Summary
Chapter 13 begins with Stencil, Paola, and Profane boarding an ocean liner to set sail for Malta, from New York. The narrative rewinds, and the remainder of the chapter narrates the events leading up to the trio’s departure. Benny Profane, for once in his life, feels rooted: he has a lover in Rachel, a steady job as a night watchman, and a home living with Esther, Paola, and Rachel. But the stability is short-lived—in Chapter 12, Profane predicted that the inanimate would “take revenge when he was looking for it least,” and so it does. One morning, Profane’s alarm clock malfunctions, he puts his shoes on the wrong feet, he misses his train… a chain of misfortunes culminating in Profane losing his job after, in his absence, the laboratory’s circuitry blows a fuse, setting off the fire sprinklers. Rachel tries to get Profane back on his feet, encouraging him to apply for more jobs, but Profane has given up trying to be anything but a schlemihl. He begins to hang out regularly with the Whole Sick Crew; they introduce him to drugs, and to the artwork/artists (the “proper nouns”) of the Western Canon.
After Profane spends a day drinking with Pig Bodine, the two head back to Profane’s apartment. Here, Pig attempts to rape Paola. Profane stops him. Apparently, Pig owes Profane a favor. The narrative flashes back to Pig and Profane’s time in the Navy, when Profane had indirectly saved Pig’s life. Pig Bodine, having heard that radio frequencies can cause temporary infertility—saving him from needing extra condoms—climbed the ship’s mast to access the radar antenna, where he planned on microwaving his crotch. Profane had hidden stolen hamburger meat near the antenna, and before reaching the antenna, Pig smelled the scent of cooking meat. If he hadn’t smelled Profane’s burning patties, Pig would’ve burned himself. Pig promised to return the favor. Years later, at Paola’s bedside, Profane finally redeems the favor to get Pig off of Paola. With Pig gone, Paola tries to seduce Profane, but he rejects her advances. She asks him, “Then why did you make Pig go away?”
In the final section of Chapter 13, Stencil tries to coax Profane into coming to Malta with him and Paola. Because Malta may provide the climax of Stencil’s investigation into V., he needs someone to distract Paola while he’s there: he says Profane is the perfect pick, because Paola is in love with Profane. As they talk, Stencil walks Profane to Dr. Eigenvalue’s dental office, and cons Profane into performing a heist: breaking through a ninth-story window, they steal Dr. Eigenvalue’s precious set of dentures, cast in rare metals.
Set in Paris, 1913, Chapter 14 follows Mélanie l’Heuremaudit, a fifteen-year-old ballerina, who has fled from school, living alone off of regular checks from her careless mother (her father, at this point, is absent). She visits Monsieur Itague, an impresario, who—through an untold prior agreement—makes Mélanie the principal dancer in his upcoming production: an avant-garde ballet, entitled L’Enlèvement des Vierges Chinoises (or, Rape of the Chinese Virgins). It features automaton dancers.
Mélanie is introduced to one of the theatre’s main patrons, an unnamed woman in her mid-thirties. She is said to be V. The two enter into a sexual relationship, marked by fetishism and objectification: in fct, V. calls Mélanie her “fetiche” (fetish). Regularly, the two sit in V.’s loft—“V. on the pouf watching Mélanie on the bed; Mélanie watching herself in the mirror.”
The chapter ends with Mélanie in performance, dancing Itague’s new ballet. In the choreography’s climax, Mélanie is to be impaled in the crotch by a pointed pole—inspired by Itague’s reading of violence against Native Americans in America. Mélanie is supposed to wear a protective metal undergarment, locking her to the pole, protecting her from harm. But, in the real performance, Mélanie does not wear the safety device, and she is fatally impaled by the pole. It is unclear whether Mélanie forgot to or chose not to wear the device.
At Rachel’s apartment, with Stencil and Paola, Benny Profane realizes his involvement in the burglary of Eigenvalue’s dentures was likely a means to coerce him into coming to Malta with Stencil and Paola. The police might be after him. Paola, once more, tries to convince Profane to join her in Malta—touching him affectionately. Rachel walks in as Paola hugs Profane, and despite Profane’s objections, comes to the conclusion that Profane and Paola are having an affair. Rachel spends the next week sleeping with Roony Winsome.
Stencil, Profane, and Pig Bodine fly to Washington D.C. for a week-long trip: Stencil is there to secure documents needed for the larger trip to Malta; Pig and Profane are there to party. Pig and Profane meet a pair of government girls, named Flip and Flop, with whom they spend the next handful of days drinking and having sex. Eventually, Pig and Profane are detained and placed in the jail’s drunk tank. Here, Pig Bodine—who, all this time, has been AWOL from the Navy—is sent back to Norfolk, on charges of desertion.
Profane spends one last sentimental night with Rachel, sharing a bottle of champagne, before leaving New York for Malta.
Analysis
V. is in large part a novel about individual agency and free will. Often, Pynchon points to a loss of agency, in part caused by group ideology (e.g. fascism) and technologies of control (e.g. the bomb). Chapter 13 begins by suggesting that Benny Profane, in setting sail for Malta, is once again riding “Fortune’s yo-yo” and “drift[ing] wherever Fortune willed. If Fortune could will” (p. 367). Here, Pynchon does not even guarantee Fortune itself the ability to will: such is the extent of his skepticism.
And yet, over the course of the chapter, Pynchon undermines his own skepticism of agency, instead suggesting that to be skeptical of free will is, ironically, an act of free will. It is quite a recursive idea. For example, throughout the novel, Benny Profane has been characterized as a “schlemihl,” someone prone to accidents and failures—in other words, stuck on Fortune’s naughty list. Profane accepts this label, unwaveringly so. However, in Chapter 13, Rachel Owlglass suggests this label is, in part, inaccurate: “You are not a schlemihl,” she tells Profane. “You’re nobody special. Everybody is some kind of a schlemihl” (p. 384). Moreover, she suggests Profane wants to be a schlemihl, saying he has a “fear of losing” his “precious schlemihlhood” (p. 384). Suddenly, Profane’s resignation to Fortune is an act of agency, as much as any other. The idea is reinforced by the chapter’s subtitle: “in which the yo-yo string / is revealed as / a state of / mind” (p. 367).
This ironic view of agency—in which whim sits side by side with will—is also increasingly present in Stencil’s investigation into V.’s identity. In Chapter 13, Benny Profane asks Stencil why he has focused so greatly on V. Stencil’s response reveals a certain arbitrariness to his focus:
“Why not?" said Stencil. "His giving you any clear reason would mean he'd already found her. Why does one decide to pick up one girl in a bar over another. If one knew why, she would never be a problem. Why do wars start: if one knew why there would be eternal peace. So in this search the motive is part of the quarry […] Of course Stencil could have chosen the War, or Russia to investigate. But he doesn’t have that much time" (p. 386)
Like Albert Camus’ idea of the absurd hero, Stencil has fully committed himself to a search without clear meaning, perhaps even a futile one. He simultaneously exhibits a remarkably strong will (dedicating the entirety of his life to V.) and a non-existent will (having no larger purpose behind his search: he doesn’t know why himself).
The chapter ends with a short exchange between Stencil and Profane. After successfully stealing Dr. Eigenvalue’s dentures, they reflect on the peculiar calm of the New York day: “‘How quiet,’ said Stencil. […] ‘So what year is it.’ / ‘It is 1913,’ said Stencil. / ‘Why not,’ said Profane’” (p. 392). In the chapter’s final line, Profane mirrors Stencil’s earlier words, repeating the justification of “why not.” In this moment, Pynchon affirms human agency, albeit absurdly. Stencil and Profane have the “power” to reverse time, returning to 1913, before both World Wars—and simply because they say it’s so.
Chapter 14 expands on Pynchon’s thematic explorations of the inanimate. Dolls and mannequins are present throughout the chapter: Itague’s ballet features automaton dancers; Mélanie has a nightmare in which she is a wind-up doll; waking up, she cuddles a lay figure (or dummy) in the bedroom. Each of these details serves to create an uncanny proximity between humans and the inanimate. But, crucially, Chapter 14 introduces another form of inanimacy: that of sexual objects and fetishes. The chapter’s young protagonist, Mélanie, is unfortunately the subject of this objectification. For example, director Itague looks at her with “his eyes parallel to a line connecting her hip-points” (p. 396); later Itague says she “functions as a mirror” and is a “ghost” of “mesmeri[zation]” and “self-arousal;” he even refers to her as “it” (p. 399).
V., appearing as the theatre’s patroness, is even more explicit, openly telling Mélanie that she is “not real but an object of pleasure,” that she is a “fetish” (p. 404). The two women enter into a love affair, characterized by stillness: they simply sit and stare, V. at Mélanie, and Mélanie at herself. Their love, in a very literal sense, is not animated.
The chapter suggests a certain transformative power in the human gaze—more broadly, human belief. Through sexual leers, Mélanie is made less human, and more object.
Pages 408 to 412 contain the novel’s most overtly philosophical exploration into inanimacy, wherein Pynchon directly identifies V. with the inanimate, suggesting she is part of a “conspiracy leveled against the animate world” (p. 411). Pynchon writes that V. has always existed within the inanimate world, in so far as she has always existed within the “two-dimensional” world of tourism—a world “if not created then at least described to its fullest by Karl Baedeker of Leipzig [a famous travel guide author]” (p. 408-409). This is Pynchon at his most meta; Karl Baedeker was a major source of research for the novel’s historical chapters—including Chapter 14. In acknowledging that V. is but an object of Baedeker’s world, Pynchon is implicitly recognizing V. as an object of his own writing—inanimate because she is merely a character of his own fiction.
In the crux of these philosophical passages, Pynchon writes that V. and Mélanie’s “love was in its way only another version of tourism; for as tourists bring into the world as it has evolved part of another, and eventually create a parallel society of their own in every city, so the Kingdom of Death is served by fetish-constructions like V.'s, which represent a kind of infiltration” (p. 411). It is an argument that links fetishization to globalization (“tourism”), fetishization to colonialism (“create a parallel society,” “infiltration”), fetishization to death—and V. is made the symbol of it all.
V. is full of reflections and doublings, mirrors and binaries: Chapter 15 further complicates these motifs. For example, while vacationing in Washington D.C., Benny Profane and Pig Bodine meet a pair of “government girls” named Flip and Flop; the four spend the week partying. The characters of Flip and Flop are overt allusions to McClintic Sphere’s earlier dialogue, namely his philosophy of antipodes (i.e. crazy vs. cool, flip vs. flop). Ironically, the characters of Flip and Flop are near-indistinguishable: they work together, commute together, live together; they are called “spectral sisters” (p. 418). So, in effect, Flip and Flop are identical, while Sphere’s “flip” and “flop” are opposites: in other words, Pynchon implies that similarity and difference can coexist. A similar relationship is present in the subtitle of Chapter 15, “Sahha,” which is a Maltese salutation; the chapter ends with Paola and Profane saying, “Sahha,” to bid farewell to the Whole Sick Crew. In the next chapter, Paola is greeted by her bygone husband, who says, “Sahha.” In this moment, Pynchon specifically draws attention to the fact that sahha means both hello and goodbye (p. 442). With the word sahha—like flip and flop—opposites are made one.
(Another doubling to consider: in Flip and Flop’s apartment, while listening to Pat Boone’s music, Flop remarks: “You have the same initials […] Pat Boone, Pig Bodine” (p. 420). One might notice, going further, the mirrored initials of Pig Bodine and Benny Profane: P.B. and B.P. Are Pig and Benny, then, another pair of foils? There’s a lot of doubling here… Flip reflects Flop… Pig reflects Benny… Flip AND Flop reflect Pig AND Benny…).
