The Inanimate
If Benny Profane is the novel’s protagonist, then every inanimate object—from a machine gun to an alarm clock—is the antagonist. Profane believes in a “law of retribution” between him and the inanimate world, in which he is the constant loser: he is a schlemihl, prone to mishaps and misfirings. He will always trip on his laces.
This is not the end of Profane’s uncomfortable relationship with inanimate objects. In fact, Pynchon repeatedly likens Profane to various objects: he is a “yo-yo” (p. 10), he is a “thing” (p. 26), he is not too different from a scientific dummy (p. 286). This is part of a larger theme in the novel: a creeping loss of humanity, symbolically portrayed in various characters. We are first introduced to Rachel Owlglass, in Chapter 1, as a woman in love with her own car. Chapter 14’s prima ballerina, the young Mélanie l’Heuremaudit, is made inanimate through sexual objectification and fetishization (poetically, she performs alongside automatons). Live alligators become “consumer-objects,” “kids’ toys” (p. 146). Cairo’s deserts intrude on all land, on anything living: “Soon, nothing. Soon only the desert” (p. 82). And so on. Perhaps most significant, though, is the gradual transformation of the enigmatic V., whose person, over the course of the novel, becomes more and more inanimate, as body parts are replaced with their bionic components, from a glass eye to an artificial foot. At the heart of these symbolic details is Pynchon’s concern with humanity’s relationship to technology: a tool of progress, yes, but also a tool of dehumanization.
Flip / Flop
One of the novel’s most famous lines, “Keep cool but care,” is spoken by McClintic Sphere, and is a potential solution to one of the novel’s central thematic concerns: how to cope with intense experiences (whether it be war or heart-break). Throughout V., Sphere develops and expands a personal philosophy, in which the world, from his perspective, is in constant flux between two poles: the flip and the flop, the crazy and the cool, the emotional and the unemotional. Sphere 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” (p. 293). Pynchon’s novel, in large part, is a response to the two world wars, and their aftermath. He implies that humanity has been fundamentally altered in the twentieth century: take, for example, this quote from SHROUD, a crash test dummy: “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). The twentieth century ushered in new (or, at least, magnified) forms of “crazy”—e.g. weapons of mass destruction, the Holocaust, widespread extremism—and, now, we are left searching for new “standards,” as Pynchon puts it. In many ways, V. is a search for these standards—and “keep cool but care” is the ethos of this search.
Dreams
Dreams are an important part of Thomas Pynchon’s V. Signor Montissa, about to steal Botticelli's Birth of Venus, comments that she is like “a gaudy dream, a dream of annihilation” (p. 210). In particular, Pynchon seems interested in the difference between private dreams and public dreams. For example, Hugh Godolphin says of WWI, “whether we like it or not that war destroyed a kind of privacy, perhaps the privacy of dream.” He goes on to argue that dreams in the twentieth century are public—“no longer our own”—and instead “political hallucinations on a live mass” (p. 248). The implication is clear: politics are shaped by collective dreams.
The theme of collective dreaming is portrayed symbolically in the character of Kurt Mondaugen, a German engineer who falls into a delirium, and ultimately takes on the dreams and memories of a second character, Foppl. Symbolically, Mondaugen adopts a “public” dream—i.e dreams of Foppl’s sadism during the Herero Genocide. Here, a dangerous association is made, one between public dreams and violence. Later, Pynchon expresses the link more clearly, when he has McClintic Sphere say, “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). Pynchon’s thematic implication is this: that collective dreams, unlike private dreams, are often at the root of great cruelty.
Necessary Lies
One of the novel’s central conflicts, which undergirds both Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil’s character-arcs, is the question: are some lies necessary? Both Profane and Stencil, by the end of the novel, are given a chance to confront their own self-deception: will Profane admit that being a schlemihl/yo-yo is “a state of mind”; will Stencil admit that he can’t find V.? The answer is no: Profane continues to yo-yo, and Stencil flees to Stockholm—apparently V.’s been there, too, for it’s a never-ending goose chase. To understand the significance of Profane and Stencil’s self-deception, it's important to ask: what does each stand to lose, were he to confront these lies?
In Chapter 11, Fausto Maijstral ruminates on poetry, in a passage that might prove relevant; he says:
“[Poets] are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the ‘practical’ half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they. […] It is the ‘role’ of the poet, this 20th Century. To lie” (p. 326).
Pynchon, through Fausto, suggests there is such a thing as a necessary lie, told to keep people from enduring great discomfort and impracticality. Seemingly, then, Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil have each accepted a necessary lie into their lives, for without these lies, each would suffer the destruction of their self-identity, and with it a loss of purpose.
Stencil, of his investigation, says, “So in this search [for V.] the motive is part of the quarry” (p. 386). His life’s meaning is a search for meaning; and even if there is no true “meaning,” Stencil’s search for meaning gives him meaning. Somehow, a lie becomes a truth—and Stencil becomes the absurd hero.
Cycling History
V. contains many visual metaphors, each of which reinforces a larger theme of historical repetition—i.e. the same old same old, day after day, decade to decade. There are the characters who “yo-yo,” from Benny Profane to New York’s nine million commuters, tracing the same daily paths. Pynchon writes of “Fortune’s wheel,” which carries history up and down with each spin—or dead level, if you can step off the wheel, and view it from the side. Dr. Eigenvalue describes the century as a folded tapestry, in which each generation is trapped in a fold, looking nostalgically at the peaks of the decades before them (p. 155). Pynchon coins the term mirror-time, first used to describe a clock reflected in a mirror, but later used to describe the German expatriates in South Africa, like Foppl, who are stuck in a perverse nostalgia for the violence of war and colonization, two decades prior—to the extent that they play dress-up, wearing the clothes of their colonial history.
At the novel’s end, the epilogue, a disparate set of characters each find themselves in Malta—all of them having appeared together in Florence, two decades prior. One character says there’s “a tremendous nostalgia about this show,” in response to their unexpected reunion. In V., Pynchon is thematically interested in repetition: from people’s acceptance of monotony, to their yearning for times passed, to the habits of history.
Sexuality
Sexuality is a major force in Pynchon’s writing—and often, it is a form of power. Consider Esther’s attempt to win over a stranger at a party: “She assumed ballet fourth position, moved her breasts at a 45-degree angle to his line-of-sight, pointed her nose at his heart, looked up at him through her eyelashes” (p. 58). Exaggerated to the utmost (with such militaristic diction as “at a 45-degree angle to his line-of-sight”), Esther uses sex appeal as though she were operating heavy machinery, or aiming a cannon. Alternatively, consider the perversity of Benny Profane’s job search, in which he uses his erection to randomly select a wanted ad in the classifieds (p. 215) Here, sexuality guides Profane’s actions—literally. In both examples, we see sex as a form of control. For Esther, it is a way to control others. And for Profane, it is a way in which he is controlled.
Accepting that sex is a form of power, Pynchon then shows the ways in which this power can be abused, exploring sex’s potential as a form of domination and cruelty. This link is made strongest in the character of Foppl, a German colonizer, murderer, and rapist. Foppl, speaking about murder, says: “Till we’ve done it [killed], we’re taught that it’s evil. Having done it, then’s the struggle: to admit to yourself that it’s not really evil at all. That like forbidden sex it’s enjoyable” (p. 253).
Fact / Fiction
At the heart of V. is an interrogation of the meaning of truth. Pynchon challenges his readers to set apart fact from fiction, intentionally blurring the two: he frames (at times) cartoonish plots with real geopolitical crises; he has full chapters narrated by unreliable narrators (e.g. Herbert Stencil and Fausto Maijstral). Always, he leaves room for uncertainty. This is because V. is thematically concerned with the construction of history—i.e. how facts are made, and by whom. Are they made by the Germans in South Africa, or by the Bondelswaartz? By Sidney Stencil, or Herbert Stencil? In Chapter 9, Van Wijk suggests history is “made at night,” and “ordered” by the ruling class (p. 233).
Sidney Stencil says it best when he says, “Short of examining the entire history of each individual participating […] short of anatomizing each soul, what hope has anyone of understanding a Situation? It may be that the civil servants of the future will not be accredited unless they first receive a degree in brain surgery” (p. 470). Perhaps this is why Sidney says, in prayer, “let him be less and less sure as he gathers years…” (p. 491).
