708 The American Century: Literature since 1945The deconstruction is there, centrally, in the controlling sign of V. herself,
“a remarkably scattered concept” as we are told. A human figure, passing through
many stages and identities, she comes down to Stencil’s final dream of her as a
plasticated technological object. A shifting letter attached to a historical process of
progressive deanimation, the human figure is translated into a figure of speech. The
other two compositional principles of the novel, Stencil and Profane, may apparently
be opposed, just as Callisto and Meatball are, as the creator of patterns and the man
of contingency, the constructive and the deconstructive, he who seeks and he who
floats. They are joined, however, not only in a failure of significance but a failure of
identity. Stencil and Profane inhabit a textual world that simultaneously exhausts
and drains meaning: there is a proliferation of data, in excess of possible systems and
in denial of any need, any compulsion to explain. Not only that, they are created only
to be decreated, just as that textual world is – and in the same terms as that elusive
noncharacter V. herself. Their names are parodies, their words and gestures
gamesome or stereotypical, their physical bearing a series of masks. As such, they
offer playful variations on a definition of life supplied during the novel: as
“a successive rejection of personalities.” In the simplest sense, V is not a book without
a subject or a plot. Full of characters (of a sort) and events, it exploits a number of
narrative genres to keep the action lively and the attention engaged: among them the
mystery story, the tale of the quest, and science fiction. But in another, more
elemental sense, it is. Not only a text about indeterminacy, V is an indeterminate text:
its significance, its subject is the lack, the impossibility of one.
Almost the last reported words of V. are “How pleasant to watch Nothing.” In his
subsequent fiction, Pynchon has continued this watching and searching of the
boundlessness of “Nothing” in a variety of fictional guises. In his second novel,
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), the main character, Oedipa Maas, learns that her
onetime lover, Pierce Inverarity, has made her an executor of his estate. Now he is
dead, she sets out to investigate Inverarity’s property: an investigation that leads to
the discovery of what she takes to be a conspiratorial underground communications
system dating back to the sixteenth century. Following the clues, she finally believes
she will solve the enigma through a mysterious bidder keen to buy Inverarity’s stamp
collection. But the novel ends with the enigma unsolved, the plot and its meaning
unresolved, as Oedipa awaits the crying out at the auction of the relevant lot number- The subject, and its significance, still wait to be located. So do they in Gravity’s
Rainbow (1973), Pynchon’s third novel. Set in the closing years of World War II, the
story here, a complex web of plots and counterplots, involves a Nazi Lieutenant
Weissman, disguised as a mysterious Captain Blicero, and an American sleuth,
Lieutenant Tyron Slothrop, while V-2 rockets rain down on London. Weissman, it
appears, was once the lover of V. – in this elaborately intertextual world, Pynchon’s
texts echo his own as well as the texts of others. The gravitations of mood are
characteristic: from black humor to lyricism to science fiction to fantasy. So is the
feeling the reader experiences, while reading this book, that he or she is encountering,
not so much different levels of meaning or reality, as different planes in fictive space,
with each plane in its shadow box proving to be a false bottom, in an evidently
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