The American Century: Literature since 1945 707and containment, the open and the closed, between which the individual
consciousness constantly vacillates. The two are not, in any event, mutually exclusive.
To an extent, what Pynchon does in his work is to give a decidedly postmodernist
spin to perennial American preoccupations. In the tradition of the American
jeremiad, he presents a culture, if not bound for heaven, then bent toward hell, its
own form of apocalypse or heat death. And in the grain of American writing
structured around the figures of the wilderness and the clearing, he develops a
sometimes bewildering series of systems, human and nonhuman, built around the
fundamental, formative principles of spatial openness and closure, immersion and
separation, the flexible and the fixed, the signified and the signifier – a world that is
a totality of things, data, and a world that is a totality of fact, signs.
In his first novel, V (1963), Pynchon returned to two formative characters recalling
Callisto and Meatball in the shape of Hubert Stencil and Benny Profane. The book
confirms its author’s sense of the modern world as an entropic waste land, inhabited
by men and women dedicated to the annihilation of all animatedness. It is bounded
by dead landscapes, urban, mechanical, underground. A populous narrative, it is
also packed with characters who are ciphers; seeing others and themselves, not as
people, but as things, objects, they lapse into roles, masquerade, and cliché. Blown
along the mean streets and even meaner sewers of this story, Benny Profane is a
schlemiel, the suffering absurd comedian of Jewish lore. A faded copy of a picaro, he
drifts through life in such enterprises as hunting alligators underneath New York
City; it is there, in fact, in the darkness and oblivion of the sewers, that he finds his
greatest comfort and peace. Hubert Stencil, on the other hand, searches the world
for V., the mysterious female spy and anarchist who is by turns Venus, Virgin, and
Void and seems to be everywhere and nowhere. Stencil appears to be on a significant
quest. Described as “a century’s child” and born in 1901, he is pursuing the remnants
of the Virgin in the world of the Dynamo. His father, a former British spy, has left
behind enigmatic clues pointing to a vast conspiracy in modern history. So, whereas
Profane lives in a world of sightlessness without signs or discernible patterns, Stencil
enters a world of elusive signs and apparent patterns, all gravitating toward an absent
presence, the lady V. His quest is for a fulcrum identity. In a sense, he is given an
outline identity by his search, since he thinks of himself as “quite purely He who
looks for V. (and whatever impersonations that might involve).” It is also a quest for
the identity of modern times. Using the oblique strategy of “attack and avoid,”
Stencil moves through many of the major events of the twentieth century, seeking to
recover the master plot, the meanings of modern history and this book. The only
meaning found, however, is the erasure of meaning: the emptying of a significant
human history and its sacrifice to mechanism and mass. The purposiveness of
Stencil, it turns out, and the purposelessness of Profane are both forms of “yo-yoing”
movement, often violent oscillation, bereft of all significance except the elemental
one of postponing inanimatedness.
At the heart of V, in short, is a paradox characteristic of all Pynchon’s work. Its
enormous historical bulk and vast social fabric is so constructed that it may be
deconstructed, so complexly created that it may be doubted then decreated.GGray_c05.indd 707ray_c 05 .indd 707 8 8/1/2011 7:31:40 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 40 PM