"Suppose," said Profane to the sea gull, who was blinking at him, "suppose I was God." He inched on to the platform and lay on his stomach, with nose, eyes and cowboy hat sticking over the edge, like a horizontal Kilroy.
"If I was God . . ." He pointed at an SP [Shore Patrolman]; "Zap, SP, your ass has had it." The SP kept on at what he'd been doing: battering a 250-pound fire controlman named Patsy Pagano in the stomach with a night stick.
In this quote, Profane imagines himself a god, to no effect: his attempt at interfering in a Shore Patrol’s violence is impotent, as the officer continues “what he’d been doing: battering.” Of course, this comes as no surprise—Profane is no god—but it does introduce a question: what would a real god, if one existed, do? God or no god, the simple fact remains that the Shore Patrolman’s violence goes on, uninterrupted. The quote shows human passivity (in Profane), human agency (in the SP), and a corresponding indifference/amorality from any higher power.
“Nothing I [Dr. Schoenmaker] do to a Jewish girl's nose is going to change the noses of her children when she becomes, as she must, a Jewish mother. So how am I being vicious. Am I altering that grand unbroken chain, no. I am not going against nature, I am not selling out any Jews. Individuals do what they want, but the chain goes on and small forces like me will never prevail against it. All that can is something which will change the germ plasm, nuclear radiation, maybe."
[…]
"You set up another chain." She [Rachel Owlglass] was trying not to yell. "Changing them inside sets up another chain which has nothing to do with germ plasm. You can transmit characteristics outside, too. You can pass along an attitude…"
"Inside, outside," he said, you’re being inconsistent, you lose me."
In a novel concerned with human agency, and the (in)ability to alter fate (or: the “chain”), this passage presents two opposing views on the matter: Dr. Schoenmaker, who believes in a largely predetermined nature, and Rachel Owlglass, who believes individual action can shape the future (i.e nature vs. nurture). Noteworthy, Dr. Schoenmaker uses his perspective to justify his ethically ambiguous career, whereas Rachel uses her argument to vilify his career: in other words, Pynchon seems to suggest that one’s view on human agency plays a crucial role in shaping one’s morality.
“I am one," Bongo-Shaftsbury smiled. And pushed back the sleeve of his coat to remove a cufflink. He rolled up the shirt cuff and thrust the naked underside of his arm at the girl. Shiny and black, sewn into the flesh, was a miniature electric switch. […]
"You see, Mildred. These wires run into my brain. When the switch is thrown the other—"
"Papa!" the girl cried.
"Everything works by electricity. Simple and clean."
"Stop it," said the other Englishman.
"Why, Porpentine." Vicious. "Why. For her? Touched by her fright, are you. Or is it for yourself."
Porpentine seemed to retreat bashfully. "One doesn't frighten a child, sir."
"Hurrah. General principles again." Corpse fingers jabbed in the air. "But someday, Porpentine, I, or another, will catch you off guard. Loving, hating, even showing some absent-minded sympathy. I'll watch you. The moment you forget yourself enough to admit another's humanity, see him as a person and not a symbol—then perhaps—"
"What is humanity."
"You ask the obvious, ha, ha. Humanity is something to destroy.”
First with symbolic imagery, then with rhetorical dialogue, this passage conveys a clear—maybe even self-evident—thematic argument: the loss of one’s humanity, or the dehumanization of others, is the parent of immorality and violence.
“In a world such as you inhabit, Mr. Stencil, any cluster of phenomena can be a conspiracy. So no doubt your suspicion is correct”
In a succinct quote, Dr. Eigenvalue addresses the bias in Herbert Stencil’s methods: Stencil manufactures conspiracy based on his own prejudices. Ironically, Dr. Eigenvalue then concludes that Stencil’s suspicion is “correct.” Throughout V., Pynchon explores the fine line between conspiracy and reality: here, he allows the two to coexist, wherein “any” evidence can be “correct.”
“Staring up at me through the ice, perfectly preserved, its fur still rainbow-colored, was the corpse of one of their spider monkeys. It was quite real; not like the vague hints they had given me before. I say 'they had given.' I think they left it there for me. Why? Perhaps for some alien, not-quite-human reason that I can never comprehend. Perhaps only to see what I would do. A mockery, you see: a mockery of life, planted where everything but Hugh Godolphin was inanimate. With of course the implication . . . It did tell me the truth about them. If Eden was the creation of God, God only knows what evil created Vheissu. The skin which had wrinkled through my nightmares was all there had ever been. Vheissu itself, a gaudy dream. Of what the Antarctic in this world is closest to: a dream of annihilation. […] Does it make any difference?" Godolphin said. "If it were only a hallucination, it was not what I saw or believed I saw that in the end is important. It is what I thought. What truth I came to.”
In this cryptic passage, Hugh Godolphin describes a personal epiphany made during his expedition to the South Pole, after uncovering a spider-monkey buried in the ice, left by the people of Vheissu. The passage hints at a certain existential dread. Hugh encounters a monkey, a “mockery of life,” placed in the lifeless, “inanimate” environment of the South Pole. Is this a metaphor for the human condition—us “monkeys” on Earth, floating through the inanimate expanse of space? (Consider: the Gaucho later echoes Godolphin’s use of “mockery,” while likening humans to apes—“there are nights […] I think we are apes in a circus, mocking the ways of men. Perhaps it is all a mockery” (p. 211)—perhaps reinforcing a reading that sees the spider-monkey as a symbol for humanity). And what then is Vheissu? The illusion of a Creator?
“There's been a war, Fraulein. Vheissu was a luxury, an indulgence. We can no longer afford the likes of Vheissu."
"But the need," she [Vera Meroving] protested, "its void. What can fill that?"
He [Hugh Godolphin] cocked his head and grinned at her. "What is already filling it. The real thing. Unfortunately. Take your friend D'Annunzio. Whether we like it or not that war destroyed a kind of privacy, perhaps the privacy of dream. Committed us like him to work out three-o'clock anxieties, excesses of character, political hallucinations on a live mass, a real human population. The discretion, the sense of comedy about the Vheissu affair are with us no more, our Vheissus are no longer our own, or even confined to a circle of friends; they're public property, God knows how much of it the world will see, or what lengths it will be taken to. It's a pity; and I'm only glad I don't have to live in it too much longer."
"You’re remarkable," was all she’d say; and after braining an inquisitive goldfish with a rock, she left Godolphin.
This is an important passage, both because it brings us closer to an understanding of V. (drawing a clear link between Vheissu and dreams), but also because of its thematic proclamations. Godolphin implies that the twentieth century—with its world wars, its growing globalization and technological advancements—is defined by collective dreams (e.g. “political hallucinations on a live mass”), rather than by private dreams. Historically, he may be correct: consider the century’s rise of fascism and communism.
Vera Meroving’s response has even deeper implications: first, she suggests that a loss of dreams creates a “void”—a void that must be filled. So, what fills the void? Pynchon ends the passage with a simple, and greatly symbolic, action: with no words to respond to Godolphin’s claims, Vera Meroving kills and “brain[s]” a fish. Here, perhaps, is Pynchon’s morbid answer to the question: in a lack of dreams, the void is filled with mindless violence.
Twenty days before the Dog Star moved into conjunction with the sun, the dog days began. The world started to run more and more afoul of the inanimate. Fifteen were killed in a train wreck near Oaxaca, Mexico, on 1 July. The next day fifteen people died when an apartment house collapsed in Madrid. July 4 a bus fell into a river near Karachi and thirty-one passengers drowned. Thirty-nine more were drowned two days later in a tropical storm in the central Philippines […] These were the mass deaths. There were also the attendant maimed, malfunctioning, homeless, lorn. It happens every month in a succession of encounters between groups of living and a congruent world—which simply doesn't care. Look in any yearly Almanac, under "Disasters"—which is where the figures above come from. The business is transacted month after month after month.
In this passage, Pynchon temporarily abandons the larger narrative, and instead records the countless deaths to have occurred across the globe over the course of a summer. The use of relentless repetition, and the absence of detail beyond simple fact, both serve to numb the reader to these real-world deaths. Through his form, Pynchon emphasizes the “transact[ional]” nature of life and death, and magnifies the existential dread underlying his characters’ narrative arcs (i.e. Benny Profane feeling like an inanimate object).
“Mathematically, boy," he told himself, "if nobody else original comes along, they're bound to run out of arrangements someday. What then?" What indeed. This sort of arranging and rearranging was Decadence, but the exhaustion of all possible permutations and combinations was death. It scared Eigenvalue, sometimes. He would go in back and look at the set of dentures. Teeth and metals endure.
In this quote, Pynchon addresses an irony of progress: eventually, progress ends in stagnation; creation ends in destruction; life ends in death. The idea that originality is unattainable is a notion often attributed to postmodernist thought—of which Thomas Pynchon is considered an exemplar.
Ultimately, though, Pynchon satirizes this existential fear, having Dr. Eigenvalue take solace in his “endur[ing]” dentures—an absurdly trivial and worldly source of comfort, for someone fearing the death of human culture.
“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?”
Spoken by Fausto Maijstral Jr., father to Paola, this quote links several of Pynchon’s thematic threads. It alludes to Pynchon’s concept of a mirror-time, with Fausto’s conception of a “street and under the street.” And it alludes to V. herself, who has previously been likened to dreams, and been described as a life-long “tourist” (p. 411)—is V. then, the one to explore “the other kingdom, even if only as a kind of tourist?” The quote suggests V. is someone who can exist between the realms of life and death: and, moreover, that a poet should aim to do the same. Here, perhaps, is another potential reading of V.: she is the poet’s dream.
Stencil made a short prayer: let him be less and less sure as he gathers years…
For those readers left confused, maybe even frustrated, amidst the cacophony that is Pynchon’s writing: consider, perhaps, the way in which he treats not-knowing as a virtue. In this quote, ignorance is made religiously virtuous: something of prayer. It is spoken in the novel’s epilogue, and, perhaps, can be understood as a thematic coda. Above all, Pynchon seems to champion ambiguity—allowing for multiple possibilities at once, with no single “sure” answer.
But Stencil himself, who seemed more unaware each day (under questioning) of what was happening in the rest of the world, reinforced Maijstral's growing theory that V. was an obsession after all, and that such an obsession is a hothouse: constant temperature, windless, too crowded with particolored sports, unnatural blooms.
What does the title mean? What is “V.” when all is said and done? Well, that’s a question easier asked than answered. This quote may come the closest to nailing it: V. is an obsession. Maybe a girl and possibly a rat. More plausibly the conceptualization of the feminine ideal. Or perhaps just the embodiment of that crazy thing that drives everyone to some level of obsession. V. is potentially nothing more than that thing which is wanted more than all others, but which can never be attained and, even if it were, would surely bring naught but disappointment.
Or, maybe, she really is just a sort of shape-shifting biological female upon whom is imprinted all that muckety-muck about philosophical perfection. It may be the author’s intention—the notoriously private and question-shy author—that each reader must decide on their own who or what V. actually is. Initials are, in a sense, designed to create a veil of mystery and ambiguity, after all, onto which the uninitiated have little choice but to place their own preconceptions and assumptions.
