Benny Profane, the Human Yo-Yo (Simile)
Since his discharge from the Navy Profane had been road-laboring and when there wasn't work just traveling, up and down the east coast like a yo-yo; and this had been going on for maybe a year and a half (p. 10)
Here is one of the first similes of the novel, in which Profane is likened to a yo-yo—symbolizing Profane’s lack of agency (i.e. tethered to another’s hand), and characterizing Profane as someone stuck in his habits (i.e. only moving up and down). The comparison is repeated throughout the novel.
Like Puppets and Dolls (Simile)
All at once the tweed one jerked to his feet like a clockwork doll and began speaking in Italian (p. 65)
&
The sun rose and van Wijk appeared in his doorway like a two-dimensional figure jerked suddenly onstage by hidden pulleys (p. 231)
Pynchon’s writing is often concerned with the inhumane treatment of humans—from objectification to commodification to simple heartlessness. In these two quotations, Pynchon uses simile to portray humans as inanimate objects: puppets and dolls. In so doing, he literalizes his own fears, invoking a loss of humanity.
Lead Weights of History
Van Wijk exploded in a bitter fit of laughing. "You seem," he finally drawled, "to be under certain delusions about the civil service. History, the proverb says, is made at night. The European civil servant normally sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history. He doesn't fight it, he tries to coexist with it.
‘"Die lood van die Goevernement indeed. We are, perhaps, the lead weights of a fantastic clock, necessary to keep it in motion, to keep an ordered sense of history and time prevailing against chaos. Very well! Let a few of them melt. Let the clock tell false time for a while. But the weights will be reforged, and rehung, and if there doesn't happen to be one there in the shape or name of Willem van Wijk to make it run right again, so much the worse for me” (p. 233).
This passage contains several important ideas. First is van Wijk’s idea that history is something that is “made,” rather than something that occurs—implying a certain subjectivity to the field. But moreover, van Wijk’s metaphor—likening governments to the “lead weights of a fantastic clock […] to keep an ordered sense of history and time”—suggests that the narratives of history do not naturally contain order: rather, order is something (artificially) introduced by the powers that be.
Fortune's Wheel (Metaphor)
They'd brought the Spitfires and ME's down to earth with their R.A.F. game, but it was only simple metaphor, as noted. The Germans to be sure were pure evil and the Allies pure good. The children weren't alone in that feeling. But if their idea of the struggle could be described graphically it would not be as two equal-sized vectors head-to-head—their heads making an X of unknown quantity; rather as a point, dimensionless—good—surrounded by any number of radial arrows—vectors of evil—pointing inward. Good, i.e., at bay. The Virgin assailed. The winged mother protective. The woman passive. Malta in siege.
A wheel, this diagram: Fortune's wheel. Spin as it might the basic arrangement was constant. Stroboscopic effects could change the apparent number of spokes; direction could change; but the hub still held the spokes in place and the meeting-place of the spokes still defined the hub. The old cyclic idea of history had taught only the rim, to which princes and serfs alike were lashed; that wheel was oriented vertical; one rose and fell. But the children's wheel was dead-level, its own rim only that of the sea's horizon—so sensuous, so ‘visual’ a race are we Maltese (p. 338-339).
In this crucial passage, Pynchon creates a metaphorical diagram, and transforms it several times over, each time arriving at a new significance. He shows morality as a struggle against many, circling evils. He portrays history as a wheel: a cyclic model, with the same stories told over and over; it is the constant rise and fall of civilizations. Then he shows how, through a change in perspective, these rises and falls can look perfectly level: history as an equilibrium.
Folds of History (Metaphor)
Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the peculiar moral habit of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. 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 (p. 155-156)
In this visual metaphor, Eigenvalue likens history to a “rippled” fabric, separated into “sinuous cycles”—a clear example of Pynchon’s larger exploration into the cyclical nature of history. Unique to this example is the suggestion that history cannot be understood objectively, illustrated in each generation’s inability “to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else,” because of their placement “at the bottom of a fold.” This generational blindness, Eigenvalue suggests, causes a “phony nostalgia”—i.e. the romanticization of times past, and the likelihood that we will not learn from past mistakes.
