V. (Symbol / Motif)
The titular V. is the novel’s focal point: cracking its significance is to understand the book. Thomas Pynchon, in describing his writing development during college, says, “the Cornell seminars taught him the way of crafting a fiction around one central metaphor that unifies its sometimes very disparate and complex elements of character, imagery, and action" (Weisenburger, Thomas Pynchon at Twenty-Two). To adopt Pynchon’s language: V. is the novel’s “central metaphor.”
But Pynchon deliberately obscures V.’s symbolic meaning—or, rather, buries its meaning in the initial’s seemingly bottomless set of interpretations. With V. commonly portrayed as a succubus figure, might V. be a subversion of the Virgin archetype? Venus? Mound of Venus? Set before and after the World Wars, might V. be an ironic portrayal of Victory? V-Day? German V-Bombs? Or is V. Western civilization? She does hang “on the Western wall” (p. 163).
In the novel, V. is directly linked to several women characters (i.e. Victoria, Veronica), as well as a rat, various regions from Venezuela to Valletta, Malta to the mythical civilization of Vheissu… For “one central metaphor,” V. is certainly polyphonic.
All the same, there are certain general characteristics of these many V.’s, with which we can approach an understanding. Arguably, the most significant—and most frequent—characteristic of V. is her gradual movement from human to inanimate. Consider V. the woman, with her many alter-egos, from her youth as Victoria Wren to her death as the Bad Priest: over the course of her life, Pynchon gradually introduces more bionic components to her person. By the time of her death, V. has a glass eye, fake teeth, a studded navel, and artificial feet. From these details, V. seems to associate with the novel’s larger theme of the inanimate, and the twentieth century’s loss of humanity (to technology).
In Chapter 7, titled “She hangs on the / Western / wall”, V. takes several inanimate forms—as Vheissu, Venezuela, and The Birth of Venus—each of which relates to a character’s dreams: Godolphin’s search for meaning, Mantissa’s search for companionship, and the Gaucho’s search for independence. This chapter offers another crucial portrayal of V., characterizing V. as a dream, i.e. the desired object. Godolpin, in his words, describes V. as a “dream of annihilation” (p. 206). But who performs the annihilation? V. or the dreamer?
Inanimate Objects (Motif)
Inanimate objects are a major motif in V. Some characters are obsessed with the inanimate: for example, Rachel is sexually involved with her car. Some characters are oppressed by the inanimate: for example, Benny Profane, as a schlemihl, regularly experiences misfortune at the hands of malfunctioning technology.
One of Profane’s oft-repeated fears is that he has no more agency than an inanimate object. The novel’s many details magnify this fear, as Pynchon includes countless objects that bear an uncanny resemblance to humans: crash test dummies, lay figures, automatons, even a secret agent with a switch on his arm, and an artist who wires himself to a television set.
The thematic significance of inanimate objects is, perhaps, best captured in an imagined conversation between Benny Profane and a crash test dummy. The dummy says, “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 […] 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). Inanimate objects are so greatly emphasized in V. because Pynchon’s writing is largely a response to the historical cruelties of the twentieth century, events in which humans were stripped of their humanity, and treated as objects.
Mirrors (Symbol / Motif)
Mirrors appear throughout the novel. Kurt Mondaugen voyeuristically uses mirrors in Foppl’s mansion to spy on Vera Meroving. Mélanie l’Heuremaudit is characterized as a “mirror” that reflects the desires of men (p. 399). Stencil describes thinking he found V. in a whorehouse with mirrors (p. 387). Pynchon describes Porpentine’s death, writing, “Vision must be the last to go. There must also be a nearly imperceptible line between an eye that reflects and an eye that receives” (p. 94). And so on.
The first prominent description of a mirror is the mirror in Dr. Schoenmaker’s waiting room, which reflects a clock. With this mirror, Pynchon associates mirrors with the passing of time, even lumping the two into a singular concept: “did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time” (p. 46). This is an important association, for V. is thematically concerned with the cyclical nature of history—i.e. the mirroring of historical events. Pynchon repeats the phrase of “mirror-time” to describe Kurt Mondaugen’s trip to South Africa (p. 230). Throughout Mondaugen’s story, historical events are mirrored: the guests play dress-up, as though they were from an earlier era; Mondaugen, in delirium, experiences vivid flashbacks to the Herero Genocide; and these violent flashbacks are explicitly mirrored in the chapter’s end, as the local Bondel population is bombed. Mondaugen’s story is one clear example of Pynchon’s exploration into “mirror-time,” and the depressing monotony of cruelty.
Music (Formal Motif)
A unique formal element of Pynchon’s writing is his use of music, wherein characters regularly break into song, with lyrics transcribed for the reader. Really, one could call V. a “musical.” The presence of song in the text serves multiple purposes: it creates a vivid and playful tone, while also countering the text’s realism. Pynchon can use song to imbue lyricism into his writing. For example, in Chapter 9, Pynchon uses song to expand on the chapter’s theme of shared dreams. Earlier, Godolphin tells Vera Meroving: “Whether we like it or not that war destroyed a kind of privacy, perhaps the privacy of dream” (p. 248). Shortly thereafter, Mondaugen sings a lullaby to Godolphin, including such lyrics as “Ills are many, blessings few, / But dreams tonight will shelter you” and “Should the Angel come this night […] Dreams will help you not at all” (p. 254). A song like this can create distance between the reader and the narrative, wherein Pynchon—rather than aiming for illusion or verisimilitude—draws attention to the literary and fictive nature of his writing, encouraging the reader to consider his writing as symbolic, rather than factual.
Wind (Motif)
Wind features throughout V., sometimes as a simple scenic device, at other times as a more complex symbol. Several times over, Pynchon personifies wind. For example, after describing McClintic Sphere’s jazz music, Pynchon ends the scene as follows: “Outside the wind had its own permanent gig. And was still blowing” (p. 60). Or, another example: while waiting for a job interview Benny Profane hears in his head, “Who are you trying to kid? Listen to the wind” (p. 148). Subsequently, Profane abandons the job interview, accepting failure before he even tries for success: “He listened to the wind” (p. 148). In these examples, through personification, Pynchon gives the wind agency. In the latter example, the wind is treated by Benny Profane as an unalterable agent—something that should not be fought, but rather accepted—as though the wind were a symbol of fate and/or fortune (or even: the yo-yo’s hand).
It may be significant, as well, to consider the Maijstral family—for “maijstral” is the Maltese word for a mistral wind (i.e. a northwesterly wind). Fausto acknowledges his namesake, saying, “Myself: what am I if not a wind, my very name a hissing of queer zephyrs though the carob trees? I stand in time between the two winds, my will no more than a puff of air” (p. 311). For one reason or another, Pynchon has symbolically grouped Paola and Fausto with the wind. Later in Fausto’s confessions, he writes, “Now the winter’s gregale brings in bombers from the north […] But is the wind any part of us? Has it anything at all to do with us? […] We cannot expect more of the bombs than of the wind” (p. 322). The wind is significant for Fausto, and likely Pynchon, because it exists outside the bounds of human control: it is an unpredictable and unconquerable force—something that always exists beyond “expectation.”
In the novel’s final image—the wreckage of Sidney Stencil’s ship—there is a notable stillness, and lack of any wind: “[W]hitecaps, kelp islands, any of a million flatnesses which should catch thereafter part of the brute sun's spectrum—showed nothing at all of what came to lie beneath, that quiet June day” (p. 492). Has the wind, even temporarily, died, too?
