Summary
Chapter 10 tracks the changing relationships between many of the novel’s New York characters. First, Esther’s affair with her plastic surgeon, Dr. Schoenmaker, grows increasingly strained as he encourages her to undergo further cosmetic surgery, post-coitus. Deeply hurt, Esther leaves him (only to return again later). She regularly visits her ex-lover, Slab, to seek advice—but he’s largely focused on his latest painting project: a series of studies of cheese danishes.
Second, Winsome and Mafia’s marriage continues to deteriorate: even though Winsome has been trying to get Rachel to help him cheat on his wife with Paola, he fights Pig Bodine for sleeping with Mafia; the next day, Winsome leaves to go drinking, and Mafia tries to seduce Benny Profane.
Third, the chapter introduces a new relationship, one between McClintic Sphere, a popular jazz musician at the V-Note club, and Ruby, a young prostitute. In one scene, the two lie together, consumed in their own thoughts. Ruby worries about her father, who lives abroad; she is hesitant to visit him. Sphere ruminates over his personal philosophy: using the model of a two-triode circuit, called a “flip-flop,” he envisions humanity as existing between two possible states, the cool—the “flop”—and the crazy—the “flip.” Soon after, Sphere begrudgingly visits Lenox, Massachusetts for a jazz festival. When he returns to New York, Ruby has packed her bags, preparing to leave, fearing that Sphere has abandoned her. He arrives just in time to stop her.
The chapter also describes Benny Profane’s new employment as a night watchman at Anthroresearch Associates, a laboratory using life-like dummies to research the body’s reaction to high altitudes, automobile accidents, and nuclear radiation. Profane begins to have regular, imaginary conversations with a dummy called SHROUD (an acronym for “synthetic human, radiation output determined”), in which SHROUD suggests the difference between humans and dummies is really quite small.
At the chapter’s end, Slab hosts a large party with the Whole Sick Crew, inviting along Herbert Stencil. At the party, Paola hands Stencil a document, written by her father, reflecting on his life in Malta during WWII: the “Confessions of Fausto Maijstral.” Stencil has been avoiding Paola, because he is afraid to learn Malta’s significance as it relates to V.—it is where his father died, and perhaps the missing link of his investigation. The following chapter is the text of Fausto’s Confessions.
Chapter 11 begins with Fausto Maijstral, advanced in years, writing an apologia to his daughter Paola, in which he documents his young adulthood as a poet in Malta during the Second World War; his reflections are interlarded with entries from his daily journal, kept during the bombing of Malta. Noteworthy is Fausto’s tendency to refer to himself in the third person, just like Herbert Stencil. The document’s early pages explain the circumstances of Paola’s conception, and Fausto’s love affair with Elena Xemxi. Paola was conceived out of wedlock; Fausto had learned of his paternity soon after Elena confessed her pregnancy to the parish’s priest, Father Avalanche. But another, unfamiliar priest—referred to as the “Bad Priest”—discouraged Elena from marrying Fausto, instead saying she must only marry Christ: only he would be forgiving of her sins. They marry, all the same.
Fausto describes the collective feeling of detachment experienced by the Maltese population during World War II: a purgatorial loss of time that resulted from the war’s daily bombardments, as the Maltese people lived from bunker to bunker, air raid to air raid. Only the children, he says, were capable of experiencing time, capable of seeing “that history had not been suspended after all.” He sees poetry in the wartime play of the children, who would pretend to be airplanes, mimicking the dogfights they’ve seen overhead.
Earlier in his life, Fausto had been studying to become a priest—before leaving the church and marrying Elena. He had made a private covenant with God: “He [God] will forget about my not answering His call if I cease to question. Simply survive, you see.” At times—especially when he would leave Elena and Paola in the bunker, to wander above ground during bomb raids—Fausto believed God had continually spared him from death because of this covenant.
Fausto recounts one particularly emotional day: a dusk-time visit to a park with Elena; storm clouds gathered, and children laughed behind the nearing palm trees; here, Elena re-avowed her love for Fausto, and revealed that the Bad Priest had encouraged her to have an abortion. The next day, Elena died in a raid. On the streets, Fausto found the Bad Priest, trapped and dying under a collapsed cellar. The Bad Priest was circled by children. They pulled at the priest’s person and clothes; a wig came off. The Bad Priest was a woman—presumably V. She had a glass eye of intricate clockwork, golden slippers over an artificial foot, fake teeth, and sapphire in her navel. Fausto administered a sacrament for the Bad Priest—risking breaking his private covenant with God.
In Chapter 12, Roony Winsome, after yet another day of fighting with Mafia (he was playing his music too loud for her to write), heads to the V-Note for a drink. Here he meets McClintic Sphere, who is also in a sour mood. Winsome tells Sphere he’s ready for a divorce. Sphere suggests they escape the city for a weekend and drive to Lenox; Winsome agrees. The two barhop across Harlem to eventually meet up with Sphere’s lover, Ruby, at her rooming-house. When Winsome and Ruby are alone together, it is revealed that Ruby is actually Paola Maijstral, leading a double life.
Esther confesses to Slab that she is pregnant with Dr. Schoenmaker’s child. Slab thinks the answer is simple: with just 300 bucks, and in less than a week, she can fly to Havana, Cuba and get a legal abortion. Esther is morally opposed to abortion, and argues with Slab. But, all the same, she sticks by his side as he begins to organize the trip. At a party with the Whole Sick Crew, Slab secures the needed three hundred dollars, getting the partygoers to each chip in towards Esther’s abortion. Esther does not object. Rachel, on the other hand, is deeply concerned for Esther, and the emotional/physical trauma an abortion might cause.
Winsome wakes up in Rachel’s apartment, thinking of defenestration (i.e. throwing someone from a window). He delivers a speech to the Whole Sick Crew, in which he matter-of-factly explains each of their shortcomings, saying they are all beyond hope. He declares that he is going to jump out the window. So he does. Jumping, Winsome hits the fire escape, three feet below. As he tries to climb over the edge of the fire escape, Pig Bodine grabs Winsome by the belt to save him. What follows is a grimly slapstick scene, as the two men play cat-and-mouse down the building’s fire escape, with Winsome ultimately failing to take his own life.
Rachel and Profane run through Idlewild Airport, trying to stop Esther from flying to Cuba for her abortion. They can’t find her. The airport is packed and Slab is there, too, actively trying to stop the two from reaching Esther. Profane stumbles into Fina Mendoza, his former lover, as she prepares to fly to San Juan. Profane, for no reason other than a simple possessive nostalgia, attempts to persuade Fina from leaving.
The chapter ends with McClintic Sphere and Ruby driving peacefully along the Hudson. Sphere has a small epiphany in the form of an aphorism. He shares it aloud to Ruby: “Keep cool but care.”
Analysis
Inanimate objects are one of the major motifs of Pynchon’s V. (the word “inanimate” appears 59 times in the book!). Specifically, there is a creeping fear that humans are not all that dissimilar from the inanimate (i.e. lacking in agency / merely products of their environment). This cynical theme is emphasized in Chapter 10, specifically in Benny Profane’s imagined conversations with Anthroresearch’s crash test dummies. From the get-go, Profane feels “a certain kinship with SHOCK [one of the dummies], which was the first inanimate schlemihl he'd ever encountered” (p. 285). He begins to speak with one of the dummies, SHROUD, who tells Profane that he’ll also be inanimate one day: “‘What's it like,’ he [Profane] said. / Better than you have it. / ‘Wha.’ / Wha yourself. Me and SHOCK are what you and everybody will be someday” (p. 286). The conversation continues, with SHROUD telling Profane that humans probably lack souls, and that the human race will likely collapse from a (self-inflicted?) accident.
But the most explicit example appears in a later conversation, when SHROUD speaks of graves:
“Acres of old cars, piled up ten high in rusting tiers. A graveyard for cars. If I could die, that's what my graveyard would look like. / ‘I wish you would. Look at you, masquerading like a human being. You ought to be junked. Not burned or cremated.’ / Of course. Like a human being. Now remember, right after the war, the Nuremberg war trials? Remember the photographs of Auschwitz? Thousands of Jewish corpses, stacked up like those poor car-bodies. Schlemihl: It's already started” (p. 295).
In a grim simile, likening Jewish corpses to cars in a junkyard, SHROUD speaks to the inhumanity that has already been cemented into history—the ways in which humans have already treated one another as inanimate objects—suggesting humans have since lost part of what makes them human. The passage ends with Profane calling Hitler “crazy” (optimistically, an outlier). SHROUD responds: “Hitler, Eichmann, Mengele […] Has it occurred to you there may be no more standards for crazy or sane, now that it's started?” (p. 295).
This fear of the inanimate—which, in other words, is a symbolic fear that humans lack free will—underscores a number of the characterizations and relationships present in Chapter 10. For example, Esther is unable to break off her love affair with Dr. Schoenmaker: despite saying otherwise, she keeps coming back, seemingly unable to control her impulses.
Chapter 11 expands upon many of the novel’s recurring themes. It deals with the cyclicity of history—now, against a backdrop of a people forced into a standstill, as the Maltese people wait for a reprieve (see passage: “A wheel, this diagram: Fortune’s wheel […]” (p. 338-339). So, too, does the chapter deal with inanimacy, especially in the Bad Priest’s (V.’s) death scene: V.’s body is revealed to be increasingly artificial, featuring an artificial eye, dentures, a fake foot. V. is becoming more and more some sort of cyborg (p. 343). The motif of wind returns (i.e. wind as an agent, shaping human life): “the wind was the wrong way: from the future, driving all scent back to its past” (p. 335).
But one thematic exploration—largely unique to Chapter 11—is Fausto Maijstral’s discussion of art and art’s significance:
“Living as he does much of the time in a world of metaphor, the poet is always acutely conscious that metaphor has no value apart from its function; that it is a device, an artifice. So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation […] Fausto's kind are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are […]
It is the "role" of the poet, this 20th Century. To lie” (p. 325-326).
There are several portrayals of art and artists throughout V.—for example, Slab as a painter, Mafia Winsome as a writer, and McClintic Sphere as a jazz musician—but often Pynchon portrays these artists sardonically and/or critically: the Whole Sick Crew (including Slab) are characterized as derivative and lacking in “soul” (p. 56); Mafia’s novels, meanwhile, make use of “disturbingly predictable racial alignments” (p. 126). Fausto Maijstral as poet, and McClintic Sphere as musician, seem to be the only two artists Pynchon portrays with sympathy. He gives each character substantial dialogues, in which they philosophize: Fausto on art as deception, and Sphere on the binary of crazy and cool. Perhaps, then, Fausto’s view of art—as a necessary way to hide uncomfortable truths—and Sphere’s catchy aphorisms—"keep cool but care"—are closest to Pynchon’s own understanding of art, providing insight into Pynchon’s artistic goals while writing V.
Amidst the novel’s ever-present fatalism—in Chapter 12 alone, we see Esther passively resign herself to an abortion, and Roony Winsome attempt to take his own life (failing, even, at this)—by the end of the chapter, a glimpse of optimism finally appears, in the form of McClintic Sphere’s personal philosophy: “keep cool but care” (p. 366). In Chapter 10, Sphere has previously discussed a binary theory of life, inspired by two-triode circuits, a.k.a the flip-flop circuit. In Sphere’s eyes, people either flip, or they flop: later, he uses a similar concept, but translates “flip” and “flop” into “crazy” and “cool.” He says:
“That war [WWII], the world flipped. But come '45, and they flopped. Here in Harlem they flopped. Everything got cool—no love, no hate, no worries, no excitement. Every once in a while, though, somebody flips back. Back to where he can love […] But you take a whole bunch of people flip at the same time and you’ve got a war. Now war is not loving, is it?” (p. 293).
Sphere identifies a tension—between crazy and cool, sense and sensibility—and attempts to escape it: can there be a way to remain cool, and still love, i.e. to keep cool and care? Or is it an oxymoron—fitting of Pynchon’s ironic tone? A number of Pynchon scholars find within Sphere’s aphorism the central moral teaching of Pynchon’s writing: W.T. Lhamon calls the aphorism Pynchon’s “creed,” and David Witzling calls it a “temptingly simple rubric through which to interpret Pynchon’s complex plots” (Witzling, Pynchon’s Identity Problem). Regardless of whether “keep cool but care” accurately reflects Pynchon’s personal ideology, it shows the moral questions underlying Pynchon’s writing: how should we cope with tragedy?; through emotions, or through detachment?; through shame or faith, optimism or fatalism?
