Summary
Benny Profane, a discharged U.S. Navy sailor, has spent the last year-and-a-half “yo-yo”-ing the East Coast of America, migrating up and down, working as a road laborer. He’s dubbed a “schlemihl”—a Yiddish term for a useless, helpless fool. At the novel’s start, Christmas Eve of the year 1955, Profane finds himself at a waterfront bar, the Sailor’s Grave, frequented by Navy sailors, some of whom are familiar to Benny Profane. There is Ploy, a sailor who has filed his teeth down to spikes, using them to bite barmaids on the buttocks; there is Dewey Gland, a guitar-strumming, shanty-singing sailor; and there is Pig Bodine, Profane’s former shipmate, “horribly obscene” (p. 14), who clasps Profane at the shoulder. Pig and Profane talk of an old friend, Pappy Hod, and his wife Paola Maijstral Hod, who now works at the Sailor’s Grave as a barmaid. The bar, its floors coated in sawdust, has beer on tap pumped through spigots of foam rubber breasts. When “Suck hour!” is declared, drunken sailors stampede the bar counter for a chance to drink at the teat. Profane watches the frenzy with Paola resting against his lap. The Shore Patrol arrive, and Profane flees the scene, along with Pig Bodine and Paola.
The three—Profane, Paola, and Pig Bodine—take up temporary residence at a nearby apartment, inhabited by Morris Teflon, friend of Pig Bodine. Teflon has the bad habit of taking nonconsensual photographs of sleeping couples. Paola asks to sleep with Profane, since all the other men want to get inside her pants. Though the two initially sleep together platonically, Profane and Paola eventually have sex. Teflon photographs them mid-act, prompting Profane and Paola to leave the apartment, into the night’s snowy streets. Outside, Profane sees Pig Bodine, ominously motionless atop a Harley Davidson motorcycle, revving the engine. Profane is reminded of a former lover: the mechanophiliac Rachel Owlglass. Profane had been working as a salad man at a Jewish deli when he first encountered Rachel: she grazed him with her luxury automobile, an MG, as he went to dump old lettuce. Rachel took Profane on a joyride, driving recklessly (yet flawlessly), and it was the beginning of a long romantic relationship between the two. Through Profane, Rachel could vicariously escape her conservative, upper-class upbringing; and Profane felt utterly incapable of resisting Rachel’s demands.
After a drunken New Year’s Eve party aboard the docked ocean liner the Susanna Squaducci—wherein Profane talks to a seagull, pretends to play God (smiting sailors with points of his finger), and throws mousetraps at the boat’s watchman—Profane and Paola decide on taking a bus to New York. At a bus station in Norfolk, Profane receives a call via the paging system. It’s Rachel, who has phoned every bus stop in the nation, and now asks Profane to come home. In New York, Profane gives Paola the address to Rachel’s apartment, while Profane “yo-yo”s on the subway, riding back and forth between Times Square and Grand Central. On the train, Profane meets a group of busking Puerto Rican boys, the Mendoza family, who take Profane back to their apartment, promising Profane employment with the boys’ older brother, Angel, who hunts alligators in the Manhattan sewers.
In the second chapter, Rachel Owlglass, lover to Benny Profane, visits the office of plastic surgeon Dr. Shale Shoenmaker. Rachel is there to pay the deposit for a rhinoplasty operation for her friend, Esther Harvitz. Rachel accosts Dr. Shoenmaker, criticizing his work which profits off of anti-semitism—for Dr. Schoenmaker regularly operates on the noses of young Jewish women. Rachel begins to see humanity as a large chain of “screwers” and “screwees”—Rachel implicates even herself, seeing how she has regularly screwed over her male lovers.
Rachel lives in an apartment on the Upper West Side, paying the rent of her roommate Esther, and now Paola. Here, Esther hosts a party, attended by the “Whole Sick Crew,” a group of bohemian posers—derivative artists who merely mimic the spirit of rebellion and “soul,” when, in actuality, they conform to the ideologies of conventional magazines. The party is observed from the perspective of Herbert Stencil, who awaits any clues to further his life-long investigation into the identity of an unnamed woman, referred to pseudonymously as “V.”—a woman covertly mentioned in the journals of Herbert Stencil’s father, Sidney Stencil, a British secret agent.
The chapter ends with a brief sensory scene set in the V-Note, a jazz club where Paola drinks with three men, Winsome, Charisma, and Fu.
As the third chapter begins, Herbert Stencil lies on a sofa in Bongo-Shaftsbury’s apartment, thinking of his father’s death. He compares the death of his father to the death of another British spy, Porpentine, who was murdered in Egypt by Eric Bongo-Shaftsbury, the father of the man who owns the apartment in which Stencil now rests. Stencil first read about Porpentine’s murder in his father’s work journals.
The remainder of the chapter describes the circumstances of Porpentine’s assassination, as told through eight separate vignettes, from the perspective of eight separate characters. Set in Egypt, at the turn of the 19th century, during Britain’s occupation of the country, the first vignette records a meeting between Porpentine and another Englishman at a café near the Libyan Desert. The two Brits are mockingly observed by the café’s waiter, P. Aïeul. The second vignette records a banquet at the Austrian Consulate from the perspective of a server, Yusef. Here, Porpentine meets Mr. Goodfellow along with Victoria Wren and her younger sister, Mildred Wren. In the third vignette, Max, a vagabond who regularly begs tourists for meals, joins Porpentine, Goodfellow, Victoria, Mildred, and Bongo-Shaftsbury for a dinner, during which Max grows increasingly distressed as he begins to suspect that his hosts are merely pretending to be tourists. In the fourth vignette, Waldetar, a train conductor, tries to intervene as Porpentine fights and beats an armed Arab man in the rear train car. The fifth vignette follows a cynical cab driver, Gebrail, as he chauffeurs Porpentine about Cairo, visiting hotels and chemist shops. In the sixth vignette, a charlatan and burglar, named Girgis, watches Porpentine struggle to climb up and down the facade of a building at nighttime; Girgis thinks Porpentine is a fellow thief, but when he approaches in the dark, Porpentine mistakenly thinks Girgis is Bongo-Shaftsbury, there to kill him. In the penultimate vignette, Hanne, a barmaid at a German bierhalle in Cairo, has an anxiety attack while patrons in the beerhouse talk of politics; she overhears fragments of a conversation in which Porpentine plots his next moves. In the final vignette, a nameless spectator observes the murder of Porpentine, in the box seats of a grand theatre near Ezbekiyeh Garden.
The chapter’s title (“in which Stencil, a / quick-change artist, / does eight / imperson- / ations”) might inform our understanding of these vignettes: are these eight characters different aliases for Sidney Stencil, as he works undercover as a British secret agent?
Analysis
V. is set in the American postwar decadence of the 1950s, and Thomas Pynchon immediately introduces the tone as such: his scenes are hyperkinetic, hypersexual, and his writing itself decadent. In the introductory scene, the reader is thrown into a swarm of characters who are boozed up and hedonistic: sailors spill beer from rubber breasts, bite barmaids’ behinds, and flee the police. Pynchon’s protagonist, Benny Profane, is a self-proclaimed schlemihl, an antihero without ambition, living passively according to the whims of others, pulled along by women like Rachel and Paola: he’s likened to a yo-yo. In this world of decadence, Pynchon shows particular interest in the role of technology, and the inanimate. He portrays characters with obsessions for machinery: for example, Benny Profane’s former co-worker, Da Conho, who dashes “about in tears” when his machine gun is stolen (p. 27), or Rachel Owlglass, who Profane catches in the act of dirty-talking to her MG automobile, as she “fondle[s]" the gearshift (p. 29).
In one scene, Benny Profane urinates on a hillside, directing his stream towards the sun, timing it to the sun’s setting. Describing Profane in this scene, Pynchon writes: Profane had “some intention of pissing on the sun to put it out for good and all, this being somehow important for him. (Inanimate objects could do what they wanted. Not what they wanted because things do not want; only men. But things do what they do, and this is why Profane was pissing at the sun.)” (p. 26). Simultaneously, Profane falls to the level of the inanimate, being characterized as a “thing,” while also rising, in hubris, to the level of the cosmos, destroyer of the sun: either way, he moves away from his own humanity. Pynchon’s V.—written and set in an era haunted by the memory of the nuclear bomb and the Holocaust, but also an era of growing wealth and technological marvels—thematically explores the effect decadence has on our humanity.
If one were to diagram and graph Chapter 2, the subsequent image would be a collection of chains, circles, cycles, and reflections. Throughout the chapter, Pynchon portrays history as a repetitive, unalterable force—a never-ending relay race. For example, Dr. Schoenmaker justifies his profession, which profits off of Jewish girls’ insecurities, by saying:
“Nothing I do to a Jewish girl’s nose is going to change the noses of her children […] 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 ” (p. 48).
Reflecting on Schoenmaker’s practice, Rachel soon thereafter wonders to herself: “Schoenmaker freeloads off my roommate, she freeloads off me. Is there this long daisy chain of victimizers and victims, screwers and screwees? And if so, who is it I am screwing” (p. 49). And, in the final scene, we are introduced to McClintic Sphere, a jazz musician who is characterized as “a kind of reincarnation” of Charlie Parker (p. 60).
This cyclical view of history is amplified in the chapter’s imagery. For example, prominently placed in Dr. Schoenmaker’s office is a clock “in the form of a disk, parallel to the floor.” Waiting in the office, Rachel watches both the clock and its reflection in an adjoining mirror turn back and forth, back and forth: “here were time and reverse-time, coexisting, cancelling one another exactly out,” writes Pynchon (p. 46). Later, the Whole Sick Crew hosts a house party, and in describing the scene, Pynchon writes, “the party […] unwound like a clock’s mainspring […] seeking some easing of its own tension, some equilibrium. Near its center Rachel Owlglass was curled on the pine floor” (p. 52). Music plays, “on the record player/changer, and repeat[s], and repeat[s]; while […] the promiscuous Debby Sensay (e.g.) would be on the floor, caressed by Raoul, say, or Slab, while she ran her hand up the leg of another, sitting on the couch with her roommate—and on, in a kind of love feast or daisy chain” (p. 57). It is a scene full of cycles, both literal (i.e. Rachel curled on the floor, the record player looping), and metaphorical (i.e. a “daisy chain” of love affairs).
Chapter 3 is the first of several sections, each based in part on real historical incidents, that provide narrative insight into Herbert Stencil’s search for V. Chapter 3 is staged against the historical backdrop of 1898’s Fashoda Incident, a war scare in which the British and French imperial powers struggled for control over East Africa. Thematically, Chapter 3 largely concerns itself with identity and individuality—specifically, throughout the chapter, Pynchon blurs characters’ identities, and individuals are fractured into a larger collective. Beginning with a description of Herbert Stencil, we learn that Stencil “always referred to himself in the third person. This helped ‘Stencil’ appear as only one among a repertoire of identities” (p. 62). Here is a degree of irony, for—since the novel itself is primarily written in the third person—the reader can no longer confidently distinguish the “narrator” from Stencil himself. As the chapter continues, the assassination plot of Porpentine is observed through the fragmentary views of different characters: in other words, a unified whole is created through independent parts. Noteworthy is the changing narrative voice of each vignette: as the chapter progresses, generally speaking, the perspective moves closer to the character at hand (e.g. from a third-person omniscient, to a close third-person). In section VII, for example, the narration is largely restricted to fragments of dialogue overheard by the barmaid Hanne, our temporary protagonist, as well as Hanne’s own thoughts. In section VIII, there is no named protagonist—in fact, the final vignette only records the sensory details of Porpentine’s assassination, as though the readers themselves have become the protagonist, perceiving the event for themselves. (And, of course, from the chapter's title, it is implied that each of these characters might be an alter-ego of one individual, namely Stencil).
These questions of identity will be explored further as the novel progresses, as Pynchon explores collective thought and groupthink: the shared dreams and conspiracies that shape our world.
