Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963)
Read Professor Irwin Corey's acceptance speech for Pynchon's 1974 National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow.
Also, have a look at Douglas Kløvedal Lannark's exhaustive documenting of "love" in Gravity's Rainbow.
Ambiguities &c.
The Girl in the Quarter Rossetti
"Gebrail waited while the Englishman disappeared for half an hour into the Bazaars' pungent labyrinth. Visiting, perhaps. Now he'd seen the girl before, surely. The girl in the Quarter Rossetti: Coptic, probably. Eyes made impossibly huge with mascara, nose slightly hooked and bowed, two vertical dimples on either side of the mouth, crocheted shawl covering hair and back, high cheekbones, warm-brown skin.
Of course she'd been a fare. He remembered the face. She was mistress to some clerk or other in the British Consulate. Gebrail had picked the boy up for her in front of the Hotel Victoria, across the street. Another time they'd gone to her rooms. It helped Gebrail to remember faces." (p.84)
"'. . . who did say? I know her . . . Zenobia the Copt . . .'
'. . . Kenneth Slime at the Embassy's girl . . ." (p.91)
S. Stencil on V.: "...from a young, crude Mata Hari act in Egypt [...] while Fashoda tossed sparks in search of a fuse [...]"
(p. 386)
"Disguise is one of her attributes." (p.388)
Profane Meets Rachel for the First Time Twice
Schlozhauer's Trocadero, 1954:
"Profane was just out of the Navy and working that summer as assistant salad man at Schlozhauer's Trocadero, nine miles outside Liberty, New York." (p.22)
"He met [Rachel] through the MG, like everyone else met her. It nearly ran him over." (p.23)
"'How romantic,' she said. 'For all I know you may be the man of my dreams.'" (p.23-24)
"Profane kept running into her in what was left of the summer at least once a day. They talked in the car always..." (p.27)
"After the summer, then, there'd been letters, his surly and full of wrong words, hers by turns witty, desperate, passionate. A year later she'd graduated from Bennington and come to New York to work as a receptionist in an employment agency, and so he'd seen her in New York, once or twice, when he passed through." (p.29)
New York,1956:
"Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45°, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied [...]" (p.46)
"[Profane's] erection had produced in the newspaper a crosswise fold, which moved line by line down the page as the swelling gradually diminished. It was a list of employment agencies. OK, thought Profane, just for the heck of it I will close my eyes, count three and open them and whatever agency listing that fold is on I will go to them. It will be like flipping a coin; inanimate schmuck, inanimate paper, pure chance.
He opened his eyes on Space/Time Employment Agency, down on lower Broadway..." (p.215)
"The waiting area was crowded when he got there. A quick check revealed [...] a family who might have stepped through time's hanging arras directly out of the Great Depression; journeyed to this city in an old Plymouth pickup from their land of dust [...]" (p.215)
"Profane made out his application, dropped it on the receptionist's desk and sat down to wait. Soon there came the hurried and sexy tap of high heels in the corridor outside. [...] He could hear the quiet brush of her thighs, kissing each other in their nylon. Oh, oh, he thought, look at what I seem to be getting again. Go down, you bastard." (p.216)
"Would she destroy him, she so frail-looking, such gentle, well-bred legs? She had her head down, studying the application in her hand. She looked up, he saw the eyes, both slanted the same way.
'Profane,' she called. Looking at him with a little frown. [...] He stumbled up from the chair, and proceeded with the Times over his groin and he bent at a 120° angle behind the rail and in to her own desk. The sign said RACHEL OWLGLASS." (p.216)
"Strangely then the tumescence began to subside, the flesh at his neck to pale. Any sovereign or broken yo-yo must feel like this after a short time of lying inert, rolling, falling: suddenly to have its own umbilical string reconnected, and know the other end is in hands it cannot escape. Hands it doesn't want to escape. Know that the simple clockwork of itself has no more need for symptoms of inutility, lonesomeness, directionlessness, because now it has a path marked out for it over which it has no control. Pending any such warp in the world Profane felt like the closest thing to one and above her eyes began to doubt his own animateness." (p.217)
Hmmm....
"Mirror-time" sheds some light, as does the following passage:
"Perhaps history this century [...] is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated [...] at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. [...] Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see." (pp.155-56)
Perhaps there are two versions of Profane and Rachel, each occupying different fold-bottoms; perhaps Profane and Rachel are fated "to repeat in mirror-time what [they] had done on the side of real-time." (p.52) Either possibility "illustrat[es] again and certainly not for the last time the colorful whimsy of history." (p.308)
Who Are Herbert Stencil's Parents?
"Born in 1901, the year Victoria died, Stencil was in time to be the century's child. Raised motherless. The father, Sidney Stencil, had served the Foreign Office of his country taciturn and competent. No facts on the mother's disappearance. Died in childbirth, ran off with someone, committed suicide: some way of vanishing painful enough to keep Sidney from ever referring to it in all the correspondence to his son which is available." (p.52)
Late Saturday night, 1956:
"'What day is it,' somebody asked. 'Say, what day is it?'
"Out there something had happened, probably atmospheric. But the moon shone brighter. The number of objects and shadows in the park seemed to multiply: warm white, warm black.
[...]
"Somewhere else a traveling clock chimed seven. 'It is Tuesday,' said an old man's voice, half-asleep. It was Saturday.
"But about the night-park, near-deserted and cold, was somehow a sense of population and warmth, and high noon. The stream made a curious half cracking, half ringing sound: like the glass of a chandelier, in a wintry drawing room when all the heat is turned off suddenly and forever. The moon shivered, impossibly bright.
"'How quiet,' said Stencil.
"'Quiet. Nothing at all is happening in here.'
"'So what year is it.'
"'It is 1913,' said Stencil.
"'Why not,'said Profane." (p.392)
Malta, 1919:
"No appointments, whispered conferences, hurried paper work: only resumption of their hothouse-time--as if it were marked by any old and overprecious clock which could be wound and set at will. For it came to that, finally: an alienation from time, much as Malta itself was alienated from any history in which cause precedes effect.
"Carla did come to him again with unfaked tears this time; and pleading, not defiant.
"'The priest is gone,' she wept. 'Whom else do I have? My husband and I are strangers. Is it another woman?'
"[Sidney Stencil] was tempted to tell her. But was restrained by the fine irony. He found himself hoping that there was indeed adultery between his old 'love' and the shipfitter; if only to complete a circle begun in England eighteen years ago, a beginning kept forcibly from his thoughts for the same period of time.
"Herbert would be eighteen. And probably helling it all about the dear old isles. What would he think of his father. . .
"His father, ha." (p.489)
"Carla must have told [Fausto] at some point of the circumstances surrounding his birth. It had been near the time of the June Disturbances, in which old Maijstral was involved. Precisely how never came clear. But deeply enough to alienate Carla both from him and from herself. Enough so that one night we both nearly took a doomed acrobat's way down the steps at the Harbour end of Str. San Giovanni; I to limbo, she to a suicide's hell. What had kept her? The boy Fausto could only gather from listening in to her evening prayers that it was an Englishman; a mysterious being named Stencil." (pp.318-19)
So who is Herbert's mother? Father? If V. is a parody/inversion of the Virgin, with God "in a wideawake hat [fighting] skirmishes with an aboriginal Satan out at the antipodes of the firmament, in the name and for the safekeeping of any Victoria" (p.73), and those five crucified British soldiers, THEN one could suppose that V. was Herbert's mother and, by analogy, that rather than having been "conceived without sin" (as the Miraculous Medal says), Herbert had had a quite maculate conception, as the young Victoria Wren had been a prostitute following her "deflowering" by Goodfellow in 1898 (p.166). Thus Sidney's thought: "His father, ha." Even if V. is Herbert's mother, God knows who his father was. And just what kind of prophet is Herbert?
Porpentine's Murder
"Back came the Englishman, with his gangrenous face. A fat friend followed him out of the hotel.
'Bide time,' the fare called mirthfully.
'Ha, ho. I'm taking Victoria to the opera tomorrow night.'
Back in the cab: "There is a chemist's shop near the Crédit Lyonais.' Weary Gebrail gathered the reins." (p.85)
[...]
"The corridor runs by the curtained entrances to four boxes, located to audience right at the top level of the summer theatre in the Ezbekiyeh Garden.
A man wearing blue spectacles hurries into the second box from the stage end of the corridor. The red curtains, heavy velvet, swing to and fro, unsynchronized, after his passage. The oscillation soon damps out because of the weight. They hang still. Ten minutes pass.
Two men turn the corner by the allegorical statue of Tragedy. Their feet crush unicorns and peacocks that repeat diamond-fashion the entire length of the carpet. The face of one is hardly to be distinguished beneath masses of white tissue which have obscured the features and changed slightly the outlines of the face. The other is fat. They enter the box next to the one the man with the blue spectacles is in. Light from outside, late summer light now falls through a single window, turning the statue and the figured carpet to a monochrome orange. Shadows become more opaque. The air between seems to thicken with an indeterminate color, though it is probably orange. Then a girl in a flowered dress comes down the hall and enters the box occupied by the two men. Minutes later she emerges, tears in her eyes and on her face. The fat man follows. They pass out of the field of vision.
The silence is total. So there's no warning when the red-and-white-faced man comes through his curtains holding a drawn pistol. The pistol smokes. He enters the next box. Soon he and the man with the blue spectacles, struggling, pitch through the curtains and fall to the carpet. Their lower halves are still hidden by the curtains. The man with the white-blotched face removes the blue spectacles; snaps them in two and drops them to the floor. The other shuts his eyes tightly, tries to turn his head away from the light.
Another has been standing at the end of the corridor. From this vantage he appears only as a shadow; the window is behind him. The man who removed the spectacles now crouches, forcing the prostrate one's head toward the light. The man at the end of the corridor makes a small gesture with his right hand. The crouching man looks that way and half rises. A flame appears in the area of the other's right hand; another flame; another. The flames are colored a brighter orange than the sun.
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.
The half-crouched body collapses. The face and its masses of white skin loom ever closer. At rest the body is assumed exactly into the space of this vantage." (pp.93-94)
MIRROR-TIME
"Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45°, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied [...]" (p.46)
"But soon the hand passed twelve and began its course down the other side of the face; as if it had passed through the surface of a mirror, and had now to repeat in mirror-time what it had done on the side of real-time." (p.52)
Mondaugen "finally to leave depression-time in Munich, journey into this other hemisphere, and enter mirror-time in the South-West Protectorate." (p.230)
Mirror-time in action:
Florence, April 1899:
In a garden, "[Victoria Wren] led [Hugh Godolphin] to a stone bench by the pool." (p.168)
"Something splashed lazily in the pool." (p.172)
Südwestafrika, May 1922:
"[Vera Meroving] was sitting in the rockery [rock garden] with old Godolphin, beside a goldfish pool." (p.246)
"and after braining an inquisitive goldfish with a rock, she left Godolphin." (p.248)
There are many other examples of mirror-time in V.
Space/Time Employment Agency would certainly qualify as "a transient population of [...] the dissatisfied."
"A tram came blithering up behind them; drew abreast. Evan turned his head and saw a young girl [Victoria Wren] in dimity blinking huge eyes." (p.158)
"
Varkumian had been replaced by a young girl in a flowered dress. The leprous Englishman seemed upset." (p.92)
"What could [Hanne] tell Lepsius tonight. She had only the desire to remove his spectacles, snap and crush them, and watch him suffer. How delightful it would be." (p.93)
"According to the yarn, [Mehemet] had sailed the xebec through a rift in time's fabric [...] But it was the same sea and not until docking at Rhodes did Mehemet learn of his displacement." (p.460)
