paradoxically ‘free’ themselves from its ‘bondage’” (Spanos
729). My re-reading of V. in the current emergency has, I hope, retrieved
 Re-reading V. in the Emergency of the Crisis 89

what in Pynchon's text emerges from far-away times, what we cannot stop
and what is both, to echo Andrea Micocci again, originary and lasting. In
other words, it has pointed to ways in which his first novel is complicit
with capitalism. But what about the freedom Spanos finds in Pynchon?
This question brings us back to the issue of tonality: the tone that
Pynchon’s readers recognize and feel at home with whenever they open
his books. Regarding this elusive quality, I will restrict myself to quoting
Laura Buchholz, who writes “how the reader perceives the multiple voices
from outside the text” as a “continuum of visibility throughout a single
narrative” (Buchholz 212). This is relevant to our discussion because
Pynchon’s freedom from the bondage of capitalism, his autonomy,
primarily finds expression in the ironic distance he maintains in relation to
the narrated world. That distance spans the gamut from gentle sarcasm to
hilarity and black humor. However, that levity—the liberating gesture—is
always undermined in Pynchon. I will illustrate this by recalling the very
last words in Bleeding Edge when Maxine Tarnow has a flashback of her
boys in “their virtual hometown of Zigotisopolis [...] ready to step out into
their peaceable city” (BE 476). If this were all that took place in the scene,
one could speak of a possibility of freedom and autonomy, as Pynchon’s
latest articulation of a subversive utopian vision. But we read on: “still
safe from the spiders and bots that one day too soon will be coming for it,
to claim-jump it in the name of the indexed world” (BE 476). What
Maxine envisions is only a moment of temporary relief, a reprieve, before
processes that she cannot stop, processes that are both originary and
lasting set in. That “indexed world” is the encroaching ecumene of
technology and the economy; it is the command of capital in its
meontological guise. Although its command is heavily camouflaged in
Pynchon’s first novel, I hope I have demonstrated its presence.
To conclude both the chapter and my remarks on Pynchon’s tone, I
repeat an earlier quote: “Where was the depression? In the sphere of
Benny Profane’s guts and in the sphere of his skull, concealed
optimistically by a tight blue serge coat and a schlemihl's hopeful face” (V
148). If in V. Pynchon camouflages capital under one or another
“schlemihl’s hopeful face”, then the pull of its motor force works to undo
laughter and flippancy, and shows that it has always haunted Pynchon's
guts and skull.
90 Chapter Four

Notes
1
Guy Standing explains the term as follows: “To be precariatised is to be subject to
pressures and experiences that lead to a precariat existence, of living in the present,
without a secure identity or sense of development achieved through work and
lifestyle” (Standing 28).
2
I use the word in the sense Pynchon uses it in Bleeding Edge when he describes
the premonition of September 11: “For weeks already she’d been going around in a
state of panic, short of breath, waking up for no good reason, probed gently but
insistently by a reverse sillage, a wake from the future” (BE 236). One way to
explain what my rereading of V. amounts to is to implement a “reverse sillage” on
the text, to fathom how it had long ago inscribed the emergency of our present.
3
Shortly before the sentence that I use as the epigraph to my paper we find the
following passage in Bleeding Edge: “Shawn’s therapist, Leopoldo, is a Lacanian
shrink who was forced to give up a decent practice in Buenos Aires a few years
ago, due in no small part to neoliberal meddling in the economy of his country.
The hyperinflation under Alfonsin, the massive layoffs of the Menem-Cavallo era,
plus the regimes’ obedient arrangements with the IMF, must have seemed like the
Law of the Father run amok” (BE 244). If the economy is a “painful subject” (BE
245), as Pynchon writes in his response to the question in my epigraph, the above
passage hints that it is very close to theoretical practice and that it has to be
attended to.
4
Ozren Žunec’s “meontological” reading of Marx owes a debt to the Praxis group
of Yugoslav philosophers. In the above quote Žunec positions Marx as a thinker
who works athwart the onto-theological heritage of Western thought. More
specifically, capital is not something that has being, something that can be
conceptualized and analyzed. Capital has to be hypostasized as referring to a more
elementary dynamic, a dynamic that cannot be tamed by either economic or
philosophical categories, a dynamic that cannot be assigned ontological
designation. It is obvious that according to this conception capital cannot be
identified with capitalism. The latter is merely one of its historical embodiments.
For more on the philosophical context from which Žunec reads Marx, see my
article “Croatian Leftist Critique and the Object of American Studies”.
5
Meontology is the philosophical study of nonbeing.

References
Buchholz, Laura. 2009. The Morphing Metaphor and the Question of
Narrative Voice. NARRATIVE 17 (2): 200-219. Print.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 2007. Figures of the Thinkable. Stanford: Stanford
University Press. Print.
Chibber, Vivek. 2013. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital.
London and New York: Verso. Print.
 Re-reading V. in the Emergency of the Crisis 91

Duyfhuizen, Bernard. 2007. “The Exact Degree of Fictitiousness”:

Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day”. Postmodern Culture 17 (2). n.p.
Eldred, Michael. 2009. Capital and Technology: Marx and Heidegger. n.d.
Web. [http://www.arte-fact.org/capiteen.html]. Accessed 5 May 2015.
Farnell, Gary. 2010. Theorising the Gothic for the Twenty-first Century. In
Twenty-First-Century Gothic. Eds. Brigid Cherry, Peter Howell, and
Caroline Ruddell. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing: 7-18. Print.
Gilmore, Timothy. 2012. “How Pleasant to Watch Nothing”: Narrativity
and Desire in V. Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon 1 (1): n.p. Web.
[https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/14]. Accessed 5 May 2015.
Grgas, Stipe. 2010. Capital and Labor in Thomas Pynchon’s Novel
Against the Day. CrossSections. Eds. E. Rouse, G. Szamosi and G.
Voo. Pécs: Institute of English Studies 2: 359-370. Print.
—. 2014a. Pynchon na oštrici noža tehnologije i ekonomije. Književna
smotra XLVI (172): 21-40. Print.
—. 2014b. American Studies, Capital, and the Gothic. English Studies
Today: Prospects and Perspectives. Eds. Zorica Ĉergoviü-Joksimoviü
and Sabina Halupka-Rešetar. Novi sad: Filozofski fakultet. 223-236.
Print.
—. 2014c. Croatian Leftist Critique and the Object of American Studies.
In Working Papers in American Studies Volume I. Eds. Jelena Šesniü
and Sven Cvek. Zagreb: Croatian Association for American Studies.
83-114. Web. [http://www.huams.hr/wpas]. Accessed 5 May 2015.
Hollander, Charles. 1990. Pynchon's Politics: the Presence of an Absence.
Pynchon Notes 26-27: 5-59. Print.
Kupsch, Kenneth. 1998. Finding V. Twentieth Century Literature 44 (4):
428-446. Print.
Marx, Karl. 1993. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York:
Penguin. Print.
Micocci, Andrea. 2009. The Metaphysics of Capitalism. Lanham:
Lexington Books. Print.
Paice, Brett. 2009. Postmodern American Gothic: The Politics of Fear in
the Works of Thomas Pynchon, David Lynch, and Steve Erickson.
Unpublished dissertation. University of Notre Dame. Web.
[http://etd.nd.edu/ETD-db/theses/available/etd-04162009-
143040/unrestricted/PaiceB042009D.pdf]. Accessed 5 May 2015.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 2013. In the World Interior of Capital. Trans. Wieland
Hoban. Cambridge: Polity Press. Print.
Spanos, William V. 2003. Thomas Pynchon’s Spectral Politics.
Contemporary Literature XLIV (4): 726–736. Print.
92 Chapter Four

Standing, Guy. 2014. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London:
Bloomsbury. Print.
Suvin, Darko. 1982. Transubstantiation of Production and Creation:
Metamorphic Imagery in the Grundrisse. The Minnesota Rieview 18:
102–115. Print.
Woodmansee, Martha and Mark Osteen. Eds. 1999. The New Economic
Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics.
London and New York: Routledge. Print.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2007. The Universal Exception. London: Continuum. Print.
Žunec, Ozren. 2012. Kapitalizam i komunizam ili “tvrda” i “tekuüa”
modernost? Quorum: þasopis za književnost 28 (1-2-3): 270-306.
Print.
 PART TWO

V-LOCATIONS
 CHAPTER FIVE

FLORENCE, OR PYNCHON’S ITALIAN JOB

UMBERTO ROSSI

“Areefedirtcheap, kiddies”
“What’d he say?”
“Rounder Italian, I think”
—Thomas Pynchon

What is a location in a literary text? It may be a matter of a painstaking

search for spatial verisimilitude, as in Henry James’s “Daisy Miller”, or
Joyce’s Ulysses. It may be a matter of accurately describing streets,
squares, piazzas, palazzi, chiese, monumenti. It may even be a matter of
carefully listing drinks, as in Hemingway’s novels. In any case,
occasionally dropping names of places and drinks (not to mention food) in
the local language may make your location much more believable, more
real.
Pynchon seems to have built Florence, considered as one of V.’s
multiple locations, by adopting all of the above-mentioned strategies.
There is the beer served in Scheissvogel’s beer garden, the bottle of
Ruffina uncorked by Salazar and the Broglio wine drunk by Mantissa and
Cesare; the movements of the characters are quite accurately traced; all the
places mentioned in the seventh chapter have their counterpart in the real
world, and are placed exactly where they should be—that is, V.’s depiction
of Florence is not as jumbled and compressed as the representation of
Rome in some Hollywood movies of the period.1 Yet the purpose of all the
details provided by Pynchon is not (or not only) illusionistic; Florence is a
location, but also an important subtext in the novel, as its places and
history are intimately connected to the events that Pynchon staged there,
and to the general architecture of the whole novel. In other words, the
Florentine episode of V. proves once more that the devil is in the details;
but in this specific case, these details may need an Italian interpreter (or an
Italian Studies scholar) to be deciphered. It is not just a matter of being
well acquainted with Florence, but knowing what role this city played in
96 Chapter Five

Italian political and cultural history, and what echoes and resonances the
Italian words in the seventh chapter (and elsewhere in the novel) may stir.
This may connect the Florentine location to a network of characters
(historical or not), places, events which are all part of the history of Italy in
the 20th Century, and bear a strong relation to what is arguably the most
important location in the novel, Malta, V.’s centre of mass if there is any.
All this should ultimately make us meditate on how the history of Italy
in the 19th Century and its tragic outcome in the 20th (the Holocaust of the
Great War, Fascism, its catastrophe in WWII) is entwined in this episode
set in 1899, a year that can be considered as a watershed between the two
centuries. Italy could then be seen as a preterite nation, a country with
misplaced imperialist ambitions and its own dream (or nightmare) of
annihilation, which has the same function of the Herero genocide vis-à-vis
the Shoah; it is a sort of smaller, less efficient Germany, and the role she
played in the great tragedies of the Twentieth century may be said to work
as a distorted mirror of a greater evil, the Nazi Reich.

Meaningful Mistakes
Before we begin an analysis of toponyms and other Italian words in the
seventh chapter of V., we have to deal with a quite evident fact: some of
them are misspelt. Just to quote a few examples: “Via dell’Orivolo” (V
184) is actually Via dell’Oriuolo; “Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele” (V 179,
202) is (or better was) Piazza Vittorio Emanuele; “Ponte San Trinità” (V
165, 212) is Ponte Santa Trìnita (with a peculiar stress on the first syllable,
unlike the ordinary pronunciation of the noun, the common Italian term for
trinity). One has to wonder whether these are mere mistakes—not
unthinkable, of course, but difficult to reconcile with Pynchon’s prodigious
talent as a researcher—or deliberate deformations. This issue bears a
strong relation with Pynchon’s knowledge of the Italian language, and its
use—especially in V.—which often sounds quite odd. Some of his Italian
sentences seem to have more to do with Italian-American jargon or opera
libretti than with the language actually spoken in Italy in 1899—or today.
When Mantissa cries “Andiam’” (V 187) he sounds more like a character
out of a Donizetti or Puccini opera than a real Italian.2
Besides, no Italian woman caught by her husband in bed with her lover
would scream “È il mio marito” (V 185); the usual sentence in such
stereotyped scenes is “Cielo, mio marito!” (even though “Madonna!” does
sound like a more believable interjection—possibly with something
stronger before it); however, the article “il” should definitely not be there.
Things have not changed in later novels, such as Against the Day:3 what
 Florence, or Pynchon’s Italian Job 97

Scarsdale Vibe tells his thugs in Venice after they have shot Tancredi,
“Batti! Batti la faccia (…)” [beat the face] (ATD 743) sounds at least weird
to Italian ears (“Rompetegli la faccia” [break his face] or “Spaccategli la
faccia” [smash his face] would be the ordinary orders for native ruffians).
Yet one has to wonder whether Pynchon is not suggesting that Scarsdale’s
command of the language is far from good, as he is definitely not a native
speaker. Misspelling may be deliberate, suggesting something about the
person who utters these words. J. Kerry Grant, the author of A Companion
to V., seems to have missed this when he interprets the words the Gaucho
screams at the singing girl outside the prison, “Un’ gazz’!” (V 194) as
meaning “una gazza” (Grant 102), that is “a magpie”—an utterance that
does not really make any sense in this context. To a native speaker those
words are obviously a misspelling of “un cazzo!”, with the five-letter word
referring to the male sexual organ, ubiquitous in spoken Italian.
Interestingly, this spelling may suggest that the words do not come from
the spoken Italian of 1899 (which was actually spoken by Tuscans and
literate Italians only, that is, a small part of a mostly illiterate population
communicating in the local dialects in everyday life), but from the hybrid
language spoken by Italian-Americans (a mix of several Italian dialects,
especially those from the Southern regions). It is a language of whose
peculiar nature Pynchon should be well aware, if he informed his readers
that, to communicate with Hispanics in New York, “Profane responded in
what Italo-American he’d heard around the house as a kid” (V 135). What
Pynchon may be suggesting here is that the Gaucho is a Southerner, or has
spent a long time in the United States, among Italian immigrants; this
impression is somewhat strengthened when he exclaims “Capo di
minghe!” (V 164), as “minghe” is surely a misspelling (or an attempt to
render a phonetic transcription?) of minchia, the Sicilian term for the male
sexual organ (the phrase then should mean “dickhead”).4
However, Pynchon’s knowledge of Italian should not be underestimated:
a transcript of the courses Pynchon took at Cornell University reveals that
he also attended courses in Italian and Italian literature, and that on June 4,
1955, he was judged “proficient in Italian by examination” (“Unpublished
document”). Pynchon himself seems to be eager to remove all doubt about
his proficiency in Italian in Bleeding Edge (2013), also set in New York,
where Rockwell “Rocky” Slagiatt argues with the waiter of the trendy
Enrico’s Italian Kitchen restaurant about the name of a typical Italian dish,
pasta e fagioli; this is the correct name according to the waiter (and it is
the name of the dish in national Italian), but Rocky insists on calling it
“pastafazool” (BE 65), after Dean Martin’s famous song “That’s
Amore”—that is, using the mestizo Italian spoken by Italian-Americans.
98 Chapter Five

Could this be Pynchon’s own way to make us know that he is well aware
of the difference between the Italian spoken on Mulberry Street and in the
streets of today’s Rome or Milan—or Florence? Is it a coincidence that,
during his dialogue with Maxine, Slagiatt drops the very same Italian-
American interjection we met in V.: “Un gazz” (BE 66)?5
Interestingly, Slagiatt is himself an Italian-American, who changed his
name through a deliberate misspelling, when he dropped “the vowel at the
end of his name” so that “it would sound more Anglo” (BE 61). Here
Pynchon is—as it often happens—pulling our leg, as “Slagiatti” (with a
final i or ending with any other vowel) is not an existent Italian surname:
actually Albert Rolls suggests it is based on an acronym meaning “seemed
like a good idea at the time” (Rolls), so that Slagiatt belongs to the long
list of absurd (and often funny) surnames (be they English, German,
French or Russian) Pynchon has invented throughout his literary career.
But, even though you will not find a signor (or signora) Slagiatti in any
Italian city or town, the dropping of that final i addresses a real fact, telling
us that misspellings are never innocent. In fact, Rocky usually says that the
dropping of the final letter “was the price of smoothness and rhythm in
doing business” (BE 61), but the real purpose was to hide his ethnic and
cultural roots (while at the same time trying to maintain ties with them
[Rolls] by sporting other signs of italianità, be they the Donizetti ringtone
or the nitpicking comments on the name of dishes, plus his expertise in
Italian wines).6 The difference between Slagiatt and Slagiatti is thus highly
meaningful; it is brought about by the same logics of integration and
assimilation which turned Dino Paul Crocetti into Dean Martin. One has
then to wonder whether also turning Oriuolo into Orivolo, Emanuele into
Emmanuele, Trìnita into Trinità is not a deliberate move, one of the many
instances of Pynchon’s complex mixing of fact and fiction, of his subtle
shifts from factuality to only apparently real artefacts.
Besides, the misspellings may work as remarkably effective
interlinguistic puns. For example, when Mantissa first appears in V., he is
“drinking Broglio wine” with his accomplice Cesare (V 159); this wine is
described by Mantissa as “the finest” (V 161). Actually the name of the
wine is Brolio, after the homonymous castle in the Chianti area, which
belonged to the Ricasoli family. It was one of the Ricasoli, Bettino, aka “il
barone di ferro” [the iron baron], to define the ideal recipe for Chianti
Classico wine in 1874 (a mix of three varieties traditionally grown in the
area). Pynchon turns Brolio into Broglio, an Italian noun meaning “fraud,
intrigue, manoeuvre, rigging;” a term perfectly fitting the Florentine
episode of V. It is difficult to see such a misspelling as no more than a
typo, and this should make us reconsider the misspelt toponyms too.
 Florence, or Pynchon’s Italian Job 99

Political Toponymy
Florentine toponyms play an important role in the construction of the
location. Several streets are mentioned, which is unsurprising in a novel
where the street is a key symbol (Tanner “V. and V-2”, 29-30): Via
Tosinghi, Via Pecori, Via del Purgatorio, Via dell’Inferno, Via dei Panzani
etc. Most of them are correctly transcribed, but a few of them are misspelt.
Via dell’Orivolo, for example, is the street along which Hugh Godolphin
walks in the sixth section of the seventh chapter, lost in a reverie about all
the exotic places he has visited, just before being stopped by the police. As
I have already explained, the real name of the street is Via dell’Oriuolo,
and one has to wonder whether the misspelling does not derive from the
fact that Pynchon has used some very old tourist guide or map or book on
Florence where the letters U and V were nonchalantly exchanged
following the Latin usage, as in the alphabet used in the Roman Empire
there was no letter U, and V could be indifferently used as a vowel or a
consonant. Given the importance of letter V in the novel, Pynchon may
have found this misspelling artistically rewarding.
There is another misspelling in Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, where the
second name of Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of Italy, should be spelt
in Italian with a single m. One has to notice that today Piazza Vittorio
Emanuele II is called Piazza della Repubblica (the name was changed after
1945), but Pynchon correctly used the name it had in 1899, when the
events told in this chapter took place. Historical accuracy, or proof that
Pynchon used an old Baedeker? And how is it that here such historical and
topographic accuracy go hand in hand with a spelling mistake? I do not
really want to get into the issue of how Pynchon may have recreated
Florence in 1899 by visiting a public library in the States (though, given
his stay in Malta in the mid-Fifties, a brief trip to Dante’s city is not so
unthinkable). This uncanny mix of topographic accuracy and spelling
sloppiness may have something to do with the way the Italian location has
been built.
In the novel, Florence seems to be a place existing in a given moment
(April 1899), yet its past and future are also present in a picture stretching
along the axis of time. Florence in the Renaissance, for example, is evoked
by Rafael Mantissa who, “like Machiavelli […] was in exile” (V 160); the
Florentine writer had to leave the city from 1513 to 1521 (actually because
he was unemployed, but there is also a political side of the matter, as we
shall see). Hence early-Sixteenth century Florence is a felt presence under
or behind the city of 1899. But also future times are foreshadowed in the
seventh chapter, for example when Ferrante, the Italian spy, thinks that
100 Chapter Five

“someone should assassinate Umberto I” (V 195)—something that actually

would happen the following year, when the king would be shot by
anarchist Gaetano Bresci (subsequently—and uncoincidentially—
mentioned twice in Against the Day [ATD 739, 1011]). Thus the fourth
dimension of Pynchon’s location stretches over centuries, from the Middle
Ages and Renaissance to—as we shall see—WWII and its aftermath, and
the history of Florence is as important to this location as its topography in
1899. Florence’s trans-temporal nature seems to impinge on the misspelt
toponyms already mentioned and the subtle connections they establish
with the events in the seventh chapter. Via dell’Oriuolo is the street that
hosted the first wheel clock in Florence, installed in 1353; at that time a
remarkable technological innovation (oriuolo being an old synonym of
orologio, the Italian term for clock). Perhaps it is not a coincidence that,
walking along a street named after a time-measuring device, Godolphin
pére thinks of the passing of time, measured by the increasing number of
“birthday candles” (V 184), while he is dismayed that “[t]here were more
candles at this point perhaps than even he could dream; but nearly all had
been blown to twisted black wicks” (V 184). The passage is dense with
Shakespearean echoes, as the candles recall the brief candle evoked by
Macbeth in his famous monologue (act V, scene v);7 when old Godolphin
contemplates “[t]his year, next year, sometime, never” (V 184), it does
sound like a curiously modernist variation on Macbeth's celebrated line
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow”. Obviously enough, the
passing of time ultimately leads to death (“and the party needed very little
to modulate to the most gently radiant of wakes”), as in Macbeth's
monologue: maybe it is not a coincidence that this sombre meditation on
time and mortality takes place in Via dell’Oriuolo, that is, Clock Street.
As for Piazza Vittorio Em(m)anuele II, on the one hand it is named
after the King who ruled the Kingdom of Sardinia and then Italy in the
crucial years of the Risorgimento, the troubled unification of the country,
brought about by a perversely complicated knot of wars, alliances,
conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, inspired or instigated by the Great
Game of European diplomacy. Modern historians have repeatedly pointed
out that the Savoia, the royal family of the Kingdom of Sardinia and then
Italy, were driven more by ambition and greed than any spirit of patriotism
or national identity; the unification process often took place in an
accidental, improvised and/or poorly planned fashion—just like Mantissa’s
and the Gaucho’s tragicomic machinations. The political unrest that
characterized Italian society less than forty years after the birth of the
nation (conventionally placed in 1861) is perceptible in Pynchon’s
 Florence, or Pynchon’s Italian Job 101

rendering of the plots hatched in Florence, especially the one organized by

two disgruntled patrioti, signor Mantissa and the Gaucho.
With all this in the background, one cannot help noticing that the
monumental Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II was built between 1885 and
1895 to celebrate the deeds of the first king of Italy (who had died in
1878), by demolishing several Medieval buildings, in the course of the so-
called risanamento [renewal] of the city. Apart from its ideological
reasons, the building of the square, not harmonized with the surrounding
urban texture, was above all driven by ruthless property speculation, so
that the renewal was called sventramento [disembowelment] by Florentine
citizens. Moreover, a huge equestrian monument to the former king was
placed in the middle of the square, something that looked too much like
the authoritarian act of a conqueror. No wonder that the renewal project
was highly controversial and the monument to the king was ultimately
moved to the Cascine park in 1932. This toponym is thus tied to a complex
knot of historical, political, architectural issues, in a country where
architecture and city planning have always had heavy political implications.
Another misspelling should catch our attention: the barge on which
Hugh and Evan Godolphin would escape, helped by Mantissa, waits for
them near one of Florence’s bridges, which Pynchon misspells as “Ponte
San Trinità” (V 212). The correct name of the bridge is—as I have already
pointed out—“Ponte Santa Trìnita” (stress on the first syllable). I wonder
whether Pynchon’s misspelling is not a way to draw our attention to this
bridge, built between 1567 and 1571 to replace an older one, destroyed by
one of river Arno’s frequent floods; the then new bridge was a
technological achievement, as the project was based on Michelangelo’s
idea that its three spans should be modelled on a catenary curve, giving its
structure a solidity and a stability that would enable it to resist future
floods.
This is undoubtedly one of those technological details that have always
fascinated Pynchon;8 moreover, it—like the multiple references to
Machiavelli and his Prince—points at the splendour of Florentine
Renaissance. But there is more to this bridge than meets the eye. The
Ponte Santa Trìnita you can walk on today is not the one conjured up in
the novel, as the 16th-Century bridge was destroyed by retreating German
troops in 1944, and had to be rebuilt (using the original stones as far as
possible) in 1958—when Pynchon might have been busy writing parts of
the novel, maybe this very chapter. Leaving philological concerns aside, I
wish to underscore the link to the events of World War II, which feature
especially in the Malta episode: once again, there is a superimposition of
different historical moments connected by a network of persons or
102 Chapter Five

characters, places and objects, but also symbols. On the Ponte Santa
Trìnita there are four statues, added in 1608, representing the four seasons:
one of them is Primavera, or Spring, and its head was missing when the
statues were retrieved from the river during the reconstruction of the
bridge.9 Luigi Bellini, a Florentine antique dealer, put a reward of 5,000
dollars on the head of the Spring, which was eventually found in 1961 by
the Florentine renaioli, the local equivalent of gondoliers. One may
suspect that news concerning the bridge appeared on American newspapers
then, and that Pynchon may have considered the name of the bridge a good
building block for his location. Moreover, the statue of Spring on the
Ponte Santa Trìnita hints at Botticelli’s Primavera, or Allegory of Spring
(ca. 1482), the other large-size painting that hangs in the same room of the
Uffizi where you can see today his Nascita di Venere, or Birth of Venus
(ca. 1486), the symbolic kernel of the whole chapter; Venus is present in a
central position in both paintings.
The misspelt Italian toponyms are in any case connected to those
networks of symbols and signs that structure, albeit in an open-ended
fashion, Pynchon’s fiction (Rossi “Something”). From the goddess of
love, be she painted or carved, we may move to Henry Adams’ famous
dichotomy of the Virgin and the Dynamo, and/or reconnect Venus to V.
herself, the maybe imaginary, maybe “real” object of Stencil’s quest in her
feminine version (or embodiment)—never forgetting that, as Pynchon tells
us, “V. might be no more a she than a sailing vessel or a nation” (V 226).
So the apparently irrelevant details of the location built by Pynchon are
part of a complex textual machine, which can produce several effets de
sens. J. Kerry Grant has already noticed that two of the toponyms, Via del
Purgatorio and Via dell’Inferno (Purgatory and Hell Street) provide
readers with a comment on V. herself or itself (Grant 103-104); but other,
less overt connections can be found between Florentine toponyms and the
macro-structures of the novel.
Right at the start of the seventh chapter we are told that Evan
Godolphin “was driven carolling away down Via dei Panzani” (V 156).
The street really existed in Florence in 1899 and still exists today (its name
has to do with pantani [marshes] that existed in that area before it was
urbanized); on this street stands the Hotel Gioconda, called Hotel Tripoli
in 1899. This is where Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi Gallery,
met Vincenzo Peruggia on 11 December 1913, and was presented with
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa or Gioconda, stolen by Peruggia on 21 August
1911 in Paris.10
Since one of the two main events in the seventh chapter of V. is
Mantissa’s attempt to steal Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (the other being the
 Florence, or Pynchon’s Italian Job 103

Venezuelan riot), one has to admit that the choice of mentioning Via de’
Panzani may be something more than a little touch of realism to make the
location more believable. I am well aware that by reading this small detail
as hinting at a historical event which bears relation to the whole seventh
chapter might be suffering from Stencil’s syndrome, that is, the tendency
to see patterns, or cabals, or conspiracies everywhere. The idea that
Mantissa’s plan to steal Botticelli’s painting mirrors Peruggia’s celebrated
theft of the Gioconda is much simpler than the WASTE system in The
Crying of Lot 49 or the Rocket conspiracy in Gravity’s Rainbow, yet it
might be another product of that paranoid mentality according to which
“any cluster of phenomena can be a conspiracy” (V 154), as Eigenvalue
tells Stencil in the introductory section of the seventh chapter: a
conspiracy, or—as in this case—a deliberate literary move, which might
actually be nothing more than a coincidence.
I will in any case invoke an old critical rule, Northrop Frye’s Fallacy of
Premature Teleology (Frye 17), and go on following the Peruggia lead.
Vincenzo Peruggia stole the Mona Lisa in a very simple way, taking
advantage of the knowledge of the Louvre Museum that he had acquired
by working there as a glazier. He didn’t put the Gioconda in a Judas tree,
but simply hid it under his white smock, which he wore to pass as one of
the many workers present in the museum. Peruggia stole Leonardo’s
masterpiece on Monday, as the Louvre was closed and there was not the
usual throng of visitors before it. He definitely adopted the politics of the
fox, like Mantissa.
What is more interesting is the reason why a thirty-year-old Italian
worker, emigrated from a small mountain town in Lombardy, decided to
steal what is possibly the most famous painting in the world. Peruggia
declared that his was an act of patriotism: he wanted to bring back the
Mona Lisa to Italy because it had been stolen by Napoleon. He knew the
Louvre quite well, but was quite ignorant of art history; it was Leonardo
himself, who emigrated to France in 1516 and died there three years later,
to bequeath the painting to King Francis I. Mona Lisa hung on a wall of
the Louvre well before the birth of Napoleon (it already was part of the
French royal collections in 1625). Yet Peruggia’s patriotic statements
worked miracles, as he was hailed as a sort of hero in Italy, and was
released after only seven months in jail.
If we superimpose the historical theft of the Mona Lisa on the fictional
theft of the Birth of Venus, we may read Mantissa’s hare-brained plan
from a very different perspective. Pynchon’s narrator does not really tell
us why Mantissa wants to steal Botticelli’s painting; he just hints at a sort
of morbid fascination with the image of Venus, which would take us back
104 Chapter Five

to Henry Adams’s theory of the Virgin as a symbol of the vital force lost
by Western civilization. Then there is Tony Tanner’s rather philosophical
interpretation of the attempted theft and Mantissa’s final decision to leave
Venus hanging on the western wall of the Uffizi: the revolutionary is
scared, like Hugh Godolphin in Vheissu, by the realization that behind the
colored, living surface of the painting there is nothing at all (Tanner 35).
But these interpretations do not take into account the subject of this essay,
that is, one of the most important locations of the novel: Florence.

Florence as Synecdoche
So far most of the readings have seen the city on the Arno as a
metonymy of the Renaissance, the golden age of Italian and European
culture, which gave the Western civilization Leonardo, Botticelli,
Michelangelo and Machiavelli (all directly or indirectly present in the
chapter). But Florence also plays an important role in Italian history well
after the end of the Renaissance. Suffice it to say that the Italian language
in its written form is a slightly modified version of the Florentine dialect
as it was spoken in the mid-19th Century; and that Florence was the
capital of Italy from 1865 to 1871 (before the king and the government
moved to Rome). Moreover, Italian cultural history tells us that the idea
itself of Italy as a nation did not stem from a political reality, as it
happened in France or England, but from the Italian literary tradition
(Somigli 913; Banti 30) born with the great Middle Age authors Dante,
Petrarch and Boccaccio (the Holy Trinity of Italian literature, all of them
Tuscan, at least one of them—Dante—born in Florence), based on a
written language common to most Italian intellectuals, countering the
linguistic (and political) fragmentation of a territory in which almost each
city had its own language and traditions.11
Moreover, it is in Florence that the Basilica di Santa Croce is located, a
large-sized Gothic church also called the Temple of the Italian Glories.
This lofty appellative is due to the fact that the church contains the tombs
of (among others) Michelangelo, Galilei, Machiavelli, and Ugo Foscolo,
the Italian poet, novelist, patriot, and literary critic who elaborated the
basic scheme of Italian literary history that was dominant in the 19th and
early 20th Century; a scheme that posited literature, in particular poetry, as
the cornerstone of Italian national identity. Foscolo is also the man who, in
his 1807 poem Dei sepolcri [On sepulchres], hailed Santa Croce as the
temple of Italian glories, the shrine of Italian cultural identity. Florence
plays a particularly important role in the history of Italy and the definition
 Florence, or Pynchon’s Italian Job 105

of its national identity. One might say that, metonymically speaking,

Florence is Italy and Italy is Florence. But what is Italy, then?
Roger B. Henkle maintains that “Each of the V. episodes takes place in
a colony (except the Florentine episode, which nonetheless involves a
country subject to colonial influence, Venezuela)” (Henkle 100). Actually,
the real exception is the Parisian episode. Italy was something relatively
new and not very stable in 1899, as it had only been unified thirty-eight
years before; Rome had only been annexed in 1870; other parts of the
country as it is today only entered the nation after WWI. Till 1861 the
small Italian states were satellites of larger European countries: Lombardy
and Veneto were part of the Austrian Empire; the whole Kingdom of
Naples, including everything south of Rome, had been a Spanish colony
for a long time, ruled by a viceroy like Peru or Mexico. Italy has a long
history of foreign domination, which began in the same years in which
Niccolò Machiavelli was exiled according to Mantissa (V 160); three
centuries in which Florence, with the rest of what is now Italy, was no
more than a little square on the vast chessboard of world politics, of the
Great game of Spain, France, Austria or the British Empire. If Italy was no
more a colony in 1899, its past was nonetheless colonial, and its culture
and society was surely post-colonial.
It all started in Machiavelli’s times—no wonder that his name pops up
so often in this chapter. Florence, his city, was the home of the Medici
family; “they were the foxes”, protests the Gaucho—who strongly dislikes
the cunning politics of the fox—who “suppressed freedom in this very city
for so long” (V 163). Florence is one of those Renaissance cities which
were splendid when it came to art and culture, but were also a hotbed of
conspiracies, plots, machinations. The great Italian minds like Machiavelli
“lived, suffered under the Medici” (V 163): the Gaucho’s opinions are not
untenable, as Machiavelli was a republican, who only wrote The Prince
looking for a rapprochement with the powerful signori, who once again
were in power in Florence after the fall of the Florentine republic (1494-
1512). The history of the city between the 15th and the 16th century is a
hectic series of wars, coups d’etat, invasions, conspiracies, of which
Machiavelli himself was a victim.
One should notice, however, that Niccolò Machiavelli was also one of
the protagonists of the complex politics of Renaissance Italy; not just as
the author of The Prince, but as an actor in this most complex game,
maybe not so great as that of Nineteenth Century empires, yet as
unprincipled and Byzantine. He started his career as a diplomat and a
military commander in 1498, four years after the Medici had been expelled
from Florence, when the city was once again a republic. It is Machiavelli’s
106 Chapter Five

relentless activity as an official of the Florentine Republic that allowed

him to witness important events of those troubled years, in which the
endless wars among the small Italian states (Florence as well as Venice,
Milan, the Papal States, Mantua, etc.) brought about the intervention of
foreign European powers (France and Spain) in the peninsula. When the
republic collapsed in 1512 and the Medici came back to Florence,
Machiavelli was arrested and tortured, before having to leave the city
because the new ruler, Lorenzo II de’ Medici, did not trust him. We can
easily see Machiavelli as a failed and embittered patriot, given the
exhortation to set Italy free from “barbarians” (i.e. foreigners) that closes
The Prince. And when the Medici were once again forced to leave the city
in 1527, and the republican regime was re-established, Machiavelli was to
experience a bitterer disappointment, as the new republic did not trust him,
due to the dedication of his most famous work to one of the Medici. It is
thought that this disappointment was so strong and heart-rending as to
have caused his death at the age of 58 (Bertelli 79).12 Disappointment and
bitterness are thus something shared by the historical Machiavelli and the
two Italian patriots, conspirators and adventurers, the Gaucho and
Mantissa.
Machiavelli’s masterpiece, The Prince, plays a quite important role in
V.; Pynchon himself calls it a “mighty influence” (SL 18). The idea of
calling the paramilitary organization of Venezuelan expatriates led by the
Gaucho “Figli di Machiavelli”, that is, Machiavelli’s Children (V 179)
may sound farcical, but it also allows Pynchon to suggest that the
Venezuelan exiles rioting in the streets of Florence are the offspring of
Machiavellian politics. Moreover, the Prince offers us an interpretive
paradigm that is relevant to the novel in its entirety. Slade already
underscored the importance of the 1513 essay (53-54).13 Cowart points out
that Machiavelli’s essay is quite important for the development of Lady V.
(The Art of Allusion 18), but it is not only she who is glossing on The
Prince; Pynchon is doing that too. It is not just the overt reference to the
politics of the fox and the lion (discussed in the eighteenth chapter of The
Prince, where the author recommends rulers to imitate the two animals
according to the situation), insistently quoted by the Gaucho and Mantissa
in the second section of the seventh chapter (where The Prince is explicitly
mentioned [V 162-163]); there is a more fundamental dialectics, both in
Machiavelli’s essay and in Pynchon’s novel.
In the very first chapter of his book, Machiavelli presents us with the
fundamental opposition of virtù [virtue] vs. fortuna [fortune]. He posited
virtue as the sum of human skills and talents which enable individuals to
be agents in the political arena, including the ability to plan a political
 Florence, or Pynchon’s Italian Job 107

action, and to use force when and if necessary; while fortune is not just
luck, but also chance, all those predictable or unpredictable events that
may favour or hinder human agency in history. These complementary
opposite terms repeatedly appear in V.,14 and they may be said to embody
(maybe to be the forerunners) of two other terms, paranoia and anti-
paranoia, introduced by Pynchon in a famous passage of Gravity’s
Rainbow (GR 434), and rightly considered crucial by Cowart (43) and
many other scholars for an understanding of history in Pynchon’s fiction.
Paranoia induces us to think that everything is connected, so that every
historical event, every deed that occurs is based on a plan or design, being
the product of human virtue; on the other hand, anti-paranoia tells us that
“nothing is connected to anything” (GR 434), that history is the accidental
collision of casual events, that inconstant fortune rules. But Machiavelli
taught us that it is the interplay or dialectics of the two opposing principles
or forces, virtù and fortuna, that may explain all the historical events, be
they of short or long duration: then paranoia and anti-paranoia are both
necessary to grasp what is happening in the course of history, and it is
rather odd that in Cowart’s second monograph on Pynchon, which focuses
on the historical dimension, there are just two passing references to
Machiavelli. Interestingly, at least two of the earliest commentators of V.,
Tony Tanner and Joseph W. Slade, have suggested that while Stencil is the
child of the century (or V., whatever she or it may be), Benny Profane is
“the figurative child of Fortune” (Slade 93) or—which is more or less the
same—“a creature of the realm of ‘accident’” (Tanner 1982 47). But
Stencil’s paranoid thinking can also be interpreted as a way of seeing any
historical event, be it small or big, as the product of deliberate plans (or
cabals, as Stencil uses to say)—or, in Machiavellian terms, as the product
of virtù. Hence the two main characters of the novel embody the two
competing principles of history according to the Florentine thinker.
It is not only the Florence of the Renaissance (Machiavelli’s own
times) that can be seen as a theatre for the clash between fortune and
virtue. Florence (and Italy) in 1899 is just another of those Roman
Catholic and irrational (V 190) southern places—like Malta—where virtue
and fortune clash, and cabals thrive; it is a perfect location for a
sophisticated spy story like V.—a postmodernist “spy thriller” (V 157)
ruled by ontological uncertainty, where characters “are all impersonating
an identity” (V 130). In fact there were machinations in the Italian
Risorgimento, the series of revolts and wars that brought about the
unification of the country under the Savoia dynasty between 1848 and
1870.15 One cannot help thinking of Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian patriot
and arch-conspirator, the man-in-black of Risorgimento, who usually wore
108 Chapter Five

black clothes as a sign of deep mourning for the fate of the fatherland,
something that may be related to Mantissa being described as “shrouded in
dark serge” (V 159).
It is no wonder that the two characters are compared in the seventh
chapter, as Pynchon’s adventurer strongly recalls Mazzini, whose “lambent
dreams” (V 159) contrast with his relentless political activity: from his
English exile he hatched revolts, revolutions and assassinations of those
Italian princes who opposed the unification of the country. Mazzini was an
exile, and died in 1872 in Pisa under the alias of Giorgio Brown as he was
wanted by the Italian police. His figure seems to be Pynchon’s model for
Rafael Mantissa,16 physical differences notwithstanding (Mantissa’s
complexion is fair, while Mazzini’s was dark).
If we can see Mantissa as an avatar of Giuseppe Mazzini, we can then
identify another character whose nationality has been discussed by several
commentators of the novel, such as Samuel Thomas, who is puzzled by the
“strange, inauthentic Gaucho”, but then suggests that the adventurer “is
himself a Venezuelan national” (Thomas 54). Actually Salazar, the
Venezuelan vice-consul, hypothesizes that the “ogre in the flopping hat
may be one of our own men, sent over from Caracas to keep an eye on us”
(V 176); but something the Gaucho tells Mantissa should make us think
twice, as the former maintains that he is a big man as he “comes from the
North”, so “there may be some tedesco blood in these veins” (V 164).
Tedesco is the Italian word for “German”, and it is in Italy (not Venezuela)
that German features are more often found in the population in the
northern part of the nation.17 The fact that, while discussing the arrival of
the Gaucho in Florence, Salazar says he is afraid that frightening things
may befall him and the consul there, such as “[b]ombs […] [d]estruction,
pillage, rape, chaos” as “[t]hey remember Garibaldi in this country” (V
176) may offer a clue to the symbolic identity of the Gaucho. His bodily
frame, his Teutonic features, his red shirt and his bold, impulsive character
suggest that he is an avatar of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the adventurer and
military commander who played a crucial role in the Risorgimento, the
lion whose daring feats (such as the annexation—someone would say
conquest—of the Kingdom of Naples or Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in
1860) starkly contrasted with the conspiracies hatched by Mazzini;
unsurprisingly, Pynchon has the Gaucho as a representative of the politics
of the lion (based on strength and courage) and Mantissa of the fox
(privileging cunning and prudence).
By envisioning the Gaucho as an avatar of Garibaldi we can
understand why Mantissa’s plan includes an escape on a river barge to
Pisa, with a final boat trip from there to Nice (V 161); the French city,
 Florence, or Pynchon’s Italian Job 109

once Italian, is Garibaldi’s birthplace. Besides, there is a very strong

connection between Nice and the Risorgimento, as the city was ceded to
France due to the 1860 Treaty of Turin, in return for French military
assistance during the Second Italian War of Independence. Garibaldi
harshly criticized the cession, and declared that the referendum held in his
birthplace to ratify the transfer had been rigged. Cabals again, one cannot
help noticing. In any case, if the Gaucho is, in some counter-factual and
counter-historical way, Garibaldi, we can address Slade’s puzzlement at
his involvement in the theft of the Birth of Venus (the critic cannot
understand “why [the Gaucho] should have taken this task upon himself”,
Slade 60). Once we read the attempted theft as an anamorphic image of the
historical theft of the Gioconda, which was a crackpot act of nationalistic
repossession, it is then fitting that two disappointed patriots are involved
in its Pynchonian, comedic version. Since Garibaldi died in 1882, well
before the facts told in the seventh chapter of V., Pynchon seems to have
resurrected the two Italian padri della patria [fathers of the homeland] as
two disenchanted adventurers who do not feel at home in the very country
they have struggled to build.
Though counterfactual, this picture is close to the historical truth as we
know it today. Mazzini was an ardent republican, who only begrudgingly
(and with great bitterness) accepted the idea that his beloved Italy should
be born as a monarchy, ruled by the untrustworthy house of Savoia, whose
policies he fiercely stigmatized; as for Garibaldi, here is what Henry
Adams says about him in his Education:18 “he had not understood his own
acts; […] he had been an instrument; […] he had served the purposes of
the class he least wanted to help; yet in 1860 he thought himself the
revolution anarchic” (Adams 76). Current historiography agrees: while
Garibaldi, like Mazzini, thought that the unification of Italy would have
benefited the whole Italian people (or peoples, if one is mistrustful of the
purported cultural homogeneity of Italians), it mostly benefited the upper
class, while it impoverished the peasants, especially those of the southern
regions, leading to the mass emigration (towards Southern America and
the United States) of late 19th and early 20th Century.19 Unsurprisingly
Mantissa and the Gaucho, while actively taking part in these plots, do not
feel at home in the city. No wonder that the city is marked by the traces of
old and new dominations: while some of the streets mentioned by Pynchon
refer to the old aristocratic families of the medieval comune (Tornabuoni,
Vechietti, Tosinghi, Pecori, Greci), there is also a Via Cavour, named after
the Count Camillo Benso, prime minister of the Kingdom of Piedmont-
Sardinia, the mastermind of Italian unification until his premature death in
1861. Cavour's Machiavellian politics takes us to the Prince once again, at
110 Chapter Five

least to one of the historical interpretations of the essay, read as an

immoral handbook for sly rulers; but other interpreters, like Mazzini, who
opposed the purportedly Machiavellian machinations of such politicians as
Cavour, scolded their manoeuvring as “an ignoble travesty of the doctrine
of a great but unhappy man [i.e. Machiavelli]” (Mack Smith, Mazzini,
192). It is remarkable how all the historical figures evoked or present
(even those who are passingly mentioned) are interconnected by a web of
historical relations, stretching through centuries; once again, Florence
reveals itself as a metonymy of Italy, a microcosm in which the historical
macrocosm of the nation is recapitulated.
This may lead us to reinterpret another of the misspellings in the
seventh chapter, that is, Mantissa and Cesare’s “Broglio” wine. We have
seen how the misspelt name hints at cabals and chicanery; but it also
connects the Florence episode with the historical figure of the Iron Baron,
Bettino Ricasoli, which is endowed with relevant political and historical
resonances. Ricasoli was twice prime minister of the Kingdom of Italy
(from 1861 to 1862, then from 1866 to 1867); a staunch Catholic and
politically conservative, he was a man of celebrated integrity, who was ill
at ease with the intrigues of his political rivals (such as Urbano Rattazzi),
and ultimately retired from the political scene in 1866, when his attempts
to reach a compromise solution with the Pope about the status of Rome (at
that time not yet part of the Kingdom of Italy) were repeatedly thwarted by
the Senate.20
But the grotesque events of 1899 are not only connected to the recent
past: they also foreshadow Italy’s future. Nationalism, street fighting,
conspiracies, riots and repression, social and political unrest, the deeds of a
charismatic leader like the Gaucho (Garibaldi always had dictatorial
leanings [Mack Smith, Garibaldi, 84; 116; 192-193]), violence and
authoritarianism as the solution to the problems left unsolved by the
unification of the country: the final result of this mix is what will be born
during the Great War, when a socialist politician and journalist will turn
nationalist and imperialist, will shortly fight in the trenches and be
wounded, and will eventually replace the good old red shirts of Garibaldi
and his volunteers with the notorious black shirts of the Fasci di
combattimento, founded in 1919 by Benito Mussolini (who saw Garibaldi
as one of his role models [Mack Smith, Garibaldi, 192, 199]).
Garibaldi’s proclivity to a dictatorship (even if temporary and aimed at
establishing a true democracy) leads to Mussolini, of course; but also
Gabriele D’Annunzio, the poet, dramatist, politician and adventurer who
has an affair with Lady V. in Fiume. His attempt to occupy the Adriatic
city after the Great War is carried out according to the politics of the lion,
 Florence, or Pynchon’s Italian Job 111

and is a continuation of the patriotic wars of the Nineteenth century, even

though it is a continuation that strongly smells of imperialism. It should be
added that, while D’Annunzio—notwithstanding his having “reached his
supreme moment, his peak of virtù” (V 248), according to Vera
Meroving—had to abandon Fiume in 1920, Mussolini’s fascist government
managed to annex the city to the Kingdom of Italy in 1924.
The final outcome of all the unrest and contradictions haunting the
Florentine episode is thus the Fascist regime and the role it played in the
greater disasters of the Twentieth Century. This connects the Florentine
chapter to the Maltese episodes of V., as it will be the Regia Aeronautica,
the Italian air force, called the arma fascistissima [most Fascist force] in
the regime's parlance, to bomb Malta in 1940-42 during the Second Siege
of the island (when the island suffers, in Fausto Maijistral’s words, “the
explosive orgasms of Mussolini’s bombs”, V 318). Fascism will ultimately
be defeated by the Allies and Italy will be invaded again, turning the
Italian cities into battlefields, hence the destruction of the Ponte Santa
Trìnita in Florence at the hands of the Wehrmacht, the German army
(foreshadowed by the reference to the doomed bridge). Florence is thus a
much-conquered land, a harbinger of the Zone in Gravity, an occupied
territory where international conspiracies are hatched and/or brought into
effect.

Nightmare Historiography
All in all the Florentine episode, with its labyrinthine entanglement of
fact and fiction, displaced historical figures, different historical times,
cunningly misspelt toponyms and names, operatic and mestizo Italian
language(s), and extensive glosses on The Prince, may be seen as another
instance of Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon, Ch. 7). Yet
her vision of postmodernist narratives as texts that problematize their and
our relation to (or quest for) historical truth may be satisfactory when it
comes to outlining a general trend, but does not seem to really grasp the
literary peculiarities of Pynchon’s own approach to history and the
historical imagination in his fiction—Hutcheon actually seems to be
steering clear of Pynchon’s historical novels (and novelettes, because this
is what the historical chapters of V. set in exotic locations amount to, taken
by themselves).21
If the Florentine chapter is to be questioned as a literary/aesthetic
construct, the best interpretive framework might be the one provided by an
unfinished essay written in the last years of the modernist age, which is
however uncannily appropriate to Pynchon's postmodernist yarns: Walter
112 Chapter Five

Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Here, in this most bewildering and

fragmentary work, he proposed a maverick interpretation of dialectics as
the logic of historical process.22 Benjamin hypothesizes that the relation
between the present and the historical past should be seen as similar to the
one between the waking world and the dream: “The new, the dialectical
method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the
present as waking world, a world to which the dream we name past refers
in truth” (Benjamin, K 1, 3). In his analysis of Paris as the capital of the
19th Century, Benjamin reads the past as a dream from which we have
waken up—a mutant form of Freud’s interpretation of dreams, but a very
promising one. Pynchon’s Florence seems to be following Benjamin’s
fragmentary indication, as this location can be read, all in all, as a
complex, multi-layered oneiric artefact, inasmuch as it is only in a dream
that we can walk the streets of Florence and meet Giuseppe Mazzini
carrying a Judas tree and Giuseppe Garibaldi leading a cavalry charge of
Venezuelan exiles. A partly comic, partly tragic dream; maybe a
nightmare, as it refers (like all the exotic episodes in V.) to greater
tragedies to come, from the Great War to the Second World War, from
Fascism to the Shoah.
This might be a way to answer what Hutcheon envisions as the
question asked by “postmodernist discourses—fictive and historiographic
[…]: how do we know and come to terms with such a complex ‘thing’?”,
the thing being the past seen as something “which accumulates and
impinges” (Hutcheon 123). Maybe the right approach to the multi-layered
and contradictory palimpsest called history is a new form of
Traumdeutung, an interpretation of the dream (or nightmare) called
history, in all its multiplicity of layers, with all its webs of relations and
oppositions, through all its intermingling of facts and fictions, records and
myths, oppressed and oppressors. Such an interpretation asks for a
thorough exploration of the historical palimpsest inscribed in the three-
dimensional palimpsest called city (of which Florence is an excellent
example), or in the other locations Pynchon has used in his first novel and
the following ones. It is an effort of textual and intertextual analysis, it is
also an intercultural endeavour, and this implies that Pynchon should be
always read in a comparative horizon—that Pynchon scholarship, if it
really wants to come to terms with the oeuvre of this truly worldwide
author, will have to be multi-national, or its efforts will fall short of their
target. Another lesson we can draw from a reconsideration of Pynchon’s
first novel half a century after its publication.
 Florence, or Pynchon’s Italian Job 113

Notes
1
Such as e.g. Gidget Goes to Rome (1963) or Way of the Dragon (1973).
2
Operatic references are not uncommon in this novel; one might mention the hint
at Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904) in the sixth chapter (V 141), or Porpentine
singing an aria from Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (1893) in the Egyptian episode (V
65).
3
Cowart suggests that “one learns to read Against the Day by rereading V.” (170),
but also Against the Day and other later novels may help us to read V., inasmuch as
in every novel Pynchon seems to comment on his previous works.
4
Minghe is also used as an interjection by Mantissa (V 186). It also appears in
“Entropy” (SL 96).
5
There is another remarkable verbal recurrence in this episode of Bleeding Edge:
when the owner of the restaurant, Marco, tells Rocky that if the waiter he was
arguing with was bothering him, he would end up “in the dumpster with the
scungilli shells” (BE 65). The noun (derived from scunciglio, possibly a dialectal
form of the Italian term for “shell”, conchiglia) is used by the Gaucho in V. when
he compares the half-shell on which Venus is standing in Botticelli’s painting to a
“scungille shell” (V 178).
6
Rocky prefers a Nero d’Avola to a ’71 Tignanello (BE 66) as the former wine,
made with a typical Sicilian variety of grapes, is more attuned to his wiseguy
banter than the latter, one of the so-called “supertuscans” (BE 66).
7
One may legitimately wonder whether Pynchon decided to echo that monologue
just because it is particularly fitting, or famous, or for the Roman numerals
traditionally used to indicate in what part of the tragedy it is placed.
8
It also connects the Florentine episode with Malta, as the catenary curve is sung
by Dnubietna, Fausto Majistral’s comrade, in a poem (V 326) already discussed by
Kozlowski, who reads the curve as an emblem of the illusions that hide “the only
truth of man’s existence—accident” (Kozlowski 4). This reading, however,
oversimplifies Pynchon’s dialectical approach in which cabals and chance are, as
we shall see, complementary opposites.
9
The missing head appears in Spike Lee’s 2008 movie Miracle at St. Anna; it is
the stone head carried by Private Sam Train throughout the film.
10
The room where Peruggia slept while in Florence still exists, and its number is
20. Information about it and the story of Peruggia’s theft can be found in tourist
guides similar to those Pynchon might have read while researching V.
11
Only 25% of Italians could actually read or write Italian in the Nineteenth
Century; and it was the language of everyday life for a much smaller part of the
population, about 3% (Dombroski 459).
12
The second Florentine Republic did not live much longer; the Medici came back
with vengeance in 1530, and secured their domination on the city and the
surrounding regional state, which lasted until the death of their last descendant,
Gian Gastone, in 1737. Francis I, emperor of Austria, succeeded him on the throne
of the grand duchy; the foxes had been replaced by the lion. The splendid house of
Medici became just another name in history books, possibly to be carved on a
114 Chapter Five

street sign, like those of the ancient Florentine aristocratic families which appear as
toponyms in this chapter, from Tornabuoni to Greci.
13
Though the first printed edition is dated 1532, five years after the death of its
author, manuscript copies had been circulating since 1513.
14
Virtù/virtue appears seven times in the novel, always in its Machiavellian
meaning of a skill or ability to rationally control the course of events, to govern
history; “fortune”, its opposite (maybe complementary) term, appears eleven times.
A discussion of when and why virtue and fortune occur throughout the novel
would deserve further critical attention, as the issue has been just outlined in this
chapter.
15
The duration of the Risorgimento is seen by some as stretching till the end of the
Great War (1918), as it is only then that the two cities of Trento and Trieste joined
(or were annexed to) Italy, and the unification of the country was accomplished.
Hence the war, never directly touched by Pynchon, is once more part of the novel,
even though indirectly hinted at—and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s invasion of Fiume
(today Rijeika, Croatia) in 1919—thrice mentioned in V. (V 242, 247, 248)—can
be interpreted as a last, belated backwash of the Great War and the Risorgimento.
16
One has to notice that the Italian form of the name is actually “Raffaele”, not
Rafael. Once again, did Pynchon make a mistake, or is this another deliberate
misspelling? Another possible interpretation of this odd spelling is that Mantissa
may—like the Gaucho and Giuseppe Garibaldi—have spent a long time (as an
exile) in Spanish-speaking countries, thus changing his first name into its Spanish
equivalent. Pynchon lets us know that he has lived in Egypt, where he has met
Hugh Godolphin (V 186); hence the Spanish-sounding first name may well a touch
aimed at rendering the portrait of a cosmopolitan adventurer. Even though the
countries visited by Mantissa are not the same where Mazzini looked for shelter in
his lifelong exile, the nomadic existence of the fictional character somewhat
mirrors the unquiet life of the Italian revolutionary and thinker.
17
Differences between Northern and Southern Italy are once more stressed by one
of Pynchon’s characters, Luca Zombini, in Against the Day, when he protests that
he does not want to be mistaken for a Neapolitan, as he comes from “Friuli, in the
north” (ATD 353), and stems from “an Alpine people”: and Friuli is “like Austria,
with gestures” (ATD 354).
18
Adams is mentioned in the novel as one who—like Stencil—“referred to himself
in the third person” (V 62).
19
A hint at the Italian emigrants is—as it is usual in Pynchon—rather oblique: he
doesn’t talk about the millions of Italian-Americans (not in this novel, however),
but mentions, in the list of disasters occurring in the dog days (at the end of the
third section of the tenth chapter), the 1956 Marcinelle disaster, in which “262
miners, trapped by fire, died in a coal mine” (V 290); 136 miners who died in the
Belgian coalmine were Italian.
20
There is another Tuscan wine mentioned in the seventh chapter, that is the
“bottle of Rufina” (V 176) drunk by the Venezuelan Vice-Consul; Ruffino is
another family of winemakers, who started producing Chianti in 1877;
interestingly, “Rufina” is an imperfect anagram of “ruffian”. One more
misspelling, one more accurately chosen detail.
 Florence, or Pynchon’s Italian Job 115

21
From an architectural point of view, V. is a collection of five novelettes welded
together by a thick narrative frame (Profane and Stencil fils’s story). Interestingly,
a major Italian publishing house, Rizzoli, went so far as to publish the ninth
chapter of the novel as a standalone novelette, called La storia di Mondaugen in
2009. Since it is unthinkable that this could happen without the author’s consent,
this might tell us something about how Pynchon himself sees the novelettes as
something endowed with an at least potentially independent life; and one should
not forget, of course, that the third chapter is a rewriting of his 1961 story “Under
the Rose”.
22
Unfortunately the English-language edition has not benefited from the recent
reconstruction of this fragmentary and extremely complex text, carried out by
Giorgio Agamben, Barbara Chitussi and Clemens-Carl Härle, based on documents
only rediscovered in the early Eighties (cf. Agamben).

References
Adams, Henry. 2005 [1918]. The Education of Henry Adams. Raleigh:
Hayes Barton Press. Print.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2012. Introduzione. In Walter Benjamin. Charles
Baudelaire: Un poeta lirico nell’età del capitalismo avanzato. Eds.
Giorgio Agamben, Barbara Chitussi, and Clemens-Carl Härle.
Vicenza: Neri Pozza. Print.
Banti, Alberto M. 2000. La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e
onore alle origini dell’Italia unita. Torino: Einaudi. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap Press.
(1982. Das Passagen-Werk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Print.
Bertelli, Sergio. 1966. Machiavelli. Milano: CEI. Print.
Cowart, David. 1980. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion. Carbondale
and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Print.
—. 2011. Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History. Athens:
The University of Georgia Press. Print.
Dombroski, Robert. 1996. Writer and Society in the New Italy. The
Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Eds. Peter Brand and Lino
Pertile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 459-479. Print.
Frye, Northrop. 1957. The Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays. Princeton:
Princeton University Press. Print.
Grant, J. Kerry. 2001. A Companion to V. Athens: University of Georgia
Press. Print.
Henkle, Roger B. 1971. Pynchon’s Tapestries on the Western Wall.
Modern Fiction Studies 17: 207-220. Rpt. 1978. Pynchon: A Collection
of Critical Essays. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall. 97-111. Print.
116 Chapter Five

Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory,

Fiction. New York: Routledge. Print.
Kozlowski, Lisa M. 1989. The Truth Behind the Catenary in Pynchon’s
V.: A Dream That Will Help You Not at All. Notes on Contemporary
Literature 19 (4): 2-4. Print.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1961 [1532]. Il principe. Ed. Luigi Firpo. Torino:
Einaudi. Print.
Mack Smith, Denis. 1956. Garibaldi: A Great Life in Brief. New York:
Knopf. Print.
—. 1994. Mazzini. New Haven: Yale University Press. Print.
Rolls, Albert. 2013. Review of Bleeding Edge. Orbit 2 (1). Web.
[http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/orbit.v2.1.51]. Accessed 27 December 2014.
Rossi, Umberto. 2014. “Something More Than a Rifle”: Firearms in and
around Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. Orbit 2 (2). Web.
[http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/orbit.v2.2.77]. Accessed on 27 December
2014.
Slade, Joseph W. 1974. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Warner Paperback
Library. Print.
Somigli, Luca. 2007. In the Shadow of Byzantium: Modernism in Italian
Literature. Modernism. Eds. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska.
Amsterdam: Benjamin. 911-929. Print.
Tanner, Tony. 1978. V. and V-2. Pynchon: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. 16-
55. Print.
—. 1982. Thomas Pynchon. London: Methuen. Print.
Thomas, Samuel. 2013. The Gaucho Sells Out: Thomas Pynchon and
Argentina. Studies in American Fiction 40 (1): 53-85. Print.
Unpublished transcript of courses and exams taken by Thomas Pynchon at
Cornell University 1953-1959.
 CHAPTER SIX

“PARIS FOR LOVE”?

CLÉMENT LÉVY

The novel’s fourteenth chapter, “V. in love”, is the only one in whose title
the name of the elusive V. appears. It is also the last, before the
“Epilogue” (the novel’s seventeenth section), of the historical chapters
(chapters 3, 7, 9, 11, and 14), alternating with the main narrative. Like all
the historical chapters, it contains elements of a story told to Herbert
Stencil, who manages to reconstruct events from the witnesses’ tales. But
unlike the other episodes of his research, this one entails a substantial
comment on the object of Stencil’s quest, and the possible evolution of V.
in 1956, if she—supposing it was a woman—were still alive. Very
interestingly, this comment is accompanied by a reflection on “Baedeker’s
world” (V 78): against the backdrop of Paris, the narration considers the
tourist’s point of view for the last time, after Cairo and Florence, and
where the discourse about tourism and geographical displacement comes
to a conclusion.
A few pages before the beginning of chapter fourteen, Stencil gives
Profane his interpretation of the meaning of V.’s stay in Paris in 1913. It is
the place where she dedicated herself to love: “Paris for love” (V 387).
However, this love ends in such a tragic way, and is analyzed in such
detail by the narrator, that Stencil’s words seem tainted with a strong
irony. This prompts the reader to reconsider the way in which Paris, love,
and V. are related to each other in this chapter.
My research is based on a geocritical approach to Thomas Pynchon’s
text, which puts the focus on the places named in the fourteenth chapter
and on how closely they represent the real places. Geocriticism is still a
recent methodology for literary studies, but it warrants greater attention.
As Pynchon’s characters travel across whole continents, and as his
stories so often give new shapes and meanings to local legends and
historical events, his works seem well suited to a geocritical approach. To
begin with, the spatial dimension is a theme that his novels address in
118 Chapter Six

many ways, not only as a setting for the stories they develop, but as a
proper theme. Locations are of course very diverse as early as in his first
long publication. V. tells the story of Benny Profane and the Whole Sick
Crew during the year 1956, but half of the novel, the historical chapters,
give unclear testimonies about Lady V., or V., and the various other
identities she may have taken in the course of her life. The historical
chapters may also be called geographical, because they take us far away
from New York. The author gives the reader some help, as chapters two
and thirteen include dialogs in which Stencil explains what he knows
about V. and where he is looking for her: in Malta (where Stencil’s father
died), in Florence (where he was when he wrote a famous line about V. in
his journal), in New York (where Dr. Eigenvalue owns “a vital piece of
the V.-jigsaw” [V 55]), or in Egypt and the Middle East (“a young, crude,
Mata Hari act in Egypt” [V 386]). A few other places are mentioned in
Stencil’s speeches: Corfu, Rotterdam, Spain, the Middle East and Italy (V
388), but Paris is noted, it seems, to build a contrast with Malta: “Paris for
love, Malta for war” (V 387).
Later in Pynchon’s oeuvre, geographical mobility becomes one of his
Leitmotivs. Slothrop in the Zone, Mason and Dixon from Greenwich to
Cape Town, Saint Helena and the Ohio frontier, Kit Traverse on the Silk
Roads, in Ostend, Venice and Hollywood are easy examples of Pynchon’s
tendency to come to terms with space, and more precisely, with the
“chronotope of the road”. Mikhail Bakhtin first conceived it as the
connections between real and historical time-space coordinates with
fictional time-space in the picaresque novel (Bakhtin 98), but it is present
in many recent novels. Though some of Pynchon’s novels have California
as a single setting,1 nonetheless they can take the reader far away from the
Golden State. For example, The Crying of Lot 49 entails an Elizabethan
tragedy about the Thurn und Taxis postal network in Europe in the
fifteenth century; Vineland’s characters also travel away from Northern
California, like DL whose earlier years in Japan are recalled, or Zoyd
Wheeler, who goes to Hawaii at some point. And the real estate issue in
the Los Angeles area is linked in Inherent Vice to a broader scheme. Doc
Sportello goes to Las Vegas to investigate this criminal network, while
Mickey Wolfmann tries to find an escape route in the deserts and
wastelands of Nevada, in his efforts to create an alternative to land
property. These quickly sketched examples and moreover the many other
“[f]ictions of faraway lands” (MD 281) make geographical space a very
rewarding research subject for Pynchon scholars.
To be precise, geocriticism is a literary criticism trend that takes into
account the recent developments of a more humanistic geography, and that
 “Paris for Love”? 119

has helped to conceive a new approach toward space in comparative

literature. Its starting point was the “spatial turn” in humanities: place
became a common terrain of investigation for literature scholars and a new
paradigm was founded, as Michel Foucault had conjectured in his
groundbreaking essay on heterotopias:

The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in
the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch
of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. (Foucault 22).

Furthermore, the sense of place became a research object that geographers

like Yi-Fu Tuan and David Harvey linked to literary works during the
1980s, and their works gave way to a new literary geography.2 Brian
McHale then identified a new paradigm for the representation of space in
postmodern narrative (1987), and took Gravity’s Rainbow as an example
in his next essay (1992). It thus helped lay the foundations for a
methodology of spatial studies in novels where geography is challenged by
the author’s fantasy. Reconsidering the phenomenological approach to
artworks and reception theory, Bertrand Westphal coined the word
geocriticism to pave the way to a geocentered methodology that would
allow for the study of interactions between real spaces and their
representations in literary or cinematographic works.
Geocriticism thus gives priority to places, instead of the subjective
gaze of the authors with which more classical criticism deals, and has
some acute tools to identify the various strategies of authors wishing to
play with places’ references in the representations that they create.
Geocriticism allows in-depth exploration of fictional spaces through the
actual spaces to which they refer. It is all the more interesting as novels
often transform the configuration of real places to adapt them to the
narrator’s perspective and the story’s conditions and needs.
Using historical descriptions and travel narratives also helps broaden
the scope of such studies of literary places, and a typology of
modifications of the réalème provides a practical way through the mazes
of postmodern fictional inventions. These “strategies of interference
between the referent and its representation” (Westphal 105) were first
identified by Brian McHale (1987): juxtaposition, interpolation,
superimposition, and misattribution. To these four ways of altering the
geographical map to create new confines between usually distant
countries, putting real and fictional countries border to border, giving them
a familiar aspect by the use of mixed cultural or historical hints, and
voluntarily scrambling the system of reference between names and places,
Westphal adds “transnomination” and “anachorism”, which belong more
120 Chapter Six

closely to geographical fantasy, so often used in modern and postmodern

literature (Westphal 107-108). These ways of playing with the referent
enable an author to precisely identify the settings of a narrative before
denying this localization, and blur the shapes of the referent to allow for
the development of a utopian or dystopian narrative.

As V.’s fourteenth chapter begins, the 15-year-old girl Mélanie

l’Heuremaudit has run away from her school to join a ballet company in
Paris led by the Russian choreographer Satin. He is preparing a show
called L’Enlèvement des Vierges Chinoises (Rape of the Chinese Virgins)
in which Mélanie will dance the leading role under the stage name of Mlle
La Jarretière. The music is by another Russian called Porcépic. And their
producer, who not long ago was a bartender in Pigalle, Paris’s red light
district, is a Frenchman called Itague. As the young ballerina arrives in
Paris, she seems to follow the usual path described in Baedeker’s
guidebook. At the Gare du Nord,

she hurried through the station behind an Algerian-looking facteur who

carried her one embroidered bag lightly on his shoulder and joked with
customs officials being driven slowly to frenzy by a beseeching mob of
English tourists. (V 393)

The guide was probably the source of the French term “facteur”, already
antiquated in the 1940s:

On arrival the traveller hands his small baggage to a porter (facteur; 25 c.-
1 ½ fr., according to weight and number of packages), follows him to the
exit (where an octroi official asks the nature of its contents […]) and calls
a cab (voiture de place) or taxi-auto. (Baedeker 1)

But the narrator succeeds in making this scene lively, by mentioning

possible difficulties at the customs office and alluding to the French
colonial empire. According to David Seed, Pynchon “summarize[s] the
world of tourism as a supranational ‘coordinate system’ which reassures
the traveler by reducing every location to its standard pattern” (Seed 113).
Pynchon seems to conform to this touristic Weltanschauung when he
chooses to take us on a short detour to the Opéra, before the cab veers off
to the north where Mélanie meets Satin in a café next to Boulevard de
Clichy. This longer route allows the narrative to follow a path that
approaches the Grands Boulevards, “the centre of Parisian life”, and goes
behind the opera house, “the largest theater in the world” according to
Baedeker (Baedeker 76-77). It seems natural that a young dancer would
 “Paris for Love”? 121

wish to have a look at this famous ballet academy, as indeed would many
tourists arriving in Paris. But for a writer, to describe a well-known place
is never easy.
As Westphal writes in Geocriticism, “[t]oday the writer always comes
in second place: the writer is always preceded by those who have fixed the
referent, who are sometimes themselves writers” (Westphal 83). In other
words, there is nothing new to tell about Paris now, nor was there at the
beginning of the 1960s when Pynchon was writing V. On the other hand,
the narrator deliberately chooses to name places that were infrequently
cited by other American writers who were describing Paris around the
time of the First World War. This is probably because Pynchon did not
want to revisit places already claimed by Miller, Hemingway, or
Fitzgerald, the last two praised in the author’s introduction to Richard
Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me: “We showed up
once at a party, not a masquerade party, in disguise—he as Hemingway, I
as Scott Fitzgerald, each of us aware that the other had been through a
phase of enthusiasm for his respective author” (IF x).
As a matter of fact, a recently published essay on gender and
geocriticism deals with the representation of Paris by American expatriates
between 1900 and 1940. This literary investigation of Parisian places, by
Amy D. Wells, includes a very useful list of the places named in novels
that were published before Pynchon wrote V. Wells built a vast database of
places and their occurrences in a wide corpus of works and authors: she
shows “that the literary geography of Paris is adapted and adopted by
American writers and that therefore an ‘Americanized’ Paris exists”
(Wells 150). In a table in which she compares the five most cited places
according to the gender of the writer (Wells 152), at the top of the list, for
male writers, are cafés of the Boulevard du Montparnasse like the Dôme,
the Coupole, and the famous Closerie des Lilas. Readers of Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises (1927) and A Moveable Feast (1964) know that the
author spent much time writing there during his stay in Paris (1921-1928).
The four next most visited places in male writers’ works are all located
on the Left Bank, except for the Bois de Boulogne and the Champs
Élysées, in the western part of the city. The north of Paris is much less
present in the database: most of the locations are limited to Montmartre,
the surroundings of the Gare du Nord, and the Boulevard Lafayette, as
Wells’s map demonstrates (Wells 153). Another writer that Pynchon
seems to avoid consciously in chapter fourteen is Gertrude Stein, whose
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas includes many pages about “Picasso and
all his friends in Montmartre” (Stein 58) from 1903 to 1913 and during the
First World War. But it is more difficult to comment on the absence of a
122 Chapter Six

reference than on its presence, so a hypothesis about why allusions to

Stein are lacking is impossible.
In the fictional Paris of V.’s fourteenth chapter, the Baedeker guide
helps to build a background consistent with the historical setting of the
story, but it may well be that Pynchon mixed these references with sources
posterior to the First World War. And the young author never alludes to
the places where Hemingway, a writer he confessed to admiring, lived and
wrote.3 This could be the reason why the Montparnasse cafés are totally
absent from the Paris episode. The fictional cabaret where the beginning of
the chapter is set, Le Nerf, is near the Boulevard de Clichy, “rue Germaine
[sic] Pilon” (V 395). The only occurrence of this street-name in the novel
has it wrong, feminizing the first name as Germaine instead of Germain.
This typo could be one of the remaining “goofs [that] ought to be cleared
up before then”, as Pynchon writes in a letter to Faith and Kirkpatrick Sale
(March 9, 1963),4 but it was in fact never corrected in the American nor in
the British editions of the novel, even though only the latter (London:
Cape, 1963) benefited from the corrections intended by the author, as
Albert Rolls made clear in an article about authorized and unauthorized
versions of V. (Rolls).
Le Nerf sits on a slope leading to “the heights of Montmartre” (V 394):
“on the Butte” (V 414). But other cabarets and cafés like the Moulin de la
Galette or the Chat Noir and the Lapin Agile, where cubist artists met, all
located in the heart of this district, are not mentioned. The very name of
this cabaret, Le Nerf, seems also very uncommon, as does the name of
another café, L’Ouganda. However, they could be allusions to a colonial
dispute in Africa that is referred to in chapter three (the Fashoda incident),
and to Freudian theory, mentioned in this chapter and elaborated in the
account of a Parisian hospital where the young doctor from Vienna studied
nervous pathology, which was named hysteria at this time, with Docteur
Charcot in the 1890s.
Few other places can be precisely located on the map: Lady V.’s house
near rue de Grenelle, in the 15th arrondissement, on the Left Bank, far
away to the west from the Latin quarter; her dress shop, “rue du Quatre-
Septembre” (V 399), near the opera house; and Satin’s house at “Les
Batignolles” (V 401), in the 17th arrondissement (on the Right Bank in a
recently built district, from place Clichy to the north). Some of Mélanie
l’Heuremaudit’s trips across Paris are described, so that a few other
landmarks are cited: she takes a surface metro line to Grenelle, passes by
the Eiffel Tower, and crosses the Seine river on the Pont de Passy (V 406).
Paris’s oldest parts, churches, castles, and museums are not mentioned:
 “Paris for Love”? 123

Paris in V. is the growing “Ville-Lumière” (V 401), the modern city where

immigrants, artists, and tourists swarm.
Pynchon quotes from and comments on the Baedeker guides that he
uses in the historical chapters. An often-quoted page criticizes the way
tourists view the world through Baedeker’s guide:

V. at the age of thirty-three (Stencil’s calculation) had found love at last in

her peregrinations through (let us be honest) a world if not created then at
least described to its fullest by Karl Baedeker of Leipzig. This is a curious
country, populated only by a breed called “tourists”. Its landscape is one of
inanimate monuments and buildings; near-inanimate barmen, taxi-drivers,
bellhops, guides: there to do any bidding, to various degrees of efficiency,
on receipt of the recommended baksheesh, pourboire, mancia, tip. More
than this it is two-dimensional, as is the Street, as are the pages and maps
of those little red handbooks. (V 408-409)

Here, during the pause that delays the narration of the opening night of
L’Enlèvement des Vierges Chinoises, the name of Karl Baedeker is cited
for the last time in the novel. The narrator brings together two important
themes of the novel: the inanimate and tourism. The link between them is
V., who is an explicit protagonist in this chapter (which is not the case in
the rest of the novel, where of course she is haunting Stencil’s, or
Maijstral’s, narratives). William Plater dedicated the second chapter of his
monograph on Pynchon to “Baedeker Land”, and his analysis provides a
very persuasive explanation of this system of representation of foreign
societies. But at a more general level, his introductory remarks help us
understand how

Pynchon deliberately builds his fictional world from the facts and artifacts
of his readers’ experience. In part, he fulfills the tour guide’s responsibility
for familiarity, but he also demonstrates the confluence of illusion and
reality in form. (Plater 104)

To make the world more familiar is precisely the reason why the Baedeker
guidebook tells the tourist how to tip, and what foreign words to use. And
Pynchon, by using actual place-names in chapter fourteen, also creates an
effect of reality, so that the readers believe him. But the familiarity with
the local context is also an illusion: it is not “two-dimensional” in V. but
this world has deeper strata of hidden references and themes pervasive to
the whole novel, because Pynchon’s fantasy adds a strange personal
perfume to an otherwise realistic description of Paris. Bernhard Siegert,
who studied Pynchon’s concept of story in V.’s third chapter and its first
published version, puts it another way:
124 Chapter Six

What guarantees the possibility of telling the story is the Baedeker world in
which the figures move; it is a scene based on city maps. Pynchon clearly
pointed out this source, to which he also alluded in the short story [“Under
the Rose”]. But every obvious hint, so learn the Baedekers of espionage, is
meant to hide something else. (Siegert 42, my translation)

The situation in chapter fourteen is, however, quite different: no spies

here, no hints, no leads. Tourism is present in the background, as we saw
in the first pages, which tell of Mélanie’s arrival in Paris, but the chapter is
about revelations, not secrets. Lady V. does not feel like a tourist anymore:
she “found herself excommunicated, bounced unceremoniously into the
null-time of human love, without having recognized the exact moment as
any but when Mélanie entered a side door to Le Nerf on Porcépic’s arm
and time—for a while—ceased” (V 409). Love indeed has temporarily
changed V. into another person, and this explains why the Paris chapter
does not conform to the others set in Cairo, Florence, South-West Africa,
and Malta.
Near the end of chapter thirteen, Herbert Stencil tells Profane how for
him, V. has always been connected to gruesome events, not as a “cause” or
an “agent”, but rather as a “symptom” (V 386). Comparing her presence in
Cairo to “a young, crude Mata Hari act […] while Fashoda tossed sparks
in search of a fuse”, in 1892, and in Paris in “1913 when she knew she’d
done all she could and so took time out for love” (V 386), Stencil lets the
readers expect that V.’s taste for violence will be tempered or disappear
altogether. And this is the reason why this chapter somehow lacks an
action-filled plot. Stencil found out from Porcépic what V. had told him
about “their affair” (V 409) and this tale of a fetish and voyeuristic love
takes place in the private space of V.’s house, in a street whose name is
not given, near Grenelle, south of the Eiffel Tower.
Hanjo Berressem has studied in detail, from a Lacanian perspective,
their “secret chamber of mirrors” (Berressem 16). Their love is set away
from the cafés and parks because it needs no outside. Being based on a
closed circuit of gazes that objectify one’s self and the lover, “the tableau
freezes into inanimateness” (Berressem 17). It is no wonder that Pynchon
predicts Mélanie and V.’s entry into the Kingdom of Death: “Dead at last,
they would be one with the inanimate universe and with each other” (V
410). But this brings an end to the fixed time-space of V. in love.
This also explains why Paris in this chapter sits very much in the
background, presented rather as a sketch than as a detailed picture. The
narrator outlines very few places: the Gare du Nord, with its “three
massive arcades and seven allegorical statues”, and the rising “dome of the
Opéra, and tiny Apollo, with his golden lyre” (V 397), appear in the first
 “Paris for Love”? 125

pages of the chapter. Other places or landmarks are named, most

remarkably in the comments about Baedeker Land, but they are in fact
interchangeable. As an example, the tourists of all nations form “the most
absolute communion we know on earth […], the Tour Eiffel, Pyramids,
and Campanile all evoke identical responses from them” (V 409): this is an
undifferentiated world, where all the places of interest have the same
meaning and do not seem to bear any relation to any culture or historical
moment in particular. In this chapter, the cities evoked earlier—Cairo (for
the pyramids of Giza) and Florence, or possibly Venice (for the
Campanile)—are merged together with Paris in an indefinite system of
reference where the narrator, in a nonchalant way, can also add small
details that could distract the reader’s attention.
This is the way the carnivalesque presence of known people in chapter
fourteen can be understood. Some play an important role, such as the
Russian ballet company. Others, like the French writer Gerfaut, are only
mentioned in passing, but the name of the young girl, the character of his
next novel, “Doucette” (V 402), and the fact that she suffers strong
passions could be an obvious reference to the French writer Georges
Bernanos (1888-1948) and Mouchette, an important character in Sous le
soleil de Satan (1926).5 Such blurred allusions and the carefree treatment
of spatial references are an indication that Pynchon uses Parisian space as
a setting for this chapter without much intention to work on this material.
The referential space of London in Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the
Day receives more visible modifications, and benefits from more precise
descriptions.
The geography of Paris in this chapter is thus slightly influenced by the
Baedeker vision of space, while the influence of other is largely
suppressed by the young Thomas Pynchon, so that his creation of a
personal Parisian space is above all based on the sentimental relation
between V. and Mélanie, who do not wander through the city.

V.’s chapter fourteen is also set in Paris in 1913 because it was the
scene of a scandal that could suggest the violence of the coming world
war. The première of L’Enlèvement des Vierges Chinoises bears a
famously striking resemblance to the opening night of Le Sacre du
printemps, on May 29, 1913. Igor Stravinsky composed the music, Vaslav
Nijinsky created the ballet and led the dancers, while Sergei Diaghilev,
impresario of the Ballets Russes, was in charge of the whole production.
These artists are the models for Porcépic, Satin, and Itague. Le Sacre was
presented in a newly built theater, le Théâtre des Champs Élysées, on
avenue Montaigne, in a part of the town that was not built before the end
126 Chapter Six

of the 19th century. Today it is in the 8th arrondissement, between the

Seine and the avenue des Champs Élysées, in the most expensive part of
the city. In the novel, the producer Itague is characterized by his anti-
Semitism: his hatred for captain Dreyfus is mentioned (V 399) as well as
the titles of far-right newspapers that he reads: La Libre Parole (V 399),
La Patrie (V 406). It is quite ironical that Pynchon made the producer of
L’Enlèvement des Vierges Chinoises an anti-Semite whereas les Ballets
Russes and Le Sacre du printemps were possible thanks to a Jewish art-
lover, Gabriel Astruc, who owned the Théâtre des Champs Élysées. In the
novel, the theater is called Théâtre Vincent Castor, possibly because
“castor” is not only the name of the beaver in French, which could allow a
coarse pun, but also a near-anagram of “Astruc”. However, the theater in
chapter fourteen seems to be located on the Montmartre hill, instead of in
the richer district where the Théâtre des Champs Élysées lies.
The première of Le Sacre was largely commented on because its
innovative character, both in music and choreography, shocked the
audience and provoked a tumultuous reaction. The historian Modris
Eksteins recollected testimonies and described in great detail that riotous
evening:

Shortly after the wistful bassoon melody of the opening bars, the protests
began, first with whistling. When the curtain went up and the dancers
appeared, jumping up and down and toeing, against all convention, inward
rather than outward, the howling and hissing started. (Eksteins 34)

In the New York Times, the angry review that Alfred Capus published in
Le Figaro on June 2 was translated soon after and echoed this “storm of
hissing” (“Parisians Hiss…”). What provoked such a savage reception was
of course the aesthetic of this work, but also its theme. In two acts, the
ballet represents the pagan celebration of spring and the sanctification of
its power through a sacrifice: one of the virgins is chosen and dances to
death before the assembly of the elders. The music was also designed to
impress: the score needed a huge orchestra, with a large percussion
section, and Stravinsky favored very loud sound and high-pitched
melodies over harmony: “With its violence, dissonance, and apparent
cacophony, the music was as energetic and primitive as the theme”
(Eksteins 84). In the novel, Porcépic is presented as a composer
“experimenting with African polyrhythms” (V 402), common in Cuban
music and becoming a new trend in modern jazz in the early sixties.6 At
the end of the opening performance of his ballet, “Porcépic’s music was
now almost deafening: all tonal location had been lost, notes screamed out
simultaneous and random like fragments of a bomb” (V 414). The
 “Paris for Love”? 127

comparison of the score of L’Enlèvement des Vierges Chinoises with a

shrapnel explosion is a prefiguration of the coming war. Moreover the
violent estrangement produced by Porcépic’s work is also prepared earlier
in the text with a prevision of the Russian revolution, which will occur and
provoke an “irresistible and irreversible tide”, according to “the basic
rhythms of History” (V 405). But the most obvious manifestation of the
violence in chapter fourteen is the strong motive on which it ends: Mélanie
dies impaled on a pole at the climax of the ballet, because she forgets to
wear the protective device that would have made her death a simulacrum.
Nonetheless, the reader learns in Against the Day, more than forty
years after V. was published, that Mélanie’s accident was itself staged. In
the last part of the novel, one day in 1918, when Dally Rideout is living in
Paris, she has a friend, Jarri, whom a group of Americans recognize in
front of her shop:

“Scyuzay mwah, but ain’t you that La Jarretière?”

“Oh, yes, before the . . . War? I used to dance under that name.”
“But they say she died—”
“—A-and real horribly, too . . .”
The young woman sniffed. “Grand Guignol. They came to see blood. We
used the . . . raspberry syrup. (ATD 1066)

Mélanie’s death, and the story of the opening night that Stencil recollected
from “police records, and [that was] still told, perhaps, by old people
around the Butte” (V 412), may in fact have been a scheme, if Pynchon’s
fictional world, where characters can appear in more than one novel, is
consistent. This late evidence that the artists succeeded in setting up the
pitiful death of the young ballerina, using popular horror drama props,
shows how Pynchon corrected V. so that death did not triumph over the
forces of life.

Paris in V. is thus the place where important revelations occur

regarding Lady V., but the tragedy of Mélanie’s death makes it a place that
is anything but romantic. Their love has for a moment the bitter taste of
fetishistic dead ends, until Pynchon discloses another, happier revelation
in Against the Day. For V., Paris is a place where she tries to give herself
to the realm of the inanimate, this theme being also echoed by the presence
in the chapter of a great number of automata. Her violence is not aimed at
others, probably because the diplomatic situation between the great powers
of the continents will inescapably trigger a war. Thus Pynchon did not
choose Paris as a setting for this strange moment in the life of the
mysterious character because he would be able to link it to the events that
128 Chapter Six

triggered the First World War. His reason was probably that he wanted to
write a parody of the opening night of Le Sacre du printemps. But as we
saw, this version of Paris is an original fictionalization of a Montmartre
where neither the Sacré Cœur is mentioned, nor the cubist artists, and
where the main characters leave aside the beaten touristic paths,
Baedeker’s guide being apparently left untouched on a bed-stand.
By studying the results of a geocritical approach to the representation
of Paris in books written by American expatriated authors, we learned how
Pynchon, by contrast, created his own vision of the city. V.’s fourteenth
chapter lacks an action-filled plot because it is focused on V. and
Mélanie’s love, so that the representation of this city makes it much
bleaker than Cairo, Florence, and Malta. The places named in the chapter
do not give a clear indication of the author’s intentions, but show only his
desire to escape the already classical Paris depicted by Hemingway in his
first novels and perhaps also the cubist Montmartre whose story Gertrude
Stein had already told. Coming back to the Ville-Lumière after the First
World War in Against the Day, Pynchon could finally show a relaxed
attitude towards American residents in Paris, and laugh fancifully at their
pronunciation of the French language, because, even though he called
himself a “slow learner”, he quickly received much praise for his novels
and stood comparison with the authors he admires.

Notes
1
In David Cowart’s Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History, The
Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice are presented as “the California
novels”.
2
Three articles by Yi-Fu Tuan are considered fundamental: “Space and Place:
Humanistic Perspective”, “Sign and Metaphor”, and “Literature and Geography:
Implications for Geographical Research”. David Harvey’s The Condition of
Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change is also a seminal
work that bases parts of its critical elaboration on Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist vision
of space: The Production of Space.
3
The lines (quoted above) from his Introduction to Fariña’s novel acknowledge
Pynchon’s unequivocal yet juvenile admiration for Hemingway.
4
Cited in Rolls.
5
Sous le soleil de Satan was translated as The Star of Satan in Great Britain (1927)
and in the USA (1940), and as Under the Sun of Satan (1949). Grant sees in
Gerfaut a mask for Nabokov (Grant 175), because Doucette reminds us of Lolita,
but the way that society in the novel blames Mouchette for having older and
married lovers, while Doucette is “strangled within by passions she could not
name” (V 402), and the analogy between their nicknames, make it easier to
consider Gerfaut a parody of Bernanos rather that of Nabokov. Pynchon may also
 “Paris for Love”? 129

have mixed different models to create his Gerfaut whose “two or three chins” (V
402) do not bring to mind Bernanos or Nabokov.
6
Quoting this line of the text, I corrected the typo still present in both American
and British editions: “polyrhythyms” (V 402).

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Berressem, Hanjo. 1986. V. in Love: From the “Other Scene” to the “New
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Foucault, Michel. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Trans. J. Miskowiec.
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Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into
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McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen. Print.
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 CHAPTER SEVEN

KATABASIS, ORPHEUS, AND ALLIGATORS:

V.’S VARIOUS UNDERWORLDS

JENNIFER BACKMAN

Did the two forces neutralize and leave you on the

lonely promontory between two worlds? Can you
still look both ways, child?
—Thomas Pynchon

The Orpheus of classical myth has numerous recognizable traits, which

have made him an especially popular figure for treatment by generations
of poets and artists. He is the captivating musician whose music softens
even the heart of dread Persephone, the husband whose miscalculated
glance sends his beloved wife hurtling back into Hades, the rare mortal
who returns alive from the underworld, the man who continues to
prophesize after being torn limb from limb. Orpheus reaches between the
land of the living and the land of the dead and ends up on an ambiguous
border—his exceptional vantage point affords him an ability to “look both
ways,” but his travels beyond human experience also hinge on a dangerous
liminality, leaving him isolated on “the lonely promontory between two
worlds” (V 331). It is the essential dynamic of Fausto’s question above that
I take up here—the connection between Orpheus’s multiple, fragmented
identities and his position as a crosser of impossible boundaries.
More specifically, my aim is to examine Thomas Pynchon’s proclivity
for describing katabasis, the ancient Greek term for a descent into the
underworld, in particular his multiple ruminations on the figure of
Orpheus; the Orphic journey into the underworld is a key element that
appears consistently throughout Pynchon’s fiction; explicit references to
Orpheus abound in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the
Day while forays into underground spaces are featured plotlines in The
Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. While
Orpheus and his descent may be more overt in these later novels, the same
concerns are also at work in V. I suggest that instead of one, cohesive
132 Chapter Seven

Orpheus figure that descends into the underworld, V. features a fragmented

Orpheus, composed of multiple characters—a move that helps Pynchon to
set up his interest in fragmentation across the novel as a whole. In this
way, Pynchon uses his first novel to subtly lay the groundwork for a set of
issues and images that he will return to throughout his career.
V.’s subterranean spaces are an integral part of understanding the novel
as an Orphic text; rather than simple backdrops upon which Orphic stand-
ins enact their quests, I argue that Pynchon uses specifically classical
imagery to construct a twentieth century underworld, creating rich
environments that both draw on classical myth and comment on
contemporary culture; the echoes of Hades we see in the sewers of New
York and in the war-torn streets of Malta also serve as critique, a means by
which Pynchon condemns the violent, imperialist culture that informed so
much of the twentieth-century. In labeling V.’s underground a
contemporary underworld, I hope to distinguish it from other realms of the
dead, particularly the kind of Dantean “inferno” characterized by
punishment and divine justice. This position departs from existing
readings, such as that of Evans Lansing Smith who explicitly links Profane
to Dante’s Pilgrim and thus a vision of the underworld as “a place of
suffering and torment, not only psychological and spiritual, but also
cultural and historical” (Smith 2).1 Pynchon’s nuanced staging of
underground locations is, I think, better understood as drawing on the
early Greek underworld, especially as experienced by Orpheus; it is not a
space for the meting out of religious judgment, where sinners are sent to
receive punishment, but rather a realm for all departed souls—a shadowy,
subterranean extension of the everyday physical world. Pynchon also
works with Gaston Bachelard’s theory of “topophilia”, although with a
rather substantial difference in approach; instead of replicating Bachelard’s
examination of “felicitous space” or generally pleasant environments that
offer protection from the elements and a sense of constancy (Bachelard
xxxv), Pynchon describes primarily inhospitable locations that emphasize
mankind’s vulnerability and essential instability. This concept I call
“infelicitous space” helps to elucidate some of Pynchon’s trickier
underworld imagery later in the novel.
While scholars have noted a number of Pynchon’s references to the
Greek underworld and to the Orpheus myth (several of which I address in
more detail later), little work has been done on V. in this context. In
Thomas Pynchon and the Postmodern Mythology of the Underworld,
Smith provides a broad sketch of Pynchon’s use of underworld myths
from a variety of cultures; his chapter on V. focuses on metaphorical and
oneiric underworlds rather than on the physical spaces of the novel and
 Katabasis, Orpheus, and Alligators 133

makes only glancing reference to the Orpheus myth (Smith 41). In

“Pynchon’s Early Labyrinths,” Mark D. Hawthorne focus on the mazes
and sewers of V. but does so primarily in connection to the myth of
Theseus. Similarly, David Coughlan explores V.’s physical imagery “The
Sewers, the City, the Tower: Pynchon’s V., Fausto’s Confessions, and
Yeats’s A Vision” in connection with Yeats’s concept of the Anima Mundi.
None of these works thoroughly explore the Orphic qualities of the novel,
which I see as offering a more consistent set of images for understanding
how place works in V. while also having the added benefit of creating
stronger lines of continuity between the disparate novels that make up
Pynchon’s body of work.
The larger novels present perhaps the best illustration that Pynchon’s
treatment of the Orpheus myth is persistent and recurring. Both Gravity’s
Rainbow and Mason & Dixon contain explicit and repeated references to
Orpheus; in The American Book of the Dead, Oliver Trager suggests that
Pynchon essentially “reinvented Orpheus in WWII Europe” through the
figure of Tyrone Slothrop (Trager 316), a point that is clearly and carefully
argued by Kathryn Hume and Thomas Knight in their article “Orpheus and
the Orphic Voice in Gravity’s Rainbow”. Hume and Knight contend that
“Orpheus serves as model for some of Slothrop’s actions” and that the
Orpheus legend helps to “link several parts” of the novel, highlighting the
major Orphic themes of music, descent into an underworld, a failed quest
to outwit death, and a “prophetic/poetic vision”. Ultimately, they suggest
that, “In starkest terms, Orpheus tried to reverse time and death. Gravity’s
Rainbow is about Western man’s desire to do the same” (Hume and
Knight 300, 303).
In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon returns to the Orpheus figure to work
through the Eros/Thanatos theme, with special emphasis on Orpheus’s lost
love, Eurydice. A common thread in Mason’s attempts to deal with the
passing of his beloved wife, Rebekah, is a tendency to see her as Eurydice.
Pynchon writes:

Believing he has walked away from the Cape and successfully not looked
back, to see what Plutonian wife, in what this garment, may after all have
follow’d,—tho’ none of them is anyone’s Eurydice, he knows well enough
who that is,—or would be, were he Orpheus enough to carry a Tune in a
Bucket… (MD 147)

As a captivating musician, Orpheus had the power to convince Hades to

free his wife. Mason, however, is not even “Orpheus enough to carry a
Tune in a Bucket” (MD 147). In this way, myth presents to Mason his own
lack as well as the impossibility of possessing a heroic identity. He tries on
134 Chapter Seven

the heroic role and finds that he cannot live up to it, but doesn’t
acknowledge that even Orpheus is ultimately unable to save Eurydice.
Orpheus himself could not trump death, yet Mason sees only his own
failures. This and other passages like it reveal the depth of grief he
experiences over his wife and his suffering at not being able to assist her.2
The Orpheus myth offers Mason a larger narrative by which to understand
his loss.
A reviewer, Don Anderson, cites multiple “recurrences of the Orpheus
and Eurydice myth” in Against the Day (Anderson 23), a thought echoed
by Lovorka Gruic Grmusa in “The Underworld and Its Forces: Croatia, the
Uskoks and Their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day,” where she also
describes “Pynchon’s tendency to write of the subterranean forces and
invisible underworld spirits that possess powers beyond the factual,
lurking for retribution in the margins of recorded history, has been
manifest in all of his work. Folklore, fables, legends, and all sorts of tales
that dwell someplace between myth and reality abound in his texts”
(Grmusa 266). Evans Lansing Smith also observes continued “allusions to
the Orphic nekyia” in his chapter on Against the Day in Thomas Pynchon
and the Postmodern Mythology of the Underworld (Smith 310).
In comparison to these texts, the presence of Orpheus in V. may seem a
ghostly one, but it is one that I suggest informs the experiences of several
main characters. Specifically, I see Pynchon evoking Orpheus through
four distinct qualities—skill as a musician, engagement in a fruitless quest,
descent into the underworld, and ultimate fragmentation. Young mythic
Orpheus’s most recognizable trait is a gift for music, a gift that in V.,
belongs to jazz saxophonist, McClintic Sphere. Although he may not have
the quite the overwhelming appeal that marks Orpheus’s skill with the lyre
(we’re told that “collegians did not dig”), the narrator observes: “The solos
of McClintic Sphere were something else” and that some in the audience
see him as “a kind of reincarnation” of legendary Charlie Parker (V 60).
Initial descriptions of Sphere are also marked by decisive, muscular prose
that emphasizes his power to captivate; Pynchon writes:

Inside McClintic Sphere was swinging his ass off. His skin was hard, as if
it were part of the skull; every vein and whisker on that head stood out
sharp and clear under the green baby spot: you could see the twin lines
running down from either side of his lower lip, etched in by the force of his
embouchure, looking like extensions of his mustache. (V 59)

Not only is Sphere a gifted musician, he is also a commanding figure—in

some ways, exceeding the human. Even those features that typically
exhibit softness or vulnerability are characterized in terms of strength;
 Katabasis, Orpheus, and Alligators 135

with skin that is “hard” and veins that are “sharp and clear”, McClintic
Sphere is definite and firm, inviolable. From the very start, Sphere’s
musical skill is both his defining trait and is aligned with powerful “force”.
These creative talents set Sphere apart from The Whole Sick Crew and
the other young musicians at the V-Note. As Joel Dinerstein puts it, the
novel is full of “an ensemble cast of hipster bohemians of whom only one
is a real artist, the alto saxophonist, McClintic Sphere” (Dinerstein 25).
Hume and Knight help contextualize this reading of Sphere when they
explore the role of music in Gravity’s Rainbow: “Music turns out to be one
of several major methods by which Pynchon’s characters try to bring order
into their reality…Furthermore, because music is an art and, through the
Orpheus tradition, is almost synonymous with poetry or fiction, we have in
music a metaphor for Pynchon’s own apparent views on creating order
through art”. Unlike other “access routes into Pynchon’s astonishing,
inexhaustible cosmos” like “rocketry, science, and love”, “music is
valuable because it reminds us of the creative side of man’s nature and not
just his passive or destructive qualities” (Hume and Knight 384).
Significantly, it is Sphere that advances the motto, “Keep cool, but care”
(V 366), which is “the only postwar ethos Pynchon leaves unmocked in the
novel” (Dinerstein 25). With his musical gifts and connections to the
larger ideas of the novel, Sphere embodies the Orphic qualities that
Pynchon develops across the course of his career.
While Sphere is peripherally involved in the figurative underworlds of
city life, he shares little meaningful connection with other key elements of
the myth—quest and descent in particular. The “fruitless quest” component
of V.’s fragmented Orpheus is more clearly articulated in the character of
Herbert Stencil, whose desperate and years long search for V. has taken
over his life. Despite the lengths to which Stencil goes in his hunt for V.,
he recognizes that attaining his goal would leave him unsatisfied. He
thinks:

Finding her: what then? Only that what love there was to Stencil had
become directed entirely inward, toward this acquired sense of
animateness. Having found this he could hardly release it, it was too dear.
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. (V 55)

Stencil realizes that V. is his goal in name alone; the real quest is to
maintain the sense of purpose that having a “goal” establishes; yet despite
this self-awareness, he cannot bring himself to relinquish his obsession.
The solution is to avoid “any end to the search”, keeping a successful
136 Chapter Seven

conclusion forever out of reach. By its very nature, Stencil’s search will
fail to produce satisfying results—he will either never find what he’s
looking for or he will find it and have failed to achieve his goal. In his own
words, “Funking out; finding V.; he didn’t know which he was most afraid
of, V. or sleep. Or whether they were two versions of the same thing” (V
346). Stencil’s (and by extension, Orpheus’s) relentless and unsuccessful
pursuit appears throughout Pynchon’s novels in different guises—as
Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 and as Prairie Wheeler in Vineland,
for two quick examples.
Like Sphere, Stencil’s underworld involvements are primarily
metaphorical; for the first literal descent in the novel, we look to Benny
Profane and his underground excursions into the sewers of New York.3 As
Orpheus is one of the few characters in Greek myth that travels through
the underworld and returns, so too is Profane in V.4 He becomes our guide
into one of the few physical underground spaces described in the novel
when he accepts a job with the city,5 hunting the infamous alligators of
urban legend whose “passage down the toilet and into the underworld was
only a temporary peace-in-tension, borrowed time” (V 146). To establish
the significance of katabasis and of underground spaces in V., I will first
present the sewer system as a contemporary iteration of a classical Greek
underworld and then move to a discussion of the larger ideas addressed
through Profane’s experience of underground space. To close the Profane
section, I argue for the importance of reading his katabasis as specifically
Orphic (as opposed to other descent narratives). Next, I shift to an analysis
of Malta’s underworld by first drawing on the work of Gaston Bachelard,
and then by highlighting the similarities between V.’s underworld settings.
I finish the katabasis portion of the chapter by outlining Fausto’s Orphic
qualities and by identifying the larger ideas at stake in the presentation of
Malta’s underworld.
The inhabitants and geography of the underworld Profane encounters
echo that of Greek myth: denizens are not damned to suffering as in a
Dantean hell, but simply stuck wandering in the dim place, “forlorn” and
“a little sad” (V 116, 111-112). Like the shades of Tartarus, the “ghost-
rats” and lumbering, cast-off alligators of Pynchon’s postmodern
underworld are more pitiful than frightening (V 122). The space itself is
enveloped by “darkness”, and “a continual thin drool sounded” in the hazy
air (V 112). The sewers make up a gloomy underground world where
“Rain spattered down out of the sky and drooled along the old brick sides
of the hole. Scuffling sounds were heard in the street” (V 117). Disoriented
and disturbed by the unclear surroundings, Profane wades through “this
shindeep sewage, in this unholy light” (V 123), “waiting for something to
 Katabasis, Orpheus, and Alligators 137

happen. Something otherworldly, of course. He was sentimental and

superstitious […]. He felt about to levitate and at a loss to say where,
really, he was. In a bone cellar, in a sepulchre” (V 125).
Profane’s experience of Fairing’s Parish suggests that the structure of
the sewer system is indeterminate and difficult to navigate; he is startled
by “light ahead, around a corner” which emanates from “a wide space like
the nave of a church, an arched roof overhead, a phosphorescent light
coming off walls whose exact arrangement was indistinct” (V 122).6 Such
unclear geography is in line with early Greek presentations of the
underworld; Edith Hamilton tells us that: “In Homer, the underworld is a
vague, shadowy place” and that “the later poets define the world of the
dead more and more clearly” (Hamilton 43). David M. Johnson echoes the
thought when he describes Hesiod’s Tartarus as not making “spatial sense
in any straightforward way” and concludes that we can only “describe the
whole of the underworld as an immense, dark, enclosed place; in this most
general way the description makes topographical sense” (Johnson 10, 12).
The darkness and absence of order in the sewers may seem to indicate
a decisive break from the organized repression of the world above. In his
analysis of several Pynchon texts, Mark D. Hawthorne concludes that
labyrinthine structures can offer a brief respite from the pressures of life
above ground: “Tunnels or tentacles go deep into the earth, possibly into
the unconscious, and may reach a hidden inner reservoir that offers
temporary peace or contentment. The outside world confines, limits, and
rationalizes; it tries to domesticate the labyrinth and thus trivializes it”
(Hawthorne 81). Instead of a labyrinth that “seems to fill Profane with
almost spiritual peace” (Hawthorne 83), I see the bewildering structure of
the sewers pushing Benny to an almost paralyzing sense of frustration.
Turning back to a classical vision of Hades, it is “the very obscurity of the
underworld and the powerful emotions it inspires make it a flexible and
powerful tool for Hesiod for much the same reasons they make it puzzling
for those looking for topographical coherence” (Johnson 27). Similarly, it
is Profane’s lack of mastery that ultimately helps Pynchon levy a
substantial critique against contemporary culture:

He stopped for a minute, listened back along the tunnel. No sound except
the dull wash of water. Angel wouldn’t be coming. He sighed and started
plodding again toward the river. The alligator was burbling in the sewage,
blowing bubbles and growling gently […]. He wound on, feeling soon he’d
start to think about collapsing and just letting the stream float him out with
pornographic pictures, coffee grounds, contraceptives used and unused
[…]. (V 122)
138 Chapter Seven

Winding through the underworld, Profane becomes not peaceful, but

increasingly passive (which is noteworthy, given his already fairly inert
characterization thus far in the novel), until he feels as inanimate and
inconsequential as the trash that floats past him. As Kathryn Hume
explains in “Books of the Dead: Postmortem Politics”: “Like Mailer and
Burroughs, Pynchon imagines spiritual detritus in terms of garbage and
sewage” (Hume 436). Ironically, the alienation and resentment toward
consumer culture that cause Profane to retreat below the street are the very
reasons there is a necessity to enter the sewers in the first place. Pynchon
is clear that, after growing bored of their presents, New York children
disposed of their pets, causing the alligators to move “big, blind, albino, all
over the sewer system” (V 43). It is under the street, hunting these former
pets, that Profane confronts the literal waste material of capitalist
production. In the swirl of condoms, coffee, and porn, we can see the baby
alligators are nothing more than novelty items; having little practical use
and no functionality, they are discarded—a satirical albeit sad statement
about America’s wasteful culture.
Profane makes explicit links between waste, consumer culture, and his
alligator companions, thinking “if they needed him at all it was because in
some prehistoric circuit of the alligator brain they knew that as babies
they’d been only another consumer-object, along with the wallets and
pocketbooks of what might have been parents or kin, and all the junk of
the world’s Macy’s” (V 146).7 In this way, the sewer system can’t really
be said to offer Profane a break from the commodity production of the
world above; rather, it works as a sardonic reminder of how carelessly
those commodities are handled. The same worldview and conformity that
characterize the street persist in muted shades underground; as Profane and
the other members of the Alligator Patrol work to eliminate the discarded
products of late capitalism, they help to uphold the status quo above. The
underworld may be at a distance from the street, but in keeping with
classical tradition, it is still a part of the physical world.
Profane’s eventual emergence from the sewer underworld is also
fundamentally Orphic in nature. Where other descent narratives are
characterized by success or transformation, the most essential element of
the Orpheus story is his defeat. Rachel Falconer speaks to the distinction I
want to make here when she writes: “There is an obvious contrast here
between Dantean and Orphic models of katabasis: the descent of Orpheus
ends in failure, while that of Dante’s pilgrim ends in victory (at least
victory for God)” (Falconer 479). Other non-Orphic heroes also emerge
from the underworld with the knowledge they seek. Blanche Gelfant
explains: “Descent impels the epic hero: Odysseus, Aeneas, Dante—each
 Katabasis, Orpheus, and Alligators 139

journeys to the world of the dead so that he may have wisdom and strength
in life” (Gelfant 410). Applying the logic of these non-Orphic journeys,
she concludes that:

Descent to the cellars, tunnels, and sewers of the subterranean city is a

modern urban variation of pastoral retreat. Subterranean heroes seek a
clean secluded place away from the city’s contamination. They seek peace
and quiet—the peace which the invisible man and Benny Profane find
underground. There they can breathe: the putrescence of the sewers is
easier in their lungs than the air above, full of moral pollution. In the
underground they escape violence, corruption, and the coercive pressures
of society […]. Enlightened by the power generated underground, they
can, they believe, shape order out of chaos. (Gelfant 438)

In my view, the underworld in V. is Orphic in that it is not, by nature,

restorative. To see the sewer system as “away from the city’s
contamination” seems to be directly at odds with Profane’s own reflections
on his surroundings. Worse, figuring that particular underground space as
an “escape from violence” elides the reasons for the Alligator Patrol’s
existence as well as its inherently violent purposes. Its dark and secluded
environment only seems restful or peaceful on the surface. After all,
Profane’s sole motivation for descending is for employment, a part of
contemporary life through which he consistently feels “the coercive
pressures of society”.
Like Orpheus, Profane’s problems persist upon his return to ground
level; there is no real evidence for a substantive change in his ability to
deal with the alienating aspects of city life. His behaviors and observations
about the street and its inhabitants remain almost exactly the same. He
refuses to interact with the bustling crowd on the streets before working on
the Alligator Patrol, having grown “a little leery of streets, especially
streets like this. They had in fact all fused into a single abstracted Street,
which come the full moon he would have nightmares about” (V 10). This
wariness of city space persists after his return aboveground and carries
over to the people that populate it. He thinks: “The eyes of New York
women do not see the wandering bums or the boys with no place to go.
Material wealth and getting laid strolled arm-in-arm the midway of
Profane’s mind” (V 214). Both before and after his katabatic adventures,
Profane experiences city life as a vacant combination of the abstract
pursuit of pleasure and commodity accumulation, where poverty and
suffering are invisible. As a result, the people moving through New York’s
busy streets become one large, indeterminate crowd marching through one
“single abstracted Street” (V 10). One person is indistinguishable from the
140 Chapter Seven

next: “He wasn’t comfortable in this street. The people mobbing the
pavement between the stalls seemed no more logical than the objects in his
dream. ‘They don’t have faces’, he said to Angel’” (V 139). Again, the
loneliness and difficulty connecting with others reflects Profane’s position
as an Orphic figure. As Orpheus emerges from the underworld alone and
without any redeeming knowledge or power, so does Profane.8
Whether above ground or below, Pynchon refuses to provide his
characters with protection from the negative social forces at work in the
twentieth century. I read this generally unsentimental approach to
rendering physical environments as drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s work
in The Poetics of Space, which focuses on “quite simple images of
felicitous space”, or what Bachelard calls “topophilia”. He suggests that in
looking at physical place, we “seek to determine the human value of the
sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be defended against adverse
forces, the space we love” (Bachelard xxxi). As Pynchon’s characters are
so frequently beset by adverse forces and so infrequently comforted or
protected by their physical environments, we might consider the majority
of V. to be an examination of “infelicitous space”.
Nowhere is Pynchon more adamant about the inhospitable nature of
built environments than in Fausto’s confessions. From the very beginning
of his writing, Fausto is hardened and unforgiving in his straightforward
depiction domestic space. Where Bachelard believes that: “A house
constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of
stability” (Bachelard 17), Fausto describes a shelter half-destroyed by
bombing. Where Fausto tells us “The room simply is. To occupy it, and
find a metaphor there for memory, is our own fault” (V 304), Bachelard
argues that:

The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts,
memories, and dreams of mankind. […] Past, present and future give the
house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at
others, stimulating one another. In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside
contingencies, its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man
would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the
heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human
being’s first world. (Bachelard 7)

In Bachelard’s understanding, the house provides the “continuity” by

which man can organize and assimilate experience. The “body” of the
house both protects and helps man to orient himself in time. Pynchon’s
Orphic worldview presents mankind as “a dispersed being” regardless of
living environment, emphasizing our essential fragmentation. Beyond
 Katabasis, Orpheus, and Alligators 141

Fausto’s refusal to express attachment to the room in which he writes, the

fact that we spend so much time outside of domestic space, both in the
street and underground, conveys much about the idea of permanence in the
novel—for Profane and for Fausto, there are no “illusions of stability”.9
Bachelard’s analysis of both above and below ground space also helps
to tease out the meaningful ways in which Benny and Fausto’s katabatic
journeys both come together and diverge. While the physical underworld
spaces both men encounter are strikingly similar, their individual and
cultural identities are quite distinct; Benny is a single man experiencing a
modern, urban underworld on his own during peacetime, while Fausto
interacts with the underworld as father and a husband during WWII. Their
Orphic qualities and underworld experiences are distinct as a result;
Profane completes Orpheus’s katabatic journey, descending and returning,
however, without a clear purpose or benefit. In contrast, Fausto, whose
underworld adventures center on the clear goal of poetic inspiration, finds
his katabasis complicated by the destructive effects of war.
Pynchon may resist describing the felicitous environments that
Bachelard focuses on in Poetics of Space, but his New York and Malta
underworlds do rely on the basic structures that Bachelard presents,
especially “verticality,” which Bachelard argues is established by the
“polarity of cellar and attic” (Bachelard 17). In V., we are frequently
pushed outside the domestic realm into unforgiving outdoor spaces, but
the essential dynamic of the street and under the street remains. The
vertical organization of the house contrasts the “rationality of the roof to
the irrationality of the cellar” and positions the latter as “the dark entity of
the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces” (Bachelard 18).
Both the New York sewer system and Malta’s underground tunnels share
much with Bachelard’s “ultra-cellar”, a literary space with “mysterious
passages” and “rotundas and chapels that are the sanctuaries of the secret”
(Bachelard 20, 21). The ultra-cellar can be alternately “under the sign of
the sinister projects of diabolical men” (more akin to what Profane
experiences in New York) or “perfectly, natural, inherent to the nature of
an underground world” (what we end up witnessing in Malta), but its
power stems from its vertical location—“the house, the cellar, the deep
earth, achieve totality through depth” (Bachelard 22).
Pynchon draws on remarkably similar underground imagery and
language when conjuring Profane’s sewer “ultra-cellar” and when
describing war-torn Malta. Air raids force the Maijstral family “down in
the abandoned sewer” where “the only light is from phosphorous flares
above the city, a few candles in here, bombs” (V 310). Like the sewers of
New York, Malta’s underworld is characterized by water imagery and
142 Chapter Seven

darkness. As sewers wind like rivers around the Alligator Patrol, recalling
the Lethe, Styx, and Acheron, water also surrounds the underworld in
Malta. David Coughlan connects Pynchon’s use to Yeats’s—a sort of
liminal space between worlds that facilitates communication between the
two spaces—or as Coughlan puts it, “ectoplasmic paper for ghostly text”
(Coughlan 46). And, indeed, in the case of Malta, the violence of war
eventually leads to a blending of the realms of death and life. Fausto
explains:

Only one raid today, that in the early morning. We slept last night in the
sewer, near Aghtina and his wife. Little Paola went off soon after the all-
clear to explore the Dockyard country with Maratt’s boy and some others.
Even the weather seemed to signal a kind of intermission. Last night’s rain
had laid the plaster and stone-dust, cleaned the leaves of trees and caused a
merry waterfall to enter our quarters, not ten steps from the mattress of
clean laundry. Accordingly we made our ablutions in this well-disposed
rivulet, retiring soon thereafter to the domicile of Mrs. Aghtina, where we
broke our fast on a hearty porridge the good woman had but recently
devised against just such a contingency. (V 332)

The terror of war ends up creating a reversal in which the traditional

gloom of the underworld is replaced by the safety and comforts of the
domestic sphere. A traditional home environment it is not, but with “clean
laundry” and “hearty porridge”, the sewer becomes an unexpected
felicitous space. Even the Styx transforms into a “merry waterfall” in
which the small community can help sustain themselves.10 Fausto
observes: “During the raids everything civilian and with a soul was
underground” (V 323), which leads him to conclude, “the street—the
kingdom of death” (V 330).
Even though war changes the nature of underground space, Orpheus
still plays a significant role in Malta, with Fausto positioned as a poet who
has the ability to traverse both the realms of the living and the dead.
Unlike Profane who acts as a kind of Orphic yo-yo, bouncing down to the
underworld and back up without much volition outside of the tepid urge to
make money, Fausto explores the new street-level version of Hades in a
conscious search for inspiration. Pynchon makes explicit connection
between the realm of death and the realm of artistic creation when Fausto
describes leaving Elena and Paola alone during the raids: “But in dream
there are two worlds: the street and under the street: One is the kingdom of
death and one of life. And how can a poet live without exploring the other
kingdom, even if only as a kind of tourist? A poet feeds on dream. If no
convoys come what else is there to feed on?” (V 325). Fausto views poetic
 Katabasis, Orpheus, and Alligators 143

production as impossible without the inspiration that comes from danger,

“without exploring the other kingdom” (V 325).
This perspective on inspiration shares much with Jean Cocteau’s
presentation of the myth in Orphée—a presentation that Sean Desilets
traces back to the classic treatment of the story by Ovid: “Cocteau joins
Ovid in treating the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as an allegory of poetic
production” (Desilets 288). For Cocteau, “Creation, passionate though it
may be, demands an escape from the material world rather than
participation in it” (Desilets 289). Indeed, as Fausto proclaims, “Retreat,
then, into religious abstraction. Retreat also into poetry, which somehow
he found time to write down […]. Fausto IV was tempted to put this down
to simple ‘escape’ and leave it there. It was certainly wish-fulfillment” (V
315-316). On his nightly walks through the dream-street, we see Fausto
leaning towards what he calls the “kingdom of death” and what Desilets
calls the “exceptional life-denying state that makes poetry possible”
(Desilets 289). Poetry allows Fausto an escape from the everyday
responsibilities that he now associates with the underground world that
shelters Elena and Paola. Similarly, in Cocteau’s film, Orphée also turns
away from his wife and the domestic world she represents to explore the
world of the dead, which Cocteau stages as the bombed out ruins of
Paris.11 Neal Oxenhandler’s summary of Orphée can even be cleanly
mapped onto Fausto’s experience of Valletta: “a poet searching for the
meaning of his vocation in the midst of love and death…it is implied that
poetry brings us into contact with another world and this other world is
somehow more significant than the routine and responsibility of everyday
life” and “a passage into death through a shadowy ruined world”
(Oxenhandler 18, 19). In leaving his young family behind to traverse
Malta’s ruins, Fausto steps away from the world of responsibilities and
aligns himself with a decidedly Orphic view of creative production.
In the blurring between the two realms, Orphic influence expands to
include even the children of Malta who also become associated with
poetry in the novel. David Coughlan suggests that the poetic impulse
embodied by the children is a spiritual reaction to the violence of war and
the changing times: “Pynchon uses the destruction of the Maltese city of
Valletta first to both represent and criticize the abstraction of Yeats’s
Byzantium and second, through the figure of the child poet, to recast
Yeats’s Anima Mundi as a textual realm open to and changing with the
demands and experiences of the present” (Coughlan 35). The poetry of the
children that rush through the streets is expressed through their youthful
energy, the metaphor of motion, games, and a conscious awareness that
“history had not been suspended after all” (V 338). Despite their intense
144 Chapter Seven

connection to the “experiences of the present”, the child-poets are also

frequently left with the eldest members of the community. Fausto
acknowledges the benefits of such an Orphic position between realms
when he asks Paola:

Did the two forces neutralize and leave you on the lonely promontory
between two worlds? Can you still look both ways, child? If so you stand
at an enviable vantage: you’re still that four-year-old belligerent with
History in defilade. The present Fausto can look nowhere but back on the
separate stages of his own history. No continuity. No logic. (V 331)

The Orphic, liminal space between youth and old age is the ideal here; to
look both ways means to maintain continuity and logic without being
overwhelmed by history—aware of the past, but not overwhelmed by it.
While the power of inspiration traditionally associated with
underground space has shifted to the street, the sewers of Malta still
convey some of the novel’s more significant cultural commentary. Again,
David M. Johnson explains the cultural and historical relevance of the
underworld: “Among other things, then, Tartarus mediates between linear
and cyclical phenomena… Tartarus is the place for the past and for the
repeating present. In this sense it as much about time as it is about space”
(Johnson 13). In V., Pynchon is clear to stress the ways in which
underground locations connect us to culture and to previous generations.
Fausto thinks:

Here in this wretched tunnel we are the Knights and the Giaours; we are
L’Isle-Adam and his ermine arm, and his maniple on a field of blue sea
and gold sun, we are M. Parisot, lonely in his wind-haunted grave high
above the Harbour; battling on the ramparts during the Great Siege—both!
My Grandmaster, both: death and life, ermine and old cloth, noble and
common, in feast and combat and mourning we are Malta, one, pure and a
motley of races at once; no time has passed since we lived in caves,
grappled with fish at the reedy shore, buried our dead with a song, with
red-ochre and pulled up our dolmens, temples and menhirs and standing
stones to the glory of some indeterminate god or gods, rose toward the
light in andanti of singing, lived our lives through circling centuries of
rape, looting, invasion, still one; one in the dark ravines, one in this God-
favoured plot of sweet Mediterranean earth, one in whatever temple or
sewer or catacomb’s darkness is ours, by fate or historical writhings or still
by the will of God. (V 310-311)

Despite the similar milieu, this is clearly no retread of the New York City
sewers or the skewering of first-world consumption those sewers contain.
 Katabasis, Orpheus, and Alligators 145

In Malta, the barrier between the world of the living and the world of the
dead has come crashing down. The repressed past no longer remains
buried underground; the “circling centuries of rape, looting, invasion” can
be confronted and addressed instead of covered over. In the “wretched
tunnel” Fausto sees the past and present as one. The link that Pynchon
creates between underground space and the passage of time again share
important points of connection with Bachelard, where Pynchon’s Malta
embodies a similar sense of history; the bombs falling on the city seem to
stop time. These sewers and tunnels are not homes, but they are intimate,
material links to memory and the past, on both personal and cultural
levels. In Pynchon’s depiction of city space, we can recognize his
insistence on continually looking outwards, to the epistemological, social,
and cultural meanings inherent in the spaces that his characters inhabit.
The collapse between the two worlds creates space for a more positive
resolution to Fausto’s katabatic journey than Profane was able to achieve
in New York. Fausto clearly sees a means by which to move forward,
beyond the pain of war. He tells us:

Surely if war has any nobility it is in the rebuilding not the destruction. A
few portable searchlights (they are at a premium) for us to see by. So with
pick, shovel and rake we reshape our Maltese earth for those game little
Spitfires. […] So perhaps on earth, also in this Purgatory, a communion:
not of gods or heroes, merely men expiating sins they are unaware of,
caught somehow all at once within the reaches of a sea uncrossable and
guarded by instruments of death. Here on our dear tiny prison plot, our
Malta. (V 315)

In Malta, myth and history collapse. When Fausto recognizes the value of
the human as opposed to the “gods or heroes” of legend, we see
opportunity to “reshape”, to create anew. Pynchon may refuse the felicity
of Bachelard’s bourgeois house, but he does signal the hopeful potential of
“pick, shovel and rake”. The Orphic connection to poetry is maintained in
Fausto’s urge to create, while the failure and loss associated with the
underworld dissipates along with the boundaries between realms.
The blend of creation and destruction finds form throughout the
Maltese underworld and intersects with the Orpheus myth in numerous
ways. Pynchon also uses Malta as the location for his variation of the
sparagmos, where, after his failed quest, maenads tear Orpheus to pieces.
In V., this final element of the myth is enacted by V. herself, when she is
dismantled by the children on the streets of Malta.12 Through Fausto’s
confessions, we watch along with him as the child-poets discover the Bad
Priest pinned under a beam and begin to pull her apart:
146 Chapter Seven

Other children crowded round her head. One pried her jaws apart while
another removed a set of false teeth. She did not struggle: only closed her
eyes and waited.
But she could not even keep them closed. For the children peeled back
one eyelid to reveal a glass eye with the iris in the shape of a clock. This,
too, they removed.
I wondered if the disassembly of the Bad Priest might not go on and
on, into evening. Surely her arms and breasts could be detached; the skin
of her legs be peeled away to reveal some intricate understructure of silver
openwork. Perhaps the trunk itself contained other wonders: intestines of
parti-colored silk, gay balloon-lungs, a rococo heart. But the sirens started
up then. The children dispersed bearing away their new-found treasures,
and the abdominal would made by the bayonet was doing its work. (V 343)

As the only character physically torn to pieces, V. becomes the final

element in the novel’s presentation of a fragmented Orpheus. Like
Orpheus, V. meets her worldly end at the hands of a greedy mob. Also like
Orpheus, although V. meets her death through sparagmos, she is not
entirely silenced. Her existence, her various fragments speak to Stencil, in
particular, long after death. As Dwight Eddins puts it: “the death of V. as
Bad Priest, would seem to cap [Stencil’s] quest; but it continues as he
pursues her glass eye, now the property of another V., to Stockholm. Like
other dismembered deities, V. lives on in dispersal, presiding over the
fragmentation of the human through her reincarnate fragments” (Eddins
87).
In myth, Orpheus emerges from the underworld a failure, depressed
and hopeless, communicating his sorrow to all living things. After losing
Eurydice for a second time, “he was forced to return to the earth alone, in
utter desolation. Then he forsook the company of men. He wandered
through the wild solitudes of Thrace, comfortless except for his lyre,
playing, always playing, and the rocks and the rivers and the trees heard
him gladly, his only companions” (Hamilton 140). V. meets her end after a
kind of underworld excursion in Foppl’s villa. Her misery at the world is
conveyed through the life-denying philosophies she delivers as the Bad
Priest. Dwight Eddins explains that V.’s turn as the Bad Priest is a direct
result of her time in Africa:

This episode not only follows the events at Foppl’s villa chronologically,
but grows out of them as the apocalyptic finale of German imperialism and
of V.’s own decadent surrogations. From the account we get of her, in
Fausto’s diary and commentary, it becomes clear that she has reached the
farthest limits of Gnostic death worship—has, indeed, become at the same
time its high priest and its symbolically degenerate goddess. Renouncing
 Katabasis, Orpheus, and Alligators 147

the last vestiges of the feminine life principle to pose as a “male” priest,
she dedicates herself to preaching chastity and abortion in the name of a
supposedly God-ordained sterility. (Eddins 72)

The final Orphic qualities of fragmentation and defeat that we see in V.

are reflected by all of the characters presented here—in their very division.
Pynchon himself acts as a maenad, ripping Orpheus apart and sending his
remains into the world of the novel to convey their part of the whole. If we
approach the myth from this perspective, V. begins at the end of Orpheus’s
story, where he has already met his violent end. The split Orpheus we
encounter is animated in some ways, but is no longer a heroic whole. We
are left with remnants of the hero, traces—the skill to captivate through
music, the ability to traverse between worlds, the determination to quest,
but struggling to demonstrate any real, productive power. This
fragmentation of the mythic figure’s identity amplifies the sense of fracture
and alienation already present in the personal identities of Stencil, Fausto,
Esther, and V. (among others), who all lack a unified sense of self as a
productive member and actor in the contemporary world.
The Orpheus story offers more beyond his final fragmentation,
however; even the common elements of the Orpheus myth that aren’t
presented in the novel can be read productively. In classical versions,
Orpheus’s descent culminates in a confrontation of Hades or Persephone,
the rulers of the underworld, whose minds he is able to sway with musical
skill. In V., representatives of governing authority are nowhere to be seen,
and such an absence of underworld royalty points to the indistinct,
unknowable nature of the systems that surround us. With no one to outline
the rules governing the realm and with no one to convince, Orpheus quests
against no one and nothing in particular.
Neither do we see the traditional emphasis placed on romantic love;
most characters with romantic connections struggle to achieve intimacy.
Mafia Winsome’s concept of Heroic Love seems particularly apt here;
even as Mafia insists that “the world can only be rescued from certain
decay though Heroic Love”, it is ultimately a mockery of love’s potential
to inspire authentic connection. Rooney tells us that: “In practice Heroic
Love meant screwing five or six times a night, every night, with a great
many athletic, half-sadistic wrestling holds thrown in” and that “[i]n five
years of marriage all he knew was that both of them were whole selves,
hardly fusing at all, with no more emotional osmosis than leakage of seed
through the solid membrane of contraceptive or diaphragm that were sure
to be there protecting them” (V 126). Again, the Orphic-absence both
speaks volumes and corresponds with Pynchon’s other works. Kathryn
Hume sums the point up succinctly in “Books of the Dead: Postmortem
148 Chapter Seven

Politics” when she says: “Pynchon does not place much value on romantic
or sexual love, but he is clearly interested in a more detached, generalized
kind of love and loyalty among people” (Hume 438).
But the Orpheus story need not lead us entirely to negative
conclusions. Hume and Knight insist that Orpheus’s prophetic qualities,
his ability to persist beyond fragmentation, show us that even when “Both
world and individual seem dismembered and helpless”, “awareness of
these conditions has not reduced Pynchon to silence or apathy” (Hume and
Knight 311). In V., Fausto’s writing and Sphere’s music don’t offer any
clear solutions, but they do extend beyond their creators to influence
others. Fausto and Sphere as Orphic figures show us that “Music and
words are inadequate but not pointless. They are, or can be, part of this
subcreation that works on the side of life” (Hume and Knight 311).
Ultimately, I agree that: “Identification of the orphic characteristics of
Pynchon’s thought helps us recognize his implicit faith in art” (Hume and
Knight 367). The constant yet varied return to Orpheus and his descent
that we see throughout Pynchon’s canon speaks to the continued relevance
this particular myth has as a literary image; Orpheus is alternately a
captivating musician, a dedicated lover, a hero whose most famous
journey ends in defeat. The quintessential boundary crosser, Orpheus is at
once a charming success and a heartbreaking failure. More than simple
allusion or allegory, he is consistent and controlling presence from the
very beginnings of Pynchon’s career. Throughout Pynchon’s novels, we
can see Orpheus refigured in different ways and for different purposes,
exerting influence even in his most ghostly incarnations.

Notes
1
I do see V.’s “underworld” functioning (at least in part, toward the end of the
novel), as Smith’s alternative option: “a temenor—a sacred space of revelation and
transformation—where the fundamental forms of the imagination are manifested in
dramatically potent symbolic images” (Smith 2). However, the Hades that Pynchon
positions as potentially inspiring and symbolic is not an actual underground space,
a point I will explain in more detail later in the chapter.
2
Though the figure of Rebekah haunts Mason, and he is beset by sorrow over his
inability to help her, he does come to see that applying the Orpheus story to their
lives offers little comfort. One evening he is visited by his departed bride and looks
toward her: “Rebekah gazed back, an enigma to him, Eve in paradise,—or
Eurydice in hell, yet to learn, after it was too late, where she’d been… his mind
rac’d with ancient stories. How could he allow that she might have her own story?
How could he not choose the easier road, and refer her to some male character, the
love-crazy Poet, the tempted Innocent? Was he supposed to light a pipe, pick her
up, settle back, and read her all at one sitting?” (MD 207-208). His attempts at
 Katabasis, Orpheus, and Alligators 149

playing the hero or even applying these “ancient stories” to his own experiences
fail miserably; they are “the easier road”. As tempting as reading Rebekah through
the myth of Adam or Orpheus might be, Mason realizes that trapping her in
metaphor only does a disservice to her personhood, limiting her to the passive role
of love object instead of acknowledging her full experience.
3
Interestingly, Pynchon establishes Profane’s connection to the land of the dead
via foreshadowing early in the text when the narrator informs us: “Some of us are
afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or
seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself. It seemed he was always
walking into one: turn a corner in the street, open a door to a weather-deck and
there he’d be, in alien country” (V 20-21).
4
I will also look at Fausto Maijstral as a character that participates in an Orphic
descent, interacting with the same basic underworld environment as Profane.
However, I do want to differentiate (and will in more detail later) between their
Orphic identities and experiences. Briefly: where Profane fulfills the descent and
return narrative, Fausto really only descends. The war in Malta ends up collapsing
the realm of the living and the dead, which results in an entirely different dynamic
than what we see in the New York sewer system, and thus a different underworld
experience for Fausto—one that presents more opportunities for positive change.
Fausto also embodies Orpheus’s poetic traits, while Profane is only associated with
Orpheus’s ability to traverse between worlds.
5
The novel also points to the existence of mysterious network of underground
tunnels in Antarctica. Ferrante is told by Vogt’s mother that “a barbaric and
unknown race, employed by God knows whom, are even now blasting the
Antarctic ice with dynamite, preparing to enter a subterranean network of natural
tunnels, a network whose existence is known only to the inhabitants of Vheissu,
the Royal Geographic Society in London, Herr Godolphin, and the spies of
Florence” and that “‘[h]aving explored the volcanoes of their own region’, she
went on, ‘certain natives of the Vheissu district were the first to become aware of
these tunnels, which lace the earth’s interior at depths varying—’” (V 197).
Because the existence of these tunnels is not confirmed and they are not described
in the same narrative detail as the sewers of Malta and New York, I see them less
as actual underground locations in the novel and more as a minor reference that
emphasizes the importance of underworld space in the novel more generally.
6
While we see no evidence of “divine justice” being meted out in the sewer-
underworld, the imagery in Fairing’s Parish does clearly draw on Catholic
tradition, as Profane notices “Scrawled on the walls were occasional quotes from
the Gospels, Latin tags (Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem—
Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, grant us peace)” (V 120).
7
This is not to say that Profane’s experience of waste is characteristic of
Pynchon’s treatment of the subject in other novels. Profane’s explicit discussion of
the “consumer-object” alligators and “all of the junk of the world’s Macy’s” sets
him apart from Pynchon’s other famous waste chasers, most clearly Slothrop in his
subterranean toilet trip in Gravity’s Rainbow and Oedipa in her passionate pursuit
of W.A.S.T.E. in The Crying of Lot 49.
150 Chapter Seven

8
And while Profane’s journey underground does not share Orpheus’s romantic
motivations, his return to the world is soon marked by his inability to save a
woman. Fina might not be an exact match for Eurydice, but her vicious attack at
the hands of The Playboys certainly conjures a similar sense of suffering and loss.
9
This is especially true for Fausto, who readily acknowledges himself as a
fragmented being, referring to different eras in his life as belonging to different
generations of “Faustos”. In so doing, Fausto’s sense of self becomes another way
in which Pynchon addresses the theme of fragmentation in the novel.
10
Interestingly, according to David M. Johnson, “Hesiod’s description of [the
Styx] may owe something, ultimately, to an actual waterfall” (Johnson 24), in that
the Hesiod’s original passage “suggests that Styx flows through much of the
underworld both horizontally and vertically” (Johnson 24).
11
In Orphée, the “underworld” is also not an underground space, but rather a realm
that is reached by passing through mirrors—an association Pynchon gestures
towards when he calls the mirror-filled apartment that V. shares with Melanie
l’Heuremaudit “the Kingdom of Death”.
12
V.’s literal fragmentation is mirrored here by Fausto’s metaphorical
transformation into almost inanimate Fausto III.

References
Anderson, Don. 2006. Review of Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon.
The Australian. December 23. Print.
Coughlan, David. 2008. The Sewers, the City, the Tower: Pynchon’s V.,
Fausto’s Confessions, and Yeats’s A Vision. Critique 50 (1): 35-50.
Print.
Desilets, Sean. 2012. Cocteau’s Female Orpheus. Literature/Film
Quarterly 40 (4): 288-300. Print.
Dinerstein, Joel. Hip vs. Cool: Delineating Two Key Concepts in Popular
Culture. Is It ‘Cause It’s Cool? Affective Encounters with American
Culture. Berlin: Lit Verlag. Print.
Falconer, Rachel. 2001. Bouncing Down to the Underworld: Classical
Katabasis in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Twentieth Century
Literature 47 (4): 467-509. Print.
Gelfant, Blanche. 1975. Residence Underground: Recent Fictions of the
Subterranean City. The Sewanee Review 83 (3): 406-438. Print.
Gruic Grmusa, Lovorka. 2010. The Underworld and Its Forces: Croatia,
the Uskoks and Their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day. Against
the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives, ed. Michael J.
Meyer. Amsterdam: Rodolpi. 266-289. Print.
Hamilton, Edith. 1998. Mythology. New York: Bay Back Books. Print.
Hawthorne, Mark D. 1998. Pynchon’s Early Labyrinths. College
Literature 25 (2): 78-91. Print.
 Katabasis, Orpheus, and Alligators 151

Hume, Kathryn. 2000. Books of the Dead: Postmortem Politics in Novels

by Mailer, Burroughs, Acker, and Pynchon. Modern Philology 97 (3):
417-439. Print.
Hume, Kathryn and Thomas Knight. 1985. Orpheus and the Orphic Voice
in Gravity’s Rainbow. Philological Quarterly 64 (3): 299-314. Print.
—. 1986. Pynchon’s Orchestration of Gravity’s Rainbow. Journal of
English and Germanic Philology: 366-385. Print.
Johnson, David M. 1999. Hesiod’s Descriptions of Tartarus (Theogony
721-819). Phoenix 53: 8-27. Print.
Oxenhandler, Neal. 1956. Poetry in Three Films of Jean Cocteau. Yale
French Studies, 17: 14-20. Print.
Smith, Evans Lansing. 2012. Thomas Pynchon and the Postmodern
Mythology of the Underworld. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Print.
Trager, Oliver. 1997. The American Book of the Dead. New York:
Fireside. Print.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

“HE COULD GO TO MALTA

AND POSSIBLY END IT”:
MALTA AS “PRIME LOCATION”
IN THE EPILOGUE OF V.

PAOLO SIMONETTI

This is the end, my only friend, the end

Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end.
—The Doors

In an insightful essay tackling the typescript of V. held at the Harry

Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, Luc Herman and John M. Krafft quoted
some passages from letters Pynchon wrote to Corlies (“Cork”) Smith, his
editor at J. B. Lippincott, while he was writing the novel. Of particular
importance is a letter dated 13 March 1962, in which Pynchon declares
that “the book needs reworking” and proposes “a list of fourteen changes”
(Herman and Krafft 4); among suggested changes, Pynchon feels the need
to “simplify the plot manipulations that get Stencil to Malta” (Herman and
Krafft 10). What is now the epilogue of the novel was originally called
“June disturbances” and constituted the 21st of the projected 30 chapters
of the novel. In one of the last letters, dated 2 June 1962, Pynchon “is still
unsure about the new place of this chapter at the end”; he confesses it to be
his “favorite chapter” and “suggests ‘irony’ as a reason for moving it to
the end” of the novel (Herman and Krafft 14).
Why does Pynchon consider the epilogue in Malta as ironic? In their
article, Herman and Krafft admit that the meaning of Pynchon’s irony “is
not immediately clear” (Herman and Krafft 14). They go on suggesting
that maybe, in the author’s opinion, Sidney Stencil’s mysterious death
would “counterbalance the realistic information about V.” that he collects
on the island; they also argue that Pynchon possibly wanted to end his
154 Chapter Eight

novel with a historical chapter that would not be “Stencilized”, that is,
imagined or related by Herbert Stencil. However, the two scholars
conclude the paragraph by asking the very question where many critics
shipwrecked: does the epilogue “undermines Stencil’s historical reconstruction
or corroborates it”? (Herman and Krafft 14). In other words, is the end
significant or accidental?
If we consider the common definition of the word “epilogue”—
“Something that happens at the end of a series of events” (Longman
Dictionary of Contemporary English), or “a concluding section that rounds
out the design of a literary work” (Merriam Webster), and that often deals
with the future of its characters—then Pynchon may have meant the irony
in a more literal sense: V.’s last chapter is entitled “Epilogue 1919,” and
relates events that mostly happened before those narrated in the main time-
frame of the novel. Moreover, this epilogue does not give any clue to the
future of the characters, nor supplies any definitive solution to the riddle of
the novel, adding yet another layer of mystery to the identity of V. If this
were not enough, the epilogue presents the cause of Sidney Stencil’s death
as an irrational/accidental/random/unaccountable/absurd occurrence, thus
denying the reader any denouement. The feasible interpretations of such
an epilogue are manifold and contradictory, as is always the case with
Pynchon’s multilayered texts; for this reason, in order to shed some light
on the elusive ending of the novel, in this chapter I will propose an
alternative reading of the Malta epilogue.

The End
In his 2011 monograph, David Cowart argues that “[i]n the epilogue, in
which point of view does not appear to be ‘Stencilized’, the author seems
to identify V. as Stencil’s mother” (Cowart 44). Without quoting any
passage that could strengthen his theory (a theory that nonetheless is
generally accepted by many critics), Cowart specifies that his statement
has to be intended as a metaphor: “Even if one takes the epilogue as free
indirect discourse grounded, still, in the projections of the younger Stencil,
the suggestion regarding a baleful maternal parent seems nonetheless
valid”, provided we hold it as “[t]he conceit of being mothered by some
terrible idea of violence,” such as war, which, “in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries […] is mother of us all” (Cowart 44).
On the other hand, David Seed notes that “V. begins and ends with
references to ships and the sea”, so that its “beginning and end in that
sense seem symmetrical”, though he is aware that “we cannot sustain such
a neat explanation for long” (Seed 110):
 Malta as “Prime Location” 155

The possibility of Armageddon which hovers constantly in the background

of V. thus remains firmly in that background by Pynchon’s refusal to give a
climactic ending […]. The reader is thus located within a historical
continuum by his knowledge that events will take place in the novel after
the epilogue. Pynchon plays off the materials of the chapter against the
formal expectations of an epilogue (closure, resolution, summing-up), just
as the thematic density of other chapters contradicts their mock-picaresque
titles. (Seed 110)

In order to answer “the crucial question with the epilogue,” that is, “in
what way the chapter concludes the novel” (Seed 110), the critic compares
it with the ending of Melville’s Moby-Dick, noting that “this time there is
no survivor’s epilogue”; he argues that Stencil’s death “gives an
impression of finality but the end only resembles a conclusion because
many issues are left open” (Seed 111).
In his analysis of the endings of Pynchon’s first three novels, Richard
Pearce quotes the Russian formalist Boris Eikhenbaum, for whom the
purpose of an epilogue is to “set the perspective by a shift in time scale or
orientation” (Pearce 147). According to Pearce, at the end of V. “the
pattern becomes clear”, when “we discover that the novel has been
governed by an omniscient narrator through a series of simple flashbacks,
complex rear projections, and—principally—the intercutting of intricate
plot lines” (Pearce 145). This elusive narrator, Pearce goes on, “ties up all
the loose ends in the epilogue, where he tells us what Stencil started out to
search for but would never find—the secret of his father’s death” (Pearce
145); how this would “tie up all the loose ends” the critic omits to say.
Pearce wonders whether we should take the epilogue “seriously” (without
explaining how), teleologically arguing that to see it as “a parody of an
epilogue is to see the novel as open” (Pearce 145).
After having discussed the endings of The Crying of Lot 49 and
Gravity’s Rainbow, Pearce goes back to V., stating that its epilogue “lifts
the reader out of the world circumscribed by what came before rather than
thrusting us into it”, so that “we become absolutely certain of the events’
locations” (Pearce 149)—though he seems to forget that this happens quite
often (the first words of the novel, for instance, give us a precise indication
of time: “Christmas Eve, 1955”, followed by a specific place: “Norfolk,
Virginia”). Nonetheless, as Pearce reminds us by quoting Heisenberg’s
uncertainty principle, “[t]he closer we get and the more we know about the
location of an electron, the more uncertain we are of its velocity” (Pearce
149). The result, concludes Pearce, is that “[w]e can never get beyond the
frame of the ‘Epilogue’—or the absolutely blank space on either side. It is
just our being brought in so close to the subject that creates the
156 Chapter Eight

discontinuity and the uncertainty” (Pearce 149). What is probably more

interesting in his somehow inconclusive analysis is the implication that, at
the end of his first three novels, Pynchon makes us feel “both spectators
and participants” (Pearce 150) in the events, even though their meaning
will ultimately elude us, probably forever.
Pearce’s statement evokes a cinematic image, familiar to any reader of
Gravity’s Rainbow: that of a bunch of spectators watching a live
performance of whom they are also the unaware performers; or, to use a
contemporary analogy, that of the audience of a 3D movie, virtually
immersed in the world of the film without really taking part in it; if they
would try to physically enter the virtual space of the movie in order to,
say, interact with the characters, they would lose the distance and
perspective necessary to sustain the 3D illusion, and they would see or
perceive only confused images, or nothing at all. Taking the cue from this
image, before making hypothesis on the target of Pynchon’s irony in V.’s
epilogue, we need to consider the cinematic structure of the novel, which
combines chapters set in contemporary New York with “an almost
chronological sequence of chapters set in various locations in Europe and
Africa between 1898 and 1943” (Herman 23, emphasis added).
The word “location” is not chosen randomly. According to the
dictionary, a location is “a tract of land of designated situation or limits”
(Dictionary.com); more specifically, in the real estate jargon a “prime
location” is a most desirable area, a place that is first in excellence, quality
and value, and that is considered a top investment. With reference to
movies, a location is also “an actual place or natural setting in which a
film or broadcast is made, as distinct from a simulation in a studio”
(OED), a spot with particular natural properties that make it prone to be
arranged for a cinematic set. Moreover, in computer jargon, a location is
“a position in a memory capable of holding a unit of information, such as a
word, and identified by its address” (CED), that is, a place where some
information is or could be stored, and then retrieved by making some
operations.
In the case of V., the word “location,” with its spatial, technological,
and cinematic reverberations, is especially significant. In the next part of
this chapter I am going to assess the cinematic imagination of Pynchon’s
first novel, linking it with its treatment of spatial issues. Then, in order to
understand the ironic function of the epilogue, in the final part I am going
to analyze the mythic resonances of the Malta location, proposing an
alternative interpretation of the V-structure that dominates the whole
novel.
 Malta as “Prime Location” 157

The Screen
As many critics have cleverly argued, cinematic motifs are diffused in the
texture of Pynchon’s early works. Even though scholars have quite
exclusively focused on the cinematic structure of Gravity’s Rainbow
(Marquez, Beressem, Cowart), and on the many movie references
scattered throughout Pynchon’s later works, cinema also plays an
important role in V., giving the novel its peculiar montage-like effect;
characters perform their roles with a peculiar (and quite ominous)
awareness of being actors (if not mere puppets) who follow some sort of a
script, especially in the historical chapters, where the mysterious force
known only as V.—and, of course, Pynchon himself—figure as directors.
If we consider the spatial structure of the novel in cinematic terms, we can
say that 1956 New York is the main stage, while the historical chapters are
shot “on location”, away from the studio, in sites accurately chosen for
their properties, which acquire a particular meaning for the structure as
well as the plot of the novel.
If it is true that “cinema and film techniques have influenced the
development of modern literature and revolutionized the writer’s craft”
(Marquez 166), as Antonio Marquez stated in 1979, then this is especially
true for the author of V., who in the introduction to Slow Learner admitted
that, in order to improve his “Bad Ear,” he “had to depend on movies and
radio, which as sources then were not 100% reliable”; a few lines later, he
confessed to be “a dedicated sucker” for chase scenes, boldly declaring:
“May Road Runner cartoons never vanish from the video waves, is my
attitude” (SL 19).
We know that Pynchon is a devoted moviegoer; references to films are
present in all his fiction, and he is probably also familiar with the critical
tools of the trade, since at the beginning of his career he dreamed of being
a film critic. Mel Gussow, who examined “more than 120 letters that Mr.
Pynchon sent to his agent, Candida Donadio, from 1963 to 1982”, claimed
that “at various points [Pynchon] consider[ed] selling both V. and Lot 49
to the movies,” and that sometimes he offered “capsule reviews” of films;
“When the possibility of writing film criticism for Esquire arises”, wrote
Gussow, “he says he would love to do it and explains: ‘I can be crisp,
succinct, iconoclastic, noncoterie, nonprogrammatic… also curmudgeonly,
insulting, bigoted, psychotic and nitpicking. A boy scout’s decade of
virtues’”. It is all too natural that he structured his first novel on cinematic
rhythms and images.
If we regard V.’s multiple settings as akin to cinematic locations, then
we can say that Malta is the novel’s “prime location”, since the island
158 Chapter Eight

recurs in several chapters, and in the course of the narration it acquires a

crucial significance, further confirmed by the fact that Pynchon chose its
very setting for the novel’s epilogue. It stands to reason that every island is
a quintessential “location”, being a territory naturally separated from other
lands by water; however, in V. Malta is much more than a scenic location:
it fulfills all the definitions of the term on both literal and metaphorical
levels, as we will see at the end of this chapter.
In a letter to Thomas F. Hirsch about the South-West African materials
used in “Mondaugen’s Story”, Pynchon reveals an important detail:

I got much of the information for chapter 9 of V. from a governor report

[…]. I’m afraid I went at the whole thing in a kind of haphazard fashion—
was actually looking for a report on Malta and happened to find the
Bondelzwarts one right next to it in the same, what the NY Public Library
calls, “pamphlet volume”. (Seed 240)

This information is crucial because it tells us that Pynchon was

specifically studying the Reports of the Commission Appointed to inquire
into the events of 7th and 8th June 1919 and into the circumstances which
led up to those events—18th and 19th September, 1919 (Valletta, 1919),
which in the New York Public Library happened to be bound together with
The Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Rebellion of
the Bondelzwarts (U.G. 16) (Cape Town, 1923). Since he used the Reports
of the Commission in what eventually became the novel’s epilogue, we
must presume he had already specifically planned one or more crucial
chapters set in Malta (while, for instance, he apparently wrote
“Mondaugen’s Story” in a spur of the moment, because he was “hooked
on” the material he found by chance, Seed 240), thus confirming the
crucial importance of the Malta location in the structure of V.
Throughout the novel Pynchon depicts Malta as a privileged site,
where crucial information may be acquired, and where the fates of the
characters—possibly of the whole world—may be decided. In his detailed
1995 essay on Pynchon and Malta, Arnold Cassola was the first to argue
that the author himself might have spent some time on the island, probably
during the period he served in the US Navy, since in V. he proves a
thorough knowledge of local pubs, streets, and places, and he provides
accurate information about native historical and political events. In 2005,
Luc Herman researched the “Stephen Michael Tomaske Memorial
Collection of Thomas Pynchon” at The Huntington Library (San Marino,
CA), which contains Xeroxes from the logbooks of the USS Hank, the US
Navy destroyer Pynchon embarked on 27 March 1956. As Herman wrote
to me, “The ship goes through the Suez Canal on 29 August 1956, and
 Malta as “Prime Location” 159

again the other way, after maneuvers in the Persian Gulf, on 29 September
1956. The ship anchors in Malta on 29 October 1956, and is moved to a
drydock. It leaves Malta on 8 November 1956”. So, with the obvious
exceptions of the American settings, Malta is probably one of the few
locations of the novel Pynchon actually visited before writing the book—
possibly the only one.
Besides personal memories, Pynchon’s vivid depiction of the bombed
Valletta in the eleventh chapter of V. may owe something to Brian
Desmond Hurst’s Malta Story, a 1953 British war film on the heroic
defense of the island during its siege in WWII.1 The film was shot on
location in Malta, because, in the words of Allan Smith, the Administrator
of the Brian Desmond Hurst estate, “the canvas was a landscape that had
changed little in the intervening decade” (Smith 15); Smith confirms that
“there is quite a lot of genuine newsreel in the film, some of it taken
during the actual siege, showing planes crashing and houses being blown
up” (Smith 19-20). According to John Mizzi, a journalist present while the
film was being shot, Malta Story “is very faithful to the real story of Malta
during the war… and real battle shots are craftily woven into the acted
ones” (Smith 20). Something very similar happens in Pynchon’s historical
chapters, where real facts, events, and characters are cleverly, and often
unexpectedly, mixed with fictional ones.
The specificity of the Malta location in relation to visual arts has been
also underlined by David J. Alworth, who takes a cue from Pynchon’s
treatment of Malta in V. to define a critical practice he named “site
reading”, that aims at “examining the relation between a literary setting
[…] and one of the real, material sites that helped to inspire it”. Alworth
aligns Pynchon’s treatment of Malta with the work of the land art sculptor
Robert Smithson, “one of the earliest and most influential practitioners of
site specificity”; he states:

Pynchon deploys what I will define the logic of the ruin in his
representation of Maltese ruins, thereby establishing a complex, mimetic
relationship between V. and one of the sites that it so vividly depicts […].
Pynchon, through his specification of Maltese ruins, engaged a formal and
conceptual paradox, representation without resemblance, which animated
the emergence of site specificity in the visual and plastic arts. (Smithson)

According to Alworth, Profane’s final journey to Malta represents his

encounter with an urban palimpsest

wherein the interplay of ruin and repair—bombed-out buildings on a ‘level

and clear’ street—dramatizes the friction between one historical epoch and
160 Chapter Eight

another, disclosing both the passage of time and a kind of temporal stasis,
as the buildings appear lodged in 1943 while their environs, from the street
to the city to the whole of Malta, have advanced to 1956. (Smithson)

He concludes his analysis by stating that Pynchon’s Malta should also be

understood “as a conceptual resource that can facilitate our efforts to
apprehend space and spatiality,” since it provides “a clear and concrete
sense of the way that a certain spatial formation, the ruin, impacted the
development of postmodernist prose” (Smithson).
According to Edward Mendelson, “Valletta was for Pynchon the most
suitable place in which to end a novel that was also designed to portray
[…] the secret history […] of the twentieth century”, because he
“understood the landscape, language, and people of Malta as the most
complete embodiments of the book’s most central historical, linguistic,
and psychological issues” (Mendelson vi). Yet the critic does not expand
on his theory, and we feel that something more than Malta’s peculiar
landscape, history, and language lies behind Pynchon’s decision of making
this particular island the feminine center of his novel.

The Island
“No man is an island”, famously wrote John Donne; but what about a
woman? The “Island of Women” is a recurrent literary topos, from the
Celtic mythology to the travel narratives of the Middle Age and the
Renaissance, up to Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous Treasure Island and
to the allegorical representations of America as a naked woman.
According to the Italian literary critic Sergio Perosa, “the island (or
continent-island) is searched for, explored, reconnoitered, and, most of all,
possessed as a woman; it is an object of cultural recognition that assumes
the forms of desire and physical-sexual possession” (Perosa 9). He locates
in the island’s archetype a “dual nature”:

both space of the marvelous and of death; a place of exalting adventure and
of punishment; enchanted and doomed. Its language is mysterious, elusive,
deceptive; it is characterized by sounds and signs that are arcane, uncanny;
it is formed by hieroglyphics, cryptograms, maps, a language difficult to
read, to decipher, to decode. (Perosa 13)

American literature is full of islands of this kind, mostly deriving from

Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Columbus’ early descriptions of the New
World; from time to time the literary island represents the Purgatory
becoming Hell, the eternal rest of the graveyard, an intellectual adventure,
 Malta as “Prime Location” 161

a political allegory, a social (or religious) utopia, a philosophical

reflection, a scientific hypothesis, the space of a ritual passage, a place of
exile and ultimately death.
Pynchon is very keen on the topos of the island. His first juvenile
work, an unfinished satirical musical called Minstral Island, was set on an
isle colonized by a motley group of artists, beatniks and squatters. Both
real and fictitious islands appear on crucial passages of virtually all his
novels, and even the bombed “zone” depicted in Gravity’s Rainbow, as
well as Foppl’s house in the ninth chapter of V. and the virtual space of
Deep Archer in Bleeding Edge may be understood as metaphorical islands
in the middle of a wasteland. Malta is only one of a series of islands along
which Pynchon will develop one of his main images, that of a utopian,
uncontaminated space soon to be invaded by malignant and disruptive
forces (capitalism, colonization, industry, political repression, advertising
etc.).
Keeping in mind the literary topos of the island as paradoxically
representing both a safe heaven and a site of great upheaval, a confined
space that often becomes a prison, Pynchon poses Malta as the symbolic
nucleus of V., borrowing from classical mythology and modern literature,
as well as historical and autobiographical events. During World War II,
Malta represented a crucial strategic junction for the East-West routes of
the English convoys going from Suez to Gibraltar, as well as for the
North-South routes from Europe to Africa that the forces of the Axis
aimed at controlling. The novel’s eleventh chapter, “Confessions of Fausto
Majistral”, is set in Malta during the Second World War, and depicts the
bombed island as an extensive ruin, both literal and metaphorical. Here the
Anglo-Maltese poet Fausto Majistral experiences the dismemberment of
the Bad Priest—one of the most disquieting avatars of V.—and we are led
to think that only here Stencil’s quest could find some logical resolution.
But Pynchon digs deeper in history, and brings out the classical
representations of Malta as the centre of the Mediterranean. Ancient
historians and geographers such as Strabo and Pliny indicated Malta and
the island of Gozo as reference marks for sailing safely from Sicily to
Africa; Malta was also mentioned in the Antonine Itinerary, a register of
the stations and distances on the routes of the Roman empire, which we
could describe as an ancient Roman version of a Baedeker. The landing on
Malta through a storming weather or strong currents is another classical
topos, as stated by the episode of St. Paul’s shipwreck on his passage to
Rome, related by St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles (XXVIII). Malta is
often traditionally represented as a refuge that turns into a place of
detention: it has sometimes been associated with the Island of Ogygia,
162 Chapter Eight

where Calypso detained Ulysses for several years in Homer’s Odyssey.

The very name Malta probably derives from the Phoenician root word mlt,
that means both “rock” and “shelter”.
The traditional image of Malta as a liminal place where history and
myth are indistinguishable is a constant leitmotiv in V., and this feature
also affects its inhabitants. In the novel’s eleventh chapter, Majistral
frames his life into “a successive rejection of personalities” (V 306), from
Fausto I to Fausto IV; then, in the epilogue, the reader learns that in 1919
he was also a spy, a double (probably triple) agent, sentimentally attached
to another avatar of V. Significantly enough, he is afraid that his daughter
Paola—the only character who bridges the gap between the novel’s two
main subplots—may suffer “a fracturing of personality such as [her] father
has undergone”, and he expresses a wish: “May you be only Paola, one
girl: a single given heart, a whole mind at peace” (V 314). In a later
passage, reflecting on the fact that Paola was often left in the company
both of children and old people, he asks: “Did the two forces neutralize
and leave you on the lonely promontory between two worlds? Can you
still look both ways, child?” (V 331).
Elsewhere I have linked Paola’s double nature to the condition of
adolescence, a dimension both longed for and feared by the artist
(Simonetti 2014), but it is clear that her liminal essence is closely related
to her place of birth, Malta. Except for Stencil’s “impersonations” in the
third chapter (that mostly aim at introducing the reader to the partiality of
any historical event as it is filtered through Stencil’s monomania), Paola is
the only character who plays two roles in V.: in chapter ten, she appears
disguised as the black prostitute Ruby, who entertains the jazz musician
McClintic Sphere; only in chapter twelve, after the reader is acquainted
with her father’s confessions, she reveals her true identity to Roony
Winsome:

[N]obody knows what a Maltese is. The Maltese think they’re a pure race
and the Europeans think they’re Semitic, Hamitic, crossbred with North
Africans, Turks and God knows what all. But for McClintic, for anybody
else round here I am a Negro girl named Ruby (V 350)

Paola describes herself as a hybrid, a person with no fixed tracts, of

uncertain race and without a real nationality (in fact, it is not clear how she
manages to pass for a black girl); in a sense, she is the counterpart of V., a
disseminated character in search of an author; but while the Bad Priest is
without history, a cyborg, an artificial, deadly, inanimate being, Paola is
the vital offspring of several historical traditions, a patchwork of cultures
 Malta as “Prime Location” 163

and races, embodying the true melting pot. If Stencil is “the century’s
child”, then Paola foreshadows the multiculturalism of the new Millennium.
“Loot the Baedeker I did” (SL 17), Pynchon confesses in the introduction
to Slow Learner; in the case of Malta, along with the classical and
mythological representations of the island, he looted his own memories as
well, since he personally visited the place. Surely enough, in setting up
Malta as the novel’s prime location, Pynchon blends classical literature
into memory and history, until the island becomes, in Hawthorne’s famous
words, a “neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-
land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself
with the nature of the other” (Hawthorne 40); in this way, Pynchon
transforms Malta into a territory apt to transfigure the V-structure in
spatial terms, so that the narrator may well remind us that “in V. were
resolved, by some magic, the two extremes” (V 487), the hothouse of the
unchangeable past and the street representing the uncertain, always
shifting, chaotic future.

The M-Structure
Many theorists (Jameson, Soja, Lefebvre among others) have located in the
Sixties a shift from a historical to a geographical imagination, a so-called
“spatial turn” as a reassertion of the dialectics of space after a modernist
downgrading of space into the service of time. According to Fredric
Jameson, this spatial turn is a consequence of the gap between the limited
abilities of the human perceptive apparatus and the unrepresentability of
the multinational hyperspace.2 Taking the cue from Lefebvre’s analysis of
urban space and Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, Edward W. Soja
coined the definition “Thirdspace”, to indicate a place both real and
imagined, “a creative recombination and extension, one that builds on a
Firstspace perspective that is focused on the ‘real’ material world and a
Secondspace perspective that interprets this reality through ‘imagined’
representations of spatiality” (Soja 6):

Everything comes together in Thirdspace: subjectivity and objectivity, the

abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the
unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency,
mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the
transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history. Anything which
fragments Thirdspace into separate specialized knowledges or exclusive
domains—even on the pretext of handling its infinite complexity—
destroys its meaning and openness. (Soja 57)
164 Chapter Eight

We can say that Pynchon’s Malta becomes a Thirdspace of this sort, a

place that allows no separation between history and mythology, biography
and fiction, and that resists every attempt to be cracked, explained,
understood, represented.
In the epilogue the narrator describes Malta as “a matriarchal island”,
the spatial equivalent of V.; a place where opposites reconcile, where “the
intolerable double vision” of the politics finds at last, if not a resolution, a
suspension; it is a place “alienated from any history in which cause
precedes effect” (V 489); a chronotope where time exists in a synchronic
status that is different from the normal chronological occurrence, where
“all history seemed simultaneously present” (V 481). Pynchon represents
Malta as a prison, too. The narrator argues about Stencil: “[P]erhaps four
years of sitting sequestered […], this quarantine might have brought him
some belief in Malta as a charmed circle, some stable domain of peace” (V
480); yet the only peace Sidney Stencil will find there will be the eternal
one. Valletta is “a chastity belt” (V 465), “so insulating that Zeus himself
might once have quarantined her and her island for an old sin or an older
pestilence” (V 474). Malta is depicted as a place of detention, an “invisible
circle” where in the ancient times Mara the sorceress was magically
confined, and whose precincts she is now doomed to haunt; in 1565 the
Turks besieged La Valletta’s knights just like in 1919 the English embargo
forbids workers to leave the island in order to get better salaries abroad.
Pynchon’s Malta is the historical island bombed by the Axis forces in
1942, but it is also the mythological island where the sorceress Mara
“appeared in a vision to La Vallette, greeting him with the words ‘Shalom
aleikum’” (V 465), just as it is the place where the young author spent
some time between October and November 1956, during his service
aboard the USS Hank. Malta is a Thirdspace, a place real and imagined at
the same time, just like any place seen on a movie, especially if it is shot
on location, not artificially recreated in a studio. Significantly enough, in
V.’s epilogue, characters twice feel “tremendous nostalgia about this
show” (V 476, 481), and the narrator argues that eventually Valletta
“would deteriorate to mere spectacle. She ceased to exist as anything quick
or pulsed, and was assumed again into the textual stillness of her own
history” (V 474). V.’s epilogue presents Malta as a freeze-frame, a stop-
motion location opposed to the syncopated fast forward and rewind
movements that characterize the whole novel. In this sense, too, Malta
acquires its status of prime location, an island immutable and isolated, a
timeless, confined place where even the most terrible historical occurrence
is “a minor eddy”, and where, inevitably enough, “nothing was settled” (V
491).
 Malta as “Prime Location” 165

The elusive land of Vheissu, another “virtual” island—a land encircled

by mountains across a lake—may not physically exist in the novel outside
Godolphin’s mind; Malta is the location Pynchon chooses to “replace” it.
Vheissu, like V., is a symbol, a place existing only as a description, a tale
that has finally become a real place, a code name for some other thing, a
fairy land, a paradise lost, a threatening alert, a bedtime story; it represents
the passage between childhood and adulthood, the only remaining link
between father and son. Like V., Vheissu is a word that has gone out of
control, a surface holding an empty nucleus. “Don’t you see?” says Vera
Meroving, one of the many incarnations of V., to old Godolphin, while
they are in Foppl’s house in the African South-West Protectorate (another
kind of “island”), “This siege. It’s Vheissu. It’s finally happened” (V 248).
J. Kerry Grant remarks that “It is a little hard to determine just what
prompts this remark” (Grant 129); in fact, it—the siege, the violence, the
riots, the war, the killings, the bloodbath—already happened many times:
in Florence, for instance, in the late nineteenth century; or in Malta, two
years before, during the riots that will be narrated in the epilogue.
Referring to Vheissu, Vera asks: “[I]ts void. What can fill that?” (V 248);
to that, Godolphin answers: “What is already filling it. The real thing” (V
248).
If Vheissu represents the novel’s void center, then Malta is “the real
thing”, Vheissu’s substitute, an alternate, real location chosen for its
specific properties. Metaphorically speaking, Pynchon decided not to
shoot the Vheissu scenes “on location”, so he used Malta as a movie
setting of sorts. Maybe it is significant that the mysterious V. is often
associated with characters or places whose names begin with an M, since
the letter M is graphically a propped V, a V supported by two legs, similar
to the facades of fake buildings in a cinematic set. We can also say that the
M-structure in the novel parallels the V-structure: Veronica Manganese
and Vera Meroving are two impersonations of V., just like the witch Mara;
around V. orbit characters whose names are Majistral, the revolutionary
Mizzi, Mussolini, Maratt; not to speak of Melanie, Mondaugen,
McClintic, Mafia, signor Mantissa, Mazzini, Machiavelli; or locations like
the Mediterranean, Marsamuscetto, the Metro Bar; and we could go on
and on. Though the real meaning of V. (both the object of the quest and
the very novel) may lie forever lost in Vheissu, Malta allures all characters
(and the reader as well) with the possibility of some alternative
denouement. This is the reason why the epilogue could not happen in any
other place.
From this point of view, Malta, or the “M-structure,” recalls the
meaning of the word “location” linked to computer science, that is, “a
166 Chapter Eight

position capable of storing a unit of information, such as a word”. All

characters are finally attracted by this location in search of a meaning, but
can Malta be the solution to the enigma of Vheissu? Is the M more
significant (or more knowledgeable) than the V? The answer brings us
back to Pynchon’s reference to irony. In order to deconstruct any human
sense-making discourse, such as historiography, eschatology and
geography, in the novel’s epilogue Pynchon challenges also mythology as
the ultimate (or we should say the original) source of meaning.

The Other End

As David Cowart rightly suggests, Pynchon the mythographer “views
historiographic mythopoesis with great skepticism” (Cowart 47), and in V.
he “foregrounds a factitious historical myth only to subvert it—and with it
all such mythopoesis” (Cowart 48). In open contrast with Eliot and the
modernists’ use of myth to shore up the ruins of Western civilization, in
the epilogue of V. Pynchon “deconstructs myth, and with it the modernist
pretense of postreligious metanarrative” (Cowart 56). From this point of
view, the most suitable parallel to Sidney Stencil’s death at the end of the
novel is not “the shipwreck suffered by the Phoenician sailor in The Waste
Land, and the lines Eliot quotes from The Tempest on the drowning of the
father” (Grant 204), but Ulysses’s drowning in a whirlpool as it is
represented by Dante in his Inferno.
In canto XXVI of Inferno Dante recounts how, having disobeyed
God’s commandment not to overstep the Pillars of Hercules, Ulysses’s
ship arrives just in sight of the mountain of Purgatory, where he could
reach the ultimate knowledge that was denied to Adam and Eve when they
were banished from Eden. In a way, Dante’s Ulysses finds himself in a
situation similar to that of the reader of V., who has finally arrived at the
end of the novel—s/he is reading the very last page of the epilogue, and
thinks s/he is entitled to the ultimate knowledge regarding the mystery of
V., or at least to a denouement of sorts. Then, s/he is suddenly
shipwrecked, too. As Piero Boitani puts it:

On the verge of ultimate knowledge, at the moment when Ulysses is about

to discover where ‘per lui, perduto, a morir gissi’ (‘being lost, he went to
die’), the divine whirlwind rises from the new land, strikes the ship, makes
it spin round three times with all the waters, lifts the stern aloft, plunges the
prow down, and closes the ocean’s seal over him. (Boitani 33)

The death of Ulysses, just like the white whale’s sinking of the Pequod at
the end of Moby-Dick, has an inherent meaning in the economy of the
 Malta as “Prime Location” 167

narrative, in that it provides a higher significance—and so a closure—to

the story. Dante’s Ulysses and Melville’s Ahab are obdurate questers, who
are punished (by God and by Nature) for their hubris. On the contrary,
Pynchon’s novel simply ends with an inexplicable event, a waterspout
appearing out of the blue despite “the cloudless weather”, a mysterious
occurrence that kills Stencil and leaves the reader ultimately baffled. Was
it mere chance? Fate? God’s will? Vengeance? Punishment? A bomb? Or
is just Mehemet’s xebec returning to the past from another “rift in time’s
fabric”, similar to the one that brought it originally to the present from the
1300s?
We could even read the waterspout as another manifestation of V. (a
waterspout, or sea tornado, may look like a very elongated V): according
to Richard Patteson, “the V. of the spout is once again deceptive, having a
vacuum at its core” (quoted by Grant 204); and if it is real facts we crave
for, we could also relate, as Judith Chambers does, the mysterious
occurrence to an historical event, “the disappearance of a ship called the
Victoria off the coast of Malta in June 1893” (also quoted by Grant 204),
considering it the umpteenth V-related clue.
Stressing the links between V. and the goddess/witch Mara, Deborah
L. Madsen reads Stencil’s death as V.’s own way of preventing him from
ever revealing the nature of V. such as he knows it: “Having surrendered
himself to Victoria/Veronica, he nonetheless leaves Malta, aboard
Mehemet’s xebec. But V.’s latest conquest does not proceed past the limit
of Mara’s domain” (Bloom 75). Comparing the waterspout to “the
earthquake and tidal wave of 9 July 1956 that killed forty-three persons” in
the Aegean, Catharine R. Stimpson sees the epilogue as “a last remainder
of the penalties that may follow if the goddesses of fecundity are
abandoned” (Stimpson 38).
On the other hand, David Seed rightly notes how in the epilogue
Sidney Stencil “rejects a conspiratorial interpretation of situations—and
this stance is endorsed by a line of Pentecostal references which ridicule
the persistence of apocalyptic fears” (Seed 108); he “consciously stops
himself from grouping [the events] into a conspiracy and thereby
distinguishes himself from his superiors” (Seed 109). Seed concludes that
Stencil’s “fate has confirmed his fears about the individual’s disappearing
role in history”, and that “he dies as the result of a chance phenomenon
killed by the very contingency he glimpsed” (Seed 111).
According to Boitani, “Ulysses stands alone—hardly a minor detail—
in being killed directly, and with no idea of an Eden or a Purgatory, by a
god he does not know” (Boitani 38); in a similar way, if we accept the
interpretation of the waterspout as a manifestation of V., Stencil is killed
168 Chapter Eight

by an all-governing force he is afraid of but barely knows. This force will

obsess his son in the years to come, and will cause upheaval and ruin
around the world; but in Malta, in 1919, Stencil can only vaguely foresee
the dangers inherent in V., casually noting in his journal that “There is
more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected” (V 53). It is
important to recall that in the epilogue, except for any connection the
reader is by now brought to make every time a name with a capital V
appears in the text, there is only one single mention of the entity known as
V. (identified by the letter followed by a period), the one that appears in
the already quoted statement about the two extremes of the street and the
hothouse that “in V. were resolved, by some magic” (V 487). At this point,
since this sentence plausibly comes from Stencil’s mind, the letter could
simply indicate his own way of mentally referring to his lover, who in
Florence was called Victoria, and who now in Malta called herself
Veronica. In this sense, it is Sidney Stencil himself who created V.: by
writing the ominous letter followed by a period in his journal, in the
passage that will later be read by Herbert, he makes the V-concept
materialize in the world, bringing the waterspout—and so his death—upon
himself.
This is only one of the many possible interpretations of the epilogue,
and, like any other, it is dictated by our all too human urge to bring the
narrative to some closure, in order to give meaning to the whole story. But
the text does not authorize it (no more than it authorizes a great number of
other, contradictory readings). What the (supposedly objective) narrator
tells us in the epilogue is that after the waterspout has disappeared, the sea
surface becomes opaque and shows “nothing at all of what came to lie
beneath” (V 492). This passage, beside recalling once again Ulysses’s
shipwreck in Dante’s Inferno, should make us aware that Pynchon’s irony
lies not only in his already noted deconstruction of myth as a meaning-
giver structure; in V.’s epilogue he operates another—and subtler—
deconstruction, one that foresees the future development of his works.
The opaque sea that hides everything happening underneath and that
shows only “surface phenomena” (V 492) is ominously similar to the
movie screen, which by showing projected images—locations real and yet
fictitious—at the same time hides what lies behind (and beneath) it. We
see what is projected on its surface, but we cannot see through the screen,
except by tearing it off and so making the projected images disappear.
In his works Pynchon has represented cinema as a force that has taken
upon itself the age-old functions of folklore and mythology in the
twentieth century. In his very first novel, however, along with the shoring
up function of myth, Pynchon also deconstructs cinematic imagination, the
 Malta as “Prime Location” 169

last—and most recent—structure that replaced myth as a sense-making

discourse for the contemporary world. Ten years later, at the end of
Gravity’s Rainbow, the screen will become “a dim page spread before us,
white and silent”, and the narrator will explicitly say that “the film has
broken”, but “the last image was too immediate for any eye to register”
(GR 760).
Maybe the irony of V.’s epilogue lies here: the waterspout represents a
disturbance on the sea-screen, a tearing up of the cinematic surface that for
a second lets us see the cameras and the operators (God? The author?)
beyond it. But the image (the meaning?) is too immediate for any reader’s
eye to register, and the epilogue that should bring closure to the novel can
only—ironically—abruptly interrupt the spectacle. By sailing away from
Malta, by closing the last page of the novel, everything becomes opaque
again, and the meaning—apparently so close at hand—disappears forever.

Notes
1
The black and white movie runs to one hour and forty minutes. It was directed by
Brian Desmond Hurst, produced by Peter De Sarigny, and the screenplay was by
William Fairchild, after a script by the novelist Nigel Balchin. It was filmed in
Malta and finished at Pinewood Studios. Alec Guinness stars as Flight Lieutenant
Peter Ross, a photo reconnaissance pilot who is forced to land on Malta and finds
himself attached to the RAF squadron as evidence shows Italy is about to invade
Malta. He meets Maria Gonzar (Muriel Pavlow), a young Maltese woman working
in the RAF operations room, and the two fall in love.
2
It is a real pity that an insightful theorist such as Jameson, after having underlined
the importance of space and spatiality in the postmodern episteme, should dismiss
Pynchon’s interest in Malta as “little more than a matter of idle curiosity”, that
“comes to look like an in-group hobby or adoptive tourism” (Jameson 361).

References
Alworth, David J. 2015. Pynchon’s Malta. “Post45, 10 January 2012”.
Web. [http://post45.research.yale.edu/2012/10/pynchons-malta/].
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Boitani, Piero. 1994. The Shadow of Ulysses. Figures of a Myth. Trans.
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Bologna: Il Mulino]. Print.
170 Chapter Eight

Cassola, Arnold. 1995. Pynchon, V., and the Malta Connection. In P.

Bianchi, A. Cassola, P. Serracino Inglott. Pynchon Malta and
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Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. Print.
Fahy, Joseph. 1977. Thomas Pynchon’s V. and Mythology. Critique:
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Grant, J. Kerry. 2001. A Companion to V. Athens and London: The
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Gussow, Mel. 1998. Pynchon’s Letters Nudge His Mask. The New York
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[http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/1998/mar/04/pynchons-letters-
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Herman, Luc e John M. Krafft. 2007. Fast Learner: The Typescript of
Pynchon’s V. at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. Texas Studies in
Literature and Language 49 (1): 1-20. Print.
Herman, Luc. 2012. Early Pynchon. In The Cambridge Companion to
Thomas Pynchon, eds. Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian
McHale. New York: Cambridge University Press. 19-29. Print.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1851 [1850]. The Scarlet Letter. Boston: Ticknor,
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Jameson, Fredric. 2003. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late
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Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald
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Marquez, Antonio. 1979. The Cinematic Imagination in Thomas
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Rocky Mountain Review of Language
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Mendelson, Edward. 1995. Preface. In Pynchon Malta and Wittgenstein,
eds. P. Bianchi, A. Cassola, and P. Sarracino Inglott. Malta: Malta
University Publishers. vi-vii. Print.
Pearce, Richard. 1985. Pynchon’s Endings. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
18 (2): 145-153. Print.
Perosa, Sergio. 1996. L’isola la donna il ritratto. Quattro variazioni.
Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Print.
Seed, David. 1988. The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. Iowa
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Simonetti, Paolo. 2014. Portraits of the Artist as an Undergraduate
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 Malta as “Prime Location” 171

Pynchon, eds. Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd and Chamerois, Gilles.

Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. 193-222. Print.
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 V.: A BIBLIOGRAPHY

MARIO FARAONE

Editions of Thomas Pynchon’s V.

1963. Philadelphia: Lippincott. 492 pp., 22 cm. (First American Edition).

—. London: Jonathan Cape. 492 pp., 21 cm. (First British Edition).
1964. New York: Bantam. 463 pp., 18 cm. (Bantam Books N2748).
1965. Milano: Bompiani. 551 pp., 21 cm. (I delfini 185). Trans. Liana M.
Johnson. (First Italian Edition).
1966. Harmondsworth: Penguin, in association with Jonathan Cape. 485
pp., 18 cm. (Penguin books 2534).
—. New York: Modern Library. 492 pp., 19 cm.
—. Paris: Plon. 489 pp., 21 cm. Trans. Minnie Danzas. (First French
Edition).
1968. Düsseldorf: Rauch. 525 pp., 8°. Trans. Wulf Teichmann and
Dietrich Stössel. (First German Edition).
—. New York: Bantam. [10], 463, [7] pp., 18 cm. (Bantam Modern
Classics).
1975. London: Pan Books. 492 pp., 20 cm. (Picador Book).
1976. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt-Taschenbuch. 551 pp., 19 cm. (Das
neue Buch, 74). Trans. Wulf Teichmann and Dietrich Stössel.
(German).
—. “Ona wisi na zachodniej scianie” [Chapter 7 of V. after the
introductory section]. Literatura na ĝwiecie 6 (16): 4-93. Trans. Jacek
Laskowski. (Polish).
1978. “Wanigari” [“Alligator Hunt”, from chapter 5 of V.]. Umi 10 (6):
221-230. (Trans. Masao Shimura). (Japanese).
1979. Tokyo: Tosho Kanko Kai. 325 pp., 22 cm. 2 vols. (Goshikku sosho
8). Trans. Takuo Miyake, Sadamoto Ito, Yukiko Nakagawa, Eiichi
Hirose, and Koichi Nakamura. (First Japanese Edition).
1983. Seoul: Hakwon-sa. Trans. Kim Sang-kun. 315+271 pp. (First
Korean Edition).
1985. Paris: Seuil. 542 pp., 21 cm. (Fiction et Cie). Trans. Minnie Danzas.
(French).
174 Bibliography

1986. New York: Harper & Row. 492 pp., 21 cm. (Perennial Library
1308).
1987. Barcelona: Tusquets. 545 pp., 21 cm. (La Flauta Mágica 6). Trans.
Carlos Martín Ramírez. (First Spanish Edition).
—. Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt. 520 pp., 22 cm. Trans. Dietrich Stössel
and Eva Manske. (German).
1988. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. 528 pp., 19 cm. (Rowohlt-
Jahrhundert, Bd. 52 / Rororo 40052). Trans. Wulf Teichmann and
Dietrich Stössel. (German).
1989. Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Books. 492 pp., 23 cm.
—. Lisboa: Fragmentos. 422 pp., 24 cm. (Romance, 6). Trans. Rui Vanon.
(First Portuguese Edition).
1990. Kyoto: Rinsen Book. 492 pp., 22 cm. (Postwar American fiction
1945-1965. 2nd series 12). (English).
1991. San Bernadino CA: R. Reginald / Borgo Press. 492 pp., 21 cm.
1992. Milano: Rizzoli. 602 pp., 23 cm. (La scala) Trans. Giuseppe Natale.
(Italian).
—. Paris: Ed. du Seuil. 632 pp., 18 cm. (Points Roman 524) Trans.
Minnie Danzas. (French).
1993. Milan: CDE - Club degli editori. 602 pp., 23 cm. Trans. Giuseppe
Natale. (Italian).
1994. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. 528 pp., 19 cm. (Rororo, 13730)
Trans. Wulf Teichmann and Dietrich Stössel. (German).
1995. London: Vintage / Random House. 492 pp., 21 cm.
1996. Milano: Bompiani. 605 pp., 20 cm. (I grandi tascabili 489) Pref.
Guido Almansi. Notes Claudio Gorlier. Trans. Giuseppe Natale.
(Italian).
1997. Barcelona: Tusquets. 518 pp., 23 cm. (Colección Andanzas 304).
Trans. Carlos Martín Ramírez. (Spanish).
1999. New York: Harper. vii, [3], 533 pp., 21 cm. (Perennial Classics).
2000. Sankt-Peterburg: Amfora. 524 pp., 21 cm. (Tysiଊ aଋ cheletie) Trans.
Gleba Grigor’eva and Alekseiଊ aଋ Khanina. (First Russian Edition).
—. Sankt-Peterburg: Simpozium. 670 pp., ill., 21 cm. Trans. Gleba
Grigor’eva and Alekseiଊ aଋ Khanina. (Russian).
2001. Paris: Ed. du Seuil. 632 pp., 18 cm. (Points 812) Trans. Minnie
Danzas. (French).
—. Oslo: Gyldendal. 483 pp., 21 cm. (Gyldendal Tasca) Trans. Linn
Øverås. (First Norwegian Edition).
2003. Nan jing: Yi lin chu ban she, xi. 566 pp., 21 cm. Trans. Ye Hua
Nian. (First Chinese Edition).
 Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails 175

2005. Milano: BUR, 586 pp., 20 cm. (BUR. Scrittori contemporanei)

Trans. Giuseppe Natale. (Italian).
—. New York: Harper Perennial modern classics. VII, 547 pp., 21 cm.
2006. Iaúi, Bucureúti: Polirom. 660 pp., 18 cm. (Biblioteca Polirom. Proză
XX) Trans. Horia Florian Popescu. (First Rumenian Edition).
2007. ǹșȒȞĮ: ȋĮIJȗȘȞȚțȠȜȒ, 664 pp., 21 cm. Trans. Prokopis Prokopidis.
(First Greek Edition).
2008. Barcelona: Tusquets. 518 pp., 21 cm. (Fábula 278). Trans. Carlos
Martín Ramírez. (Spanish).
2009. Milano: BUR, 112 pp., 17 cm. “La storia di Mondaugen” [chapter 5
of V.]. Trans. Giuseppe Natale. Pref. Massimo Bocchiola. (Italian).
2010. Taibei Shi: Lian he wen xue chu ban she gu fen you xian gong si.
544 pp., 21 cm. (Lian he yi cong 56. / Lian he wen xue 555) Trans. Ye
Hua Nian. (Chinese).
2011. Lisboa: Bertrand. 558 [2] pp., 24 cm. (Ficção contemporânea)
Trans. Salvato Teles de Meneses. (Portuguese).
—. Tokyo: Shinchosha. Trans. Taichi Koyama e Yoshiaki Sato.
(Japanese).
2014. Stockholm: Bonnier. 485 pp., 24 cm. Trans. Hans-Jacob Nilsson.
(Swedish).

Bibliographies and Dictionaries

Grant, James Kerry. 2001. A Companion to V. Athens, GA: University of
Georgia Press. Print.
Hurley, Patrick J. 2008. Pynchon Character Names: A Dictionary.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Print.
Mead, Clifford. 1989. Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and
Secondary Materials. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. Print.

Monographs and Book-Length Studies

Battesti, Anne. 2004. Thomas Pynchon: l’approche et l’esquive. Paris:
Belin. Print.
Bérubé, Michael F. 1992. Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson,
Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press. Print.
Berressem, Hanjo. 1993. Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text.
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Print.
Best, Andrea. 1995. In/Animations: Die Medien in den Romanen von
Thomas Pynchon. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Print.
176 Bibliography

Brownlie, Alan W. 2000. Thomas Pynchon’s Narratives: Subjectivity and

Problems of Knowing. New York: Peter Lang. Print.
Chambers, Judith. 1992. Thomas Pynchon. Chicago, IL: Twayne
Publishers. Print.
Collado-Rodriguez, Francisco. 2004. El Orden del Caos: Literatura y
posthumanidad en la narrativa de Thomas Pynchon. Valéncia:
Universidad de Valéncia. Print.
Cooper, Peter L. 1983. Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the
Contemporary World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Print.
Cowart, David. 1980. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion. Carbondale,
Southern Illinois Univerity Press. Print.
—. 2011. Thomas Pynchon & The Dark Passages of History. Athens and
London: The University of Georgia Press. Print.
D’Amico, Maria Vittoria. 1992. Le matrici dell’apprendista: I racconti di
Thomas Pynchon. Bari: Adriatica. Print.
de Bourcier, Simon. 2012. Pynchon and Relativity: Narrative Time in
Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novels. New York: Continuum. Print.
Dugdale, John V. 1990. Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Print.
Eddins, Dwight. 1990. The Gnostic Pynchon. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press. Print.
Eve, Martin P. 2014. Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and
Adorno. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Print.
Freer, Joanna. 2014. Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Print.
Fowler, Douglas. 1980. A Reader’s Guide to Gravity’s Rainbow. Ann
Arbor: Ardis. Print.
Henrichsen, Dag and Andreas Selmeci. 1995. Das Schwarzkommando:
Thomas Pynchon und die Geschichte der Herero. Bielefeld: Aisthesis.
Print.
Hite, Molly. 1983. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon.
Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Print.
Käkelä-Puumala, Tiina. 2007. Other Side of this Life: Death, Value and
Social Being in Thomas Pynchon’s Fiction. Helsinki: Yliopistopaino.
Print.
Kharpertian, Theodore D. 1990. A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean
Satires of Thomas Pynchon. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press. Print.
Kihara, Yoshihiko. 2001. Thomas Pynchon: Museifu-shugi-teki-kiseki no
Uchu. Kyoto: Kyoto University Press. Print.
 Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails 177

Kolbuszewska, Zofia. 2000. The Poetics of Chronotope in the Novels of

Thomas Pynchon. Lublin: Learned Society of the Catholic University
of Lublin. Print.
Lalo, Alexei. 2001. Thomas Pynchon and His America: Enigmas,
Parallels, Cultural Contexts. Minsk: RIVSH-BGU. Print.
Lévy, Clément. 2014. Territoires postmodernes: Géocritique de Calvino,
Echenoz, Pynchon et Ransmayr. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de
Rennes. Print.
Liu, Fengshan. 2011. The World behind Fantasy: A Study of Thomas
Pynchon’s Fiction. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research
Press. Print.
Madsen, Deborah L. 1991. The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas
Pynchon. New York: St. Martin’s. Print.
Malpas, Simon and Andrew Taylor. 2013. Thomas Pynchon. Manchester:
Manchester University Press. Print.
Mattessich, Stefan. 2002. Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and
Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press. Print.
McClure, John A. 2007. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of
Pynchon and Morrison. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Print.
McHoul, Alec and David Wills. 1990. Writing Pynchon: Strategies in
Fictional Analysis. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Print.
Newman, Robert D. 1986. Understanding Thomas Pynchon. Columbia,
SC: University of South Carolina Press. Print.
Park, Eunjung. 2000. A Study on Thomas Pynchon: Empire and the
Postmodern. Seoul: Daesun. Print.
Plater, William M. 1978. The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas
Pynchon. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Print.
Pöhlmann, Sascha. 2010. Pynchon’s Postnational Imagination.
Heidelberg: C. Winter. Print.
Price, Ruby Victoria. 1989. Christian Allusions in the Novels of Thomas
Pynchon. New York: Peter Lang.
Schaub, Thomas H. 1981. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana, IL:
University of UIllinois Press. Print.
Schieweg, Larissa S. 2006. Die Bürde der Geschichte: Der Untergang des
Baedekerlandes im Werk von Thomas Pynchon. Berlin: LIT. Print.
Seed, David. 1988. The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. Iowa
City, IA: University of Iowa Press. Print.
Simonetti, Paolo. 2009. Paranoia Blues: Trame del postmodern
americano. Roma: Aracne. Print.
178 Bibliography

Slade, Joseph. 1974. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Warner. Print.

Smith, Evans L. 2012. Thomas Pynchon and the Postmodern Mythology of
the Underworld. Bern: Peter Lang. Print.
Smith, Shawn. 2005. Pynchon and History: Metahistorical Rhetoric and
Postmodern Narrative form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. New
York: Routledge. Print.
Stark, John O. 1980. Pynchon’s Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the
Literature of Information. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
Print.
Stonehill, Brian. 1988. The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from
Joyce to Pynchon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Print.
Tanner, Tony. 1982. Thomas Pynchon. London: Methuen. Print.
Thomas, Samuel L., 2007. Pynchon and the Political. New York:
Routledge. Print.
Witzling, David P. 2008. Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race,
and the Cultures of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. Print.

Essay Collections
Abbas, Niran B. (ed). 2003. Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins.
Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London:
Associated University Press. Print.
Bianchi, Petra, Arnold Cassola, and Peter Serracino Inglott. 1995.
Pynchon, Malta and Wittgenstein. Msida, Malta: Malta University
Publications. Print.
Bloom, Harold (ed). 1986. Thomas Pynchon. Philadelphia: Chelsea House
Publishers. Print.
—. (ed.) 2003. Thomas Pynchon. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers.
Print.
Chamerois, Gilles and Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd. Eds. 2014. Thomas
Pynchon. Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. Print.
Copestake, Ian D. (ed.). 2003. American Postmodernity: Essays on the
Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon. New York: Peter Lang. Print.
Dalsgaard, Inger H., Luc Herman, and Brian McHale. Eds. 2012. The
Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon. Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press. Print.
Kolbuszewska, Zofia. Ed. 2013. Thomas Pynchon & the (De)Vices of
Global (Post)Modernity. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL. Print.
Levine, George and David Leverenz. Eds. 1976. Mindful Pleasures:
Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. Print.
 Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails 179

Mangen Anne and Rolf Gaasland. Eds. 2002. Blissful Bewilderment:

Studies in the Fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Oslo: Novus Forlag. Print.
Mendelson, Edward. Ed. 1978. Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays,
Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Print.
Pearce, Richard. Ed. 1980. Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston:
G.K. Hall. Print.
Pöhlmann, Sascha. Ed. 2010. Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon's
Counternarratives. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Print.
Siegert, Bernhard and Markus Krajewski. Eds. 2003. Thomas Pynchon:
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 CONTRIBUTORS

Luc Herman teaches American literature and narrative theory at the

University of Antwerp. He is the co-editor (along with Inger Dalsgaard
and Brian McHale) of The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon
(2012) and the co-author (along with Steven Weisenburger) of Gravity's
Rainbow, Domination and Freedom (2013). John M. Krafft teaches
English at the Hamilton campus of Miami University. He co-founded the
journal Pynchon Notes in 1979 and co-edited it until 2009. Together
Herman and Krafft have published several essays on the typescript of
Pynchon's V. held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in
Austin, Texas.

Tore Rye Andersen, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Comparative

Literature at the Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus
University. He is editor of the literary journal Passage and director of the
research centre Literature Between Media which investigates the status
and function of literature in a mediatized age. He is the author of the book
Den nye amerikanske roman (The New American Novel) (2011), and he
has published a number of articles on American and British fiction and on
the materiality and mediality of literature in journals like Critique, English
Studies, Orbis Litterarum, Northern Lights, and Pynchon Notes.

Mario Faraone, Ph.D., is Fellow of the Christopher Isherwood

Foundation at the Huntington, Los Angeles. He was adjunct professor of
English Literature and Literatures of English Speaking Countries at the
University of Trieste, and at the University of Pescara. He is currently
adjunct research scholar at Mediterranea, Centre of Intercultural Studies,
University of Trieste; member of the editorial board of Studi
Interculturali, and of the advisory board of ApertaMente, an intercultural
association of social and literary studies in Monfalcone, Gorizia. He
researched and published book-length studies on Isherwood and Upward;
he published essays on several issues such as politics and literature in the
1930s, Oriental philosophical and religious influences in British and
American culture; Indian and Caribbean Diaspora in the UK. He also
published the first annotated edition and translation in Italian of William
Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes: A Play in Four Acts.
200 Contributors

Stipe Grgas is Full Professor and chair of the American Studies program
at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. Before 2005
he taught at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zadar but was also a guest
lecturer at departments of other Croatian universities (Split, Rijeka). He
has published three books, edited two and has written some hundred
articles on American, Irish, and British literature and culture as well as on
topics having to do with the interdisciplinary field of human spatiality. He
was guest lecturer at a number of European universities (Odense, Aarhus,
Leipzig, Genoa) and has presented his work at numerous international
conferences. He spent the academic year 1994-1995 as a Fulbright scholar
at Yale University and was again awarded a Fulbright scholarship for the
2011 summer semester which he spent at Cornell University. He is the
acting president of the Croatian Association for American Studies.

Umberto Rossi, Ph.D., is a teacher, independent scholar, literary

journalist, and translator. He has published an introduction to Twentieth
Century war literature (Il secolo di fuoco, Bulzoni, 2008), a monograph on
the most relevant novels of Philip K. Dick (The Twisted Worlds of Philip
K. Dick, McFarland, 2011), and several academic essays on Pynchon,
Heller, Hemingway, Evangelisti, Ballard, Disch, Lethem, WWI literature,
science fiction, and postmodernist literature. He is currently co-editing a
special issue of Science Fiction Studies on Italian science fiction. He is a
member of the SFRA.

Clément Lévy studied classics and comparative literature at the

University of Limoges (France), where he defended a Ph.D. dissertation
on the notion of territory in postmodernist fictions by Calvino, Echenoz,
Pynchon, and Ransmayr (2008). His articles discuss the meaningful and
diverse ways geographical space is treated as a theme by recent European
and American authors. He currently teaches French language at the
University of Bari (Italy). Among his publications: Territoires
postmodernes : Géocritique de Calvino, Echenoz, Pynchon et Ransmayr
(PU Rennes, 2014); Géocritique : État des lieux / Geocriticism: A Survey
(ed. Bertrand Westphal and Clément Lévy, PU Limoges, 2014);
“Photographies de villes invisibles dans les romans de Thomas Pynchon”,
(Villes invisibles et écriture de la modernité, ed. Aurélie Choné, Paris,
Orizons, 2012), “As Far as Pynchon ‘Loves Cameras’”, (Against the
Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives, ed. Sascha Pöhlmann,
Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2010).
 Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails 201

Jennifer Backman is Assistant Professor of English at Palomar College

in Southern California. She received a Ph.D. in Contemporary Literature
from Purdue University and a Master’s degree in the Humanities from the
University of Chicago. Her dissertation, entitled “Bodies and Things: Iris
Murdoch and the Material World” explores the significance of material
objects and physical space in the fiction of Iris Murdoch. Her current
book-length project uses theories of materiality to interpret the recurrence
of the classical Orpheus myth in the novels of Thomas Pynchon.

Paolo Simonetti, Ph.D., is Research Fellow at “Sapienza”, Università di

Roma (Italy). He has taught American literature and culture at “Sapienza”
and “Tor Vergata” universities, and is the co-founder of the editorial
service “Clarel”. His research areas include literary theory, historical
fiction, postmodernist and contemporary American literature, including
comics and graphic novels. He is the author of Paranoia blues, a
monograph on postmodernist American fiction, and has published
extensively on Melville, Hawthorne, Nabokov, Pynchon, Auster, and
DeLillo, among others. He has edited the complete works of Bernard
Malamud in two volumes for “I Meridiani” Mondadori.
 INDEX
A Botticelli, Sandro (Alessandro di
Adams, Henry 16, 31, 102, 104,
109, 114n.
Agamben, Giorgio 115n.
Alden, Harold 4.
Alighieri, Dante 99, 104, 132, 136,
138, 166-168.
Alworth, David J. 159.
Amenophis III 58.
Andersen, Tore Rye 7, 31, 40, 48n,
49n.
Anderson, Don 134.
Andrews, Stephen Pearl 20.
Astruc, Gabriel 126.
B Charcot, Jean-Martin 122.
Bachelard, Gaston 132, 136, 140-
141, 145.
Backman, Jennifer 9, 131.
Baedeker, Karl 72n, 123.
Bakhtin, Mikhail 118.
Banti, Alberto 104.
Beletsky, Misha 48n.
Bellini, Luigi 102.
Benjamin, Walter 111-112.
Benso, Camillo, Count of Cavour 109.
Benton, Graham 20.
Beressem, Hanjo 124, 157.
Bernanos, Georges 125, 129n.
Bertelli, Sergio 106.
Bertram, John 48n.
Bloom, Harold 167.
Boccaccio, Giovanni 104.
Boitani, Piero 166-167.
Bonaparte, Napoleon 103.
Mariano di Vanni Filipepi) 102-
104, 113n.
Bresci, Gaetano 100.
Bryant, John 42-43, 47.
Buchan, John 60-61.
Buchholz, Laura 89.
Buonarroti, Michelangelo 101, 104.
Burroughs, William 138.
C
Capus, Alfred 126.
Cassola, Arnold 158.
Castoriadis, Cornelius 77.
Chambers, Judith 167.
Chibber, Vivek 86.
Chitussi, Barbara 115n.
Cocteau, Jean 143.
Columbus, Christopher 160.
Conoly, Arthur 60.
Conrad, Joseph 66-67, 72n.
Cooley, Ronald W. 69,72n.
Coughlan, David ix, 133, 142-143.
Cowart, David ix, 4, 72n, 106-107,
113n, 128n, 154, 157, 166.
Crali, Tullio 48n.
Cugat, Francis 34.
D
D’Annunzio, Gabriele 110-111,
114n.
da Vinci, Leonardo 103-104.
David, Ismar 33-34, 37, 39-40, 42-
44, 48n.
de Chirico, Giorgio 21, 32-33.
de La Valette, Jean 164.
204 Index

de L’Isle-Adam, Auguste de Villiers Frelik, Pawel ix.

144. Freud, Sigmund, 86, 112, 122.
‘Dee, John’ 5. Frye, Northrop 103.
Derrida, Jacques 85.
De Sarigny, Peter 169n. G
Desilets, Sean 143.
Diaghilev, Sergei 125. Galilei, Galileo 104.
Dinerstein, Joel 135. Garibaldi, Giuseppe 108-110, 112,
Dixon, Jeremiah 118. 114n.
Dombroski, Robert 113n. Gaudí, Antoni 21.
Donadio, Candida 157. Gelfant, Blanche 138-139.
Donizetti, Gaetano 96, 98. Genette, Gérard 33.
Donne, John 160. Gian Gastone de’ Medici 113n.
Drew, Ned 48n. Gilmore, Timothy 86-87.
Dreyfus, Alfred 126. Grant, J. Kerry 5, 97, 102, 128n,
Duguid, Paul 38. 165-167.
Duyfhuizen, Bernard 76. Gregory, Derek 56-57.
Grgas, Stipe 8, 75, 76, 85.
E Grigely, Joseph 47.
Gruic Grmusa, Lovorka 134.
Eddins, Dwight 146-147. Guinness, Alec 169n.
Eikhenbaum, Boris 155. Gussow, Mel 157.
Eksteins, Modris 126.
Eldred, Michael 87-88. H
Elias, Amy 16.
Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) 68. Hamilton, Edith 137.
Eliot, Thomas Stearns 9, 21, 166. Hand, Ted ix.
Ellroy, James 3. Härle, Clemens-Carl 115n.
Ensor, James 21. Harvey, David 119, 128n.
Eve, Martin Paul ix, 5. Hassan, Ihab 9.
Hawthorne, Mark D. 133, 137.
F Hawthorne, Nathaniel 163.
Hayles, N. Katherine 48n.
Fairchild, William 169n. Hegel, G. Wilhelm Friedrich 86.
Falconer, Rachel 138. Heidegger, Martin 86-87.
Faraone, Mario 7, 9, 53. Hemingway, Ernest 8, 95, 121, 128,
Fariña, Richard 121, 128n. 128n.
Farnell, Gary 85. Henkle, Roger B. 105.
Fattori, Giovanni 53. Herman, Luc 2, 7, 13, 17, 26, 153-
Faulkner, William 3, 9. 154, 156, 158.
Fielding, Henry 39. Hesiod 137, 150n.
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott 3, 8, 121. Hirsch, Thomas F. 3, 158.
Foscolo, Ugo 104. Hollander, Charles 88.
Foucault, Michel 119, 163. Homer 137, 162.
Francis I, Emperor of Austria 113n. Hopkins, Gerald Manley 21.
Francis I, King of France 103. Hopkirk, Peter 60.
 Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails 205

Household, Geoffrey 61. London, Jack 31.

Housman, Alfred E. 3.
Hume, Kathryn 133, 135, 138, 147-
148.
Hurst, Brian Desmond 159, 169n.
Hurston, Zora Neale 31.
Hutcheon, Linda 111-112.
I McHale, Brian 119.
Ishiguro, Kazuo 71-72.
J MacInnes, Helen 61.
James, Henry 95.
Jameson, Fredric 163, 169n.
Jaramillo, Raquel 48n.
Joan of Arc 14, 24.
Johnson, David M. 137, 144, 150n.
Joyce, James 49n, 95.
K 149n.
Kafka, Franz 22.
Käkelä-Puumala, Tiina ix, 69.
Kant, Immanuel 86.
Kaye, J. W. 60.
Kerouac, Jack 14.
Kipling, Rudyard 7, 60.
Knight, Thomas 133, 135, 148.
Kozlowski, Lisa M. 113n.
Krafft, John M. 7, 13-14, 26, 153-
154.
Kupsch, Kenneth 46-47, 81.
L Mizzi, John 159.
Lee, Harper 31, 43.
Lee, Marshall 37, 42, 44.
Lee, Spike (Shelton Jackson Lee)
113n.
Lefebvre, Henri 128n, 163.
Levine, George 8, 63.
Leving, Yuri 48n.
Lévy, Clément 8, 117.
Lodovichi, Lorenzo ix.
Lorenzo II de’ Medici 106.
M
McCarthy, Cormac 49n.
McDonald, Peter D. 38-39, 46.
McGann, Jerome 33.
McKenzie, D. F. 33.
Machiavelli, Niccolò 8, 41, 99, 101,
104-107, 110-111, 114n, 165.
Mack Smith, Denis 110.
Madsen, Deborah L. 167.
Mailer, Norman 138.
Marquez, Antonio 157.
Martin, Dean (Dino Paul Crocetti)
97-98.
Marx, Karl 84, 87, 88, 90n.
Mason, Charles 118, 133-134, 148-
Mata Hari (Margaretha Geertruida
Zelle) 118, 124.
Matthews, Nicole 48n.
Mazzini, Giuseppe 107-110, 112,
114n, 165.
Mead, Clifford 48n.
Medici, House of 105-106, 113n.
Melville, Herman 1, 4, 9, 155, 167.
Mendelson, Edward 81, 160.
Micocci, Andrea 77, 89.
Miller, Henry 8, 121.
Milne, Alan Alexander 23.
Minganti, Franco ix.
Moody, Nikianne 48n.
Montale, Eugenio 53.
Moore, Alan 7.
Munch, Edvard 21.
Mussolini, Benito 71, 110-111, 165.
N
Nabokov, Vladimir 63, 128-129n.
Nasser, Gamal Abdel 81.
206 Index

Nazaryan, Alexander 5. Sale, Kirkpatrick 32, 122.

Nijinsky, Vaslav 125. Schaub, Thomas 47.
Seed, David ix, 3, 6, 120, 154-155,
O 158, 167.
Severs, Jeff ix.
Oppenheim, Edward Phillips 61. Shakespeare, William 19-20, 100,
Osteen, Mark 79. 160.
Ovid 143. Shelley, Percy Bysshe 43.
Oxenhandler, Neal 143. Siegert, Bernhard 123-124.
Ozymandias (Ramesse II) 43. Simonetti, Paolo 1, 9, 72n, 153, 162.
Simons, John L. 61.
P Sinatra, Frank 4.
Slade, Joseph W. 106-107, 109.
Parker, Charlie 134. Sladen, Douglas 57.
Patteson, Richard 65, 70, 167. Sloterdijk, Peter 76.
Pavlow, Muriel 169n. Smith, Alfred Charles 56.
Pearce, Richard 155-156. Smith, Allan 159.
Perosa, Sergio 160. Smith, Corlies (“Cork”) 3, 4, 13-16,
Peruggia, Vincenzo 102-103, 113n. 24, 29, 31, 32-33, 153.
Petrarca, Francesco 104. Smith, Evans Lansing 132, 134,
Picasso, Pablo 121. 148n.
Plater, William 123. Smith, Shawn 2, 3, 6, 7.
Pliny 161. Smithson, Robert 159-160.
Poe, Edgar Allan 3. Soja, Edward W. 163.
Poggi, Giovanni 102. Somigli, Luca 104.
Pöhlmann, Sascha ix. Spanos, William 88-89.
Pound, Ezra 79. St. Luke 161.
Prezzavento, Paolo ix. St. Paul 161.
Puccini, Giacomo 96, 113n. Standing, Guy 90n.
Pyke, Joanna ix. Stein, Gertrude 121-122, 128.
Pynchon, Thomas Ruggles Sr. 14, 19. Sternberger, Paul 48n.
Stevenson, Robert Louis 160.
R Stimpson, Catharine R. 167.
Stoddart, Charles 60.
Rattazzi, Urbano 110. Strabo 161.
Redon, Odilon 21. Stravinsky, Igor 125-126.
Reilly, Terence ix. Strehle, Susan 63.
Ricasoli, Bettino 98, 110. Strickland, Carol 20.
Rolls, Albert 98, 122, 128n. Susina, Jan 37.
Rossi, Umberto 1, 5, 8-9, 95, 102. Suvin, Darko 85.
Rowling, J. K. (Joanne Rowling) 25.
Rowlinson, Henry 60. T

S Tanner, Tony 3, 4, 10, 68, 104, 107.

Thomas, Samuel 108.
Sale, Faith 32, 34, 122. Trager, Oliver 133.
 Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails 207

Trollope, Anthony 54. Warren, Josiah 20.

Tuan, Yi-Fu 119, 128n. Weber, Max 83.
Wells, Amy D. 121.
U Westphal, Bertrand 119-121.
Woodmansee, Martha 79.
Umberto I di Savoia 100. Wunderlich, Roger 20.

V Y

Virgil 9. Yeats, William Butler 133, 142-143.

Vittorio Emanuele II di Savoia 96,
98-101. Z
Von Trotha, Lothar 66.
Zenith, Darshan 35.
W Žižek, Slavoj 87.
Žunec, Ozren 88, 90n.
Ware, Tim 48n.

Other Works by Thomas Pynchon

A “Is It OK to Be a Luddite?” (LU) 85-
86.
Against the Day (ATD) 5, 6, 48,
48n, 49n, 76, 85, 95, 97, 100, M
113n, 114n, 125, 127-128, 131,
134. Mason & Dixon (MD) 6, 48n, 118,
131, 133, 148n.
B “Minstral Island” 161.

Bleeding Edge (BE) 5-6, 76, 85-86, S

89, 90n, 97-98, 113n, 131, 161.
Slow Learner (SL) 18-19, 31, 56,
G 58-61, 63, 65, 72n, 113n, 115n,
124, 157, 163.
Gravity’s Rainbow (GR) 3, 6, 8-9,
25, 35, 38-40, 85, 103, 107, 111, T
119, 125, 131, 133, 149n, 155-
157, 161, 169. The Crying of Lot 49 (CL) 6, 38, 46,
103, 118, 128n, 131, 149n, 155,
I 157.

Inherent Vice (IV) 1, 6, 32, 35, 38, V

48n, 75-76, 79, 85, 118, 128n,
131. Vineland (VL) 6, 32, 48n, 118, 128n,
131.
208 Index

Characters in Thomas Pynchon’s Works

A G

Aïeul, P. (V) 55-56, 65.
B 114n.
Bad Priest (V) 15, 24, 69, 145-146,
161-162.
Barrington, Carl (SL) 18.
Bolingbroke (SL) 19.
Bongo-Shaftsbury, Hugh (V, SL) 56,
59, 66, 71.
Gaucho, The (V) 18, 71, 97, 100-
101, 105-106, 108-110, 113n,
Gebrail (V) 65.
Gerfaut (V) 125, 128n.
Girgis (V) 65.
Godolphin, Evan (V) 71, 101-102
Godolphin, Hugh (V) 17, 71, 83, 99-
101, 104, 114n, 149n, 165.
Goodfellow, Mr. (V) 55, 59, 70-71.

C H

Captain Mahogany (TS) 27. Hanne (see Echerze, Hanne).

Cesare (V) 71, 95, 98, 110. Harvitz, Esther (V) 79, 147.
Chiclitz, Clayton (“Bloody”) (V) 44, Hedwig (see Vogelsang, Hedwig).
80. Hod, Robert (“Pappy”) (V) 78.
Contango, Johnny (V) 81.
I
D
Itague, M. (V) 125.
Demivolt (V) 71.
DL (VL) 118. K
Dnubietna (V) 113n.
Kholsky (V) 26.
E
L
Echerze, Hanne (V) 65.
Eigenvalue, Dudley (V) 44, 64-66, L’Heuremaudit, Mélanie (V) 8, 44,
68-69, 72n, 83, 86, 103, 118. 120, 122, 124-125, 127-128,
150n, 165.
F Leery (TS) 22, 26-27.
Leopoldo (BE) 90n.
Fairing, Father Linus (V) 80, 137, Lepsius (V) 59, 70.
149n.
Ferrante (V) 71, 99, 149n. M
Flange, Dennis (SL) 19.
Foppl (V) 3, 66, 146, 161, 165. Maas, Oedipa (CL) 136, 149n.
Mac the cook (V) 78.
Mafia (V) 147, 165.
Maijstral, Carla (V) 71.
Maijstral, Elena (V) 142-143.
 Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails
Maijstral, Fausto (V) 15, 16, 21, 67, 81,
111, 123, 133, 140-148, 149n,
150n, 161-162, 165.
Maijstral, Paola (V) 21, 67, 78, 142-
144, 162-163.
Maiortheiu (TS) 20.
Manganese, Veronica (V) 71, 165,
167.
Mantissa, Rafael (V) 71, 83, 95-96,
98-103, 105-106, 108, 110,
113n, 114n, 165.
Mara (V) 164-165, 167.
Maratt (V) 165.
Mason, Charles (MD) 133-134, 148-
149n.
Mehemet (V) 38, 167.
Mendoza, Fina (V) 7, 14, 18, 23-24,
27-29, 150n.
Meroving, Vera (V) 66, 71, 111,
165.
Mizzi, Enrico (V) 165.
Moffit (V) 71.
Moldweorp (SL) 59.
Mondaugen, Kurt (V) 2-3, 29, 66-
67, 71, 115n, 165.
O 155, 164, 166-168.
Owlglass, Rachel (V) 15, 44, 79- 80.
P Tancredi, Andrea (ATD) 97.
Porcépic, Vladimir (V) 67, 69, 120,
124-127.
Porpentine (V, SL) 55-56, 59, 65,
70-71.
Profane, Benny (V) 7, 13-14, 16-19,
22-29, 41, 44, 69, 78-79, 82, 84,
89, 97, 107, 115n, 117-118, 124,
136-142, 145, 149n, 150n, 159.
R Vogt (V) 149n.
Rebekah (MD) 133, 148-149n.
Renzo (ATD) 48n.
Rideout, Dahlia (“Dally”) (ATD) 127.
209
Rocco (TS) 13, 17-19, 22-23, 26-27.
Rocco (“Squarcione”) (SL) 19.
Rowley-Bugge, Maxwell (V) 59, 65.
S
Salazar (V) 95, 108.
Satin (V) 120, 125.
Scheissvogel (TS, V) 18-19.
Shawn (BE) 90n.
Slab (V) 17.
Slagiatt, Rockwell (“Rocky”) (BE)
97-98, 113n.
Slothrop, Tyrone (GR) 25, 35, 118,
149n.
Sphere, McClintic (V) 134-136, 148,
162, 165.
Sportello, Larry (“Doc”) (IV) 118.
Stencil, Herbert (V) 2, 4, 15-17, 19,
22, 25, 29, 35, 39, 41-42, 44, 54,
62-70, 72n, 83, 103, 107, 114n,
115n, 117, 123-124, 127, 135-
136, 147, 153-154, 161-163,
168.
Stencil, Sidney (V) 16, 41, 53-54,
62-65, 68-69, 71, 82, 83, 153-
T
Tarnow, Maxine (BE) 89, 98.
Traverse, Kit (ATD) 48n, 118.
V
Valerie (TS) 15, 27.
Veronica, the Rat (V) 41-42, 47.
Vibe, Scarsdale (ATD) 97.
Viola, Mme (V) 4.
Vogelsang, Hedwig (V) 44.
W
Waldetar (V) 59, 65.
210 Index

Weissmann (V, GR) 3, 71. Y

Wheeler, Prairie (VL) 136.
Wheeler, Zoyd (VL) 118. Yusef (V) 65.
Winsome, Gouverneur (“Roony”) (V)
147, 162. Z
Wolfmann, Michael Zachary
(“Mickey”) (IV) 118. Zombini, Luca (ATD) 114n.
Wren, Sir Alastair (V) 56.
Wren, Victoria (V) 42, 44, 55-57,
59, 167-168.

Locations
A E

Aegean 167. Egypt 16, 26, 54, 56-59, 65-66, 70,

Afghanistan 60. 72n, 114n, 118.
Africa 40, 122, 156, 161. Eleusis 59.
Alexandria 40, 55, 57-59.
Antarctica 149n. F
Austin 13, 153.
Austria 105, 114n. Fashoda 54, 122, 124.
Fiume 110-111, 114n.
B Florence 8, 18, 40, 54, 62, 64-65,
82, 83, 95-96, 98-102, 104-108,
Berlin 39. 110-112, 113n, 117-118, 124-
Bokhara 60. 125, 128, 149n, 165, 168.
Brentwood 20. France 105.
Brittany 61. Friuli 114n.
Buenos Aires 90n.
G
C
Germany 96.
Cairo 40, 58-59, 117, 124-125, 128. Gibraltar 161.
California 35, 85, 118, 128n. Giza 125.
Cape Town 118, 158. Gozo 161.
Caracas 108. Greenwich 118.
Chicago 48.
Corfu 118. H
Cornell University 3, 39, 72n, 97.
Croatia 134. Hogwarts (Rowlings’s Harry Potter
Deep Archer (BE) 161. and the Chamber of Secrets)
Durham 5. 49n.
Hollywood 118.
 Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails 211

I Norfolk 155.

Italy 71, 96, 105, 109-111, 118. O

J Ogygia (Homer’s Odissey) 161.

Ostend 118.
Japan 118.
Jerusalem 33. P

K Paris 8, 26, 40, 67, 69, 103, 117-

118, 120-125, 127-128.
Karnak 58. Peru 105.
Keneh 58. Philadelphia 31.
Pisa 108.
L Purgatory (Dante’s Inferno) 166-
167.
Las Vegas 76, 118.
Leipzig 123. R
Lombardy 105.
London 125, 149n. Rome 61, 98, 104-105, 110, 161.
Long Island 17-18, 39. Rotterdam 118.

M S

Malta 3, 9, 40, 67, 69, 71, 83, 96, Saint Helena 118.
101, 111, 113n, 118, 124, 128, San Marino (CA) 158.
132, 136, 141-142, 144-145, Sardinia, Kingdom of 100, 109.
149n, 153-154, 156-169, 169n. Sicily 161.
Mantua 106. Sinai 72n.
Marcinelle 114n. South-West Africa 1, 26, 54, 66, 71,
Marsamuscetto 165. 124, 165.
Mediterranean 62, 78, 144, 161, Spain 105, 118.
165. Stockholm 4, 146.
Mexico 39, 105. Suez 161.
Milan 98, 106.
Mordor (Tolkien’s The Lord of the T
Rings) 43.
Thebes 58.
N Trento 114n.
Trieste 5, 53, 114n.
Naples, Kingdom of 105, 108. Turin 48n.
Nevada 118.
New York 3, 18, 28, 33, 40, 79, 82, V
97, 118, 132, 136, 138, 141,
144-145, 149n, 156-158. Valletta 41, 47, 158-160, 164.
Nice 28, 108-109. Veneto 105.
212 Index

Venezuela 71, 105-106. W

Venice 97, 106, 118, 125.
Vheissu (V) 17, 41-43, 47, 104, Warsaw 76.
149n, 165-166.
Vienna 122. Z

Zigotisopolis (BE) 89.