Summary
Chapter 4 begins with Esther Harvitz, Rachel’s roommate, taking a late-night bus across Manhattan to visit her plastic surgeon, Dr. Schoenmaker. The two are having an affair. Going back in time, the narration provides a history of Shoenmaker’s teenage years, when he served as a mechanic in the first World War; this is when he first decided to pursue plastic surgery. Schoenmaker had developed a schoolboy crush on an older soldier, Evan Godolphin, a debonair pilot. In the battle of Meuse-Argonne, Godolphin’s plane crash-lands, leaving his face torn apart. The army medics repair Godolphin’s face using dubious surgery techniques—a makeshift solution that will only lead to infection, and an irreparably damaged face. Schoenmaker makes it his life mission to do better, to be an upstanding plastic surgeon. Since then, his moral enthusiasm has waned, but he remains committed to the career.
The second half of the chapter provides a grisly, step-by-step description of Esther’s rhinoplasty, now completed. Esther had been fully conscious, her nose numbed with novacaine, as Dr. Schoenmaker and his assistants operated on her—piercing deep into her nostrils with needles, chipping away bone with a chisel, slicing cartilage with scissors, all while making sexual innuendos and speaking in mock-German accents. Esther left the surgery with an altered sense of self: she is increasingly aroused and increasingly passive around males (leading her to Schoenmaker’s bed).
Chapter 5 finds Benny Profane in the sewers of New York, employed to hunt alligators—orphaned pets flushed down toilets, relicts of the city’s commercial craze for baby-gators. Profane works with Angel, the oldest brother in a Puerto Rican family that has temporarily welcomed Profane into their household (he sleeps in the apartment’s bathtub). Armed with a shotgun and a flashlight, crawling through sewage pipes, Profane and Angel pursue a black-and-white alligator. But Angel is drunk on the job, and, as consequence, reprimanded by the foreman. So Profane is left to hunt solo. He follows the gator into the Eastern regions of the sewers, known as Fairing’s Parish. Apparently, during the Great Depression, a priest named Father Fairing took to living in these sewers, where he attempted to convert rats to Christianity; he believed rats would inherit the Earth, and so needed God. He left behind a journal documenting his murine missionary work, which was found later by sewage workers, and passed between the workers as a curiosity, before being stored in the Vatican. In it, Father Fairing describes his changing relations with the rats: he gave the rats names, had religious debates with them, and even, according to the “apocrypha,” had sexual relations with a female rat named Veronica. In this part of the sewer, known as Fairing’s Parish, Benny Profane finally shoots and kills the alligator; the reptile is inexplicably glowing.
The scene changes to a thirteen-roomed apartment in New York’s Upper West Side. Here lives Gouverneur “Roony” Winsome, an eccentric music producer, and his wife, Mafia, a cult novelist who writes thousand page fictions on “Heroic Love”—namely, the virtue of lots and lots of sex. The apartment is also home to Charisma and Fu, who were first introduced in Chapter 2, at the V-Note jazz club with Paola. Winsome and Mafia’s marriage is strained, both seemingly considering divorce. Winsome has taken an interest in Paola, who is new to his circle of friends. The phone rings, and Rachel Owlglass is on the line, calling to see if Winsome has seen Paola or Herbert Stencil—she suspects they may be together.
The chapter ends in Rachel’s apartment, where she is unexpectedly visited by Fu and Pig Bodine. Pig Bodine is also looking for Paola; he’s a good friend of Paola’s separated husband, Pappy Hod, and is looking for Paola on Pappy’s behalf. The trio talks philosophy until the phone rings: Herbert Stencil has been shot in the ass while looking for clues in the sewers (the female rat, Veronica, is referred to by her initials in Father Fairing’s journals—perhaps a link to the enigmatic “V.”). Rachel, Fu, and Pig Bodine go to help Stencil.
To celebrate Benny Profane’s first shift hunting alligators, Geronimo and Angel, and Angel’s sister Josephine (“Fina”), take Profane clubbing and bar-hopping. They drink for 24 hours. Fina takes romantic interest in Profane, who evades her sexual advancements in the weeks that follow. Fina is the “spiritual leader,” and “mother to the troops,” of a NYC gang called The Playboys—the gang doesn’t have its own turf, but rather its members work as “mercenaries,” fighters for other gangs.
Profane, Angel, and Geronimo visit Little Italy for the Feast of San Ercole dei Rinoceronti, a street festival. The three men hope to get laid. Geronimo catcalls a trio of teenage girls, no older than fourteen, and the men begin to flirt with the girls. One of the girls, Lucille, says to Profane, “Catch me,” before running away. Profane is urged by the other girls to chase her, and so he does, following her into a house-party, filled with members of The Playboys. Profane finds Lucille in a backroom, lying on a pool table with her legs spread. He unzips his fly. Immediately, a fight breaks out on the adjacent streets, and Profane hears Angel crying for help. Profane zips up and runs to find Angel. Fina, beloved by the gangs, struts along the street and creates a ceasefire. Profane worries that The Playboys will one day sexually assault Fina.
As the Sewer Department loses funding, Fina encourages Profane to find a real job—steady employment. She arranges a job interview for him as a clerk at Outlandish Records, owned by Roony Winsome. Profane doubts he will get the job—or rather, is confident that he won’t—and so walks out of the job interview before he is even called up from the waiting room. He goes to a bar with Angel and Geronimo. Mrs. Mendoza (Angel and Fina’s mother) finds the three after the bar’s last call, and asks Angel if he has seen Fina, who has gone missing. Profane and Angel scour the city, block by block, until they hear the sounds of fighting. They hear a scream, which sounds like Fina’s voice. As police sirens approach, Angel and Profane find The Playboys’ clubhouse and break down its locked door. At the end of the hall, behind a door, Fina lies naked on a cot, with empty eyes and a smiling face. Angel enters the room and closes the door. Profane walks away, and decides it’s time to move out of the Mendozas’ apartment.
Analysis
Throughout V., and in particular Chapter 4, Pynchon juxtaposes sexuality and pleasure with gore and cruelty. The present action of the chapter is Esther’s rhinoplasty, described in all its gory detail; for example, Pynchon writes, “He sawed through the nasal bones on each side, separating them from the cheekbones. He then took a chisel and inserted it through one nostril, pushing it as high as he could, until it touched bone” (p. 107). At the same time, the scene takes on an overtly sexual tone: Esther is characterized as “even (a little?) sexually aroused” (p. 104), and Schoenmaker’s assistant, Trench, makes dirty innuendoes while inserting a hypodermic needle into Esther’s nose, “chanting, ‘Stick it in… pull it out… stick it in.. ooh that was good… pull it out..’ and tittering softly above Esther's eyes” (p. 105).
In addition, Dr. Schoenmaker repeatedly speaks to Esther in a mock-German accent during the procedure, saying, “Twenty-two years of social unhappiness, nicht wahr?” and “Now ve shorten das septum, ja” (p. 107). Considering Esther is a Jewish girl altering her nose—one of the most stereotyically denigrated physical attributes of Jewish individuals—and considering that the section is immediately prefaced by Schoenmaker’s experiences in World War I, it is hard not to draw allusions to World War II and the Holocaust when Schoenmaker takes on this German persona with Esther. These are deeply sinister moments. The chapter ends with Esther pursuing Dr. Schoenmaker sexually, and the two ultimately having sex, role-playing as though it were non-consensual: “‘No,’ she cried. ‘You have worked on many ways of saying no. No meaning yes. That no I don’t like. Say it differently.’ / ‘No,’ with a little moan. / ‘Different. Again.’ / ‘No,’ this time a smile, eyelids at half-mast. (p. 109-110). With Esther being Schoenmaker’s patient; with Schoenmaker being almost twenty years Esther’s elder; with Esther characterized as overly passive and Schoenmaker overly assertive; the reader is left wondering how consensual this relationship really is. Pynchon makes the line between pleasure and pain uncomfortably close; it is a recurring theme that appears throughout the novel, especially when Pynchon portrays cultural decadence, showing how societal prosperity is tightly knit with societal exploitation (e.g. in Chapter 9’s siege party).
Pynchon’s writing, often, can be understood as an actualization of the apocryphal—in other words, Pynchon treats folklore and dreams with the same depth that he treats reality and history. In Chapter 5, Benny Profane enters the subterranean world of the New York City sewage system, working as a hired crocodile hunter; he’s hunting former pets flushed down toilets. This plot-point does, in fact, have some historical basis: in mid-19th century New York, there really was a consumer fad of buying baby crocodiles as pets, and many of them did end up being flushed down toilets. But few of these crocs survived, despite rumors otherwise, and there certainly wasn’t a full-scale government task force to hunt these former pets. In this example, Pynchon takes a real event and combines it with its folkloric counterparts, creating a narrative where what is real is no longer distinguishable from what is myth. The same treatment of fact and fiction is evident in Chapter 5’s story of Father Fairing, a priest who proselytized to sewer rats. In Pynchon’s world, Fairing’s actions—his supposed religious debates (even sexual relations) with talking rodents—are accepted by Pynchon’s characters, and with little skepticism: Fairing’s journal is even archived at the Vatican’s library. Pynchon’s refusal to segregate the truth from the untruth is a crucial part of the novel’s thematic explorations: namely, the power of conspiracy, and the human need for myth (in the face of painful truths).
Towards the end of Chapter 6, as Benny Profane waits for a job interview, there is a briefly magical encounter between Profane and a passing mailman: telepathically, Profane hears the messenger say, “Who are you trying to kid? Listen to the wind” (p. 148). Immediately after, Profane decides to leave the office, abandoning his interview altogether.
Wind appears as a motif throughout V., and in this exchange with the mailman we get one of Pynchon’s more overtly metaphorical usages of wind: listening to the wind is to follow the path of least resistance, to accept the random currents of nature—in this case, for Profane simply to give up, to let himself be carried passively by the wind like an inanimate dandelion seed. It emphasizes a certain fatalism underlying Profane’s character, a fatalism that repeats throughout the chapter: for example, Profane cynically believes Fina is “overdue” for a gang bang (p. 145); and he thinks it impossible to change himself for the better, saying a “schlemihl is a schlemihl” (p. 147). With wind as a proxy, Benny Profane is characterized as an individual who resigns himself to fate: predetermined, inflexible, natural.
The chapter ends with a scene of gang violence, in which Fina is found, after having appeared to be sexually assaulted. Profane’s morbid prediction has come true; and the night outside is described as having “become cold and windy” (p. 150). If there is any indication that Pynchon shares in Profane’s fatalism, this may be it.
