In V, Thomas Pynchon is making a lot of points as humorously as he's able. Benny Profane is a born loser. Every logical turn he takes in life leads to another dead end. But by following each lead, he eventually attains to "V" or victory. Pynchon shows us Benny has very little to commend himself except his indomitable will to push on. His friendship with Herbert Stencil, (stencil, right? a traced copy of something else) and the Whole Sick Crew are Pynchon's spoof on Kerouac's characters in On The Road. Profane is Pynchon's answer to Sal Paradise, Stencil is Pynchon's Dean Moriarty. Pynchon is as good a stylist as Kerouac, but he may be a little more intelligent than Kerouac, and he definitely takes himself a lot less seriously, hence he's alive at 73 while Kerouac died at 46! Kerouac tried unsuccessfully to milk the lime light, Pynchon hides from it. Had On The Road's Dean Moriarty had a spy for a father instead of a Larimer Street bum, he might have been
more like Herbert Stencil. Not to take anything away from On The Road, along with Huckleberry Finn, one of Americas few seminal novels.
If I were going to teach V, myself, I'd teach it in conjunction with On The Road. I'm sure Kerouac's book was a profound influence on Pynchon psychologically, artistically, and politically. In V, though, Pynchon offers his answer to the problems posed in On The Road.
I'll bet the reason you didn't enjoy V is that you were looking for chronology. Pynchon's most interesting stylistic trait is what he does with time. Neither books nor films need to deal with time as we find it in life. When they don't, however, they tend to shake up readers or viewers who are mired in a temporal reality. Either they shake them out of it to the point they're thinking and paying attention, or it literally puts them into a trance. When locked in a box, most animals will simply go to sleep until the box is opened. The problem is too large for their minds to ruminate on. Pynchon puts his readers in a psychological box which will either trance them out or knock them out of their daytime trance. In either case his books change people. They challenge them politically to see multiple different political points of view encompassed by equally ridiculous characters, each wrong in their limited view of reality taught to them by the absurdity of
their experiences which Pynchon makes no bones about explaining to the reader in detail... in case you might miss his point.
Along the way, Pynchon includes allegory, metaphor, blatant code, and old time animal magnitism to change his readers' perspectives in ways that make them more thoughtful about how they veiw the world and decisions they make in it. He doesn't offer answers; he poses open ended questions the readers have to answer for themselves. On the surface, Pynchon is never serious. At his core he is in deadly earnest. His characters are throw-away being with cartoon names, amusing at most. But because they're so light it is easy to see who or what they represent and to reconfigure our thinking about those elements of life.
V, and all of Pynchon's novels so far, are comic books with the pictures all in the heads of the readers. Some of the panels are pages long. One really doesn't have to think too much while you read them. Your unconscious mind will do most of the work.
It's probably been 30 years since I read V, and I read it because I was a huge fan of the folk music duo, Dick & Mimi Farina. Dick Farina was Pynchon's roommate at Cornell University. When Pynchon published V in 1963, Farina wrote a score for it on dulcimer. On the strength of that score, I bought and read the book. I also, completely by coincidence, read V right after reading Kerouac's On The Road. It was exactly the right follow up. Kerouac's book is cynical and sentimental, Pynchon's is raucous and sarcastic, it seems almost designed to put the other book in perspective. Two diagonal lines joining at a vortex = "V".
I loved V. A decade later, Gravity's Rainbow completely boggled my mind. Rocket fuel formulas and quantum mechanics added an explosive element to what was previously merely thought provoking.
Most writers aim their work at the largest segment of society, with the idea of selling more books. Pynchon and a few others aim their work at the smartest segment of society, not selling so many books, but perhaps making a greater profit over time.
Patrick King
--- On Mon, 8/10/09, Michael Jeter <michael.damian.jeter@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Michael Jeter <michael.damian.jeter@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: RARA-AVIS: Pynchon according to Washington Post
To: rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
Date: Monday, August 10, 2009, 7:28 AM
I am really not trying to be argumentative, as I do not know enough to
argue.
In a course on modernist and post modernist novels this summer, I read _V_
to the best of my ability(which, I grant you, does not say much), and I did
not like it.
In your comment below, if I understand you, you seem to suggest that Pynchon
is trying to make a point.
What point or points do you think Pynchon is trying to make?
Michael Jeter, the over the hill graduate student, not the dead actor
On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Patrick King <abrasax93@yahoo. com> wrote:
>
>
> If you're interested in making a living making a point, you really don't
> need mass acceptance. If 1% of the population catches on, you'll be fine.
> Pynchon has held that 1% since 1955.
>
> Patrick King
> --- On Sat, 8/8/09, Steve Novak <Cinefrog@comcast. net<Cinefrog%40comcast .net>>
> wrote:
>
> From: Steve Novak <Cinefrog@comcast. net <Cinefrog%40comcast .net>>
> Subject: Re: RARA-AVIS: Pynchon according to Washington Post
> To: "RARA-AVIS" <rara-avis-l@ yahoogroups. com<rara-avis-l% 40yahoogroups. com>
> >
> Date: Saturday, August 8, 2009, 6:59 PM
>
>
>
>
> It may be strange but understandable given the general critical
>
> apparatus/premises in place both in the media and in academia...Generali
> ties
>
> being what they are, this maybe a silly statement but...I find this
>
> reluctance to accept him logical, if inexcusable. ..a bit like when you
>
> mention Auster to crime stories critics or the literary media at large in
>
> his own country...it takes years/decades for things to evolve in onešs own
>
> backyard...
>
> Montois...
>
> On 8/8/09 6:17 PM, "jacquesdebierue" <jacquesdebierue@ yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > I have to second this. Ever since I ran into a used copy of V., I became
> a
>
> > total fan of Pynchon. Why so much hostility has been heaped upon him is a
>
> > mystery to me. The same goes for another favorite, the late William
> Gaddis.
>
> > Sometimes I think that the critics are a bunch of unimaginative
> squares...
>
> > They can't just laugh at the Rev. Cherrycoke, like they are supposed to
> --
>
> > instead, they have to go and talk about paranoia and the sublimatory
> dialogic
>
> > of obfuscative meaning!
>
> >
>
> > I think Mason & Dixon ranks among the ten best American novels of the
> 20th
>
> > century. It's even better than Gravity's Rainbow.
>
> >
>
> > Why the hostility in his own country against a brilliant writer who has
>
> > nothing to prove and who has stuck to his work without messing with
> anybody?
>
> > It's very strange.
>
> >
>
> > mrt
>
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>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
--Michael Damian Jeter
New Orleans, LA
Literacy, Music, and Democracy
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