LOOK FOR THE PATTERNS: REVIEW OF PYNCHON’S V.

LOOK FOR THE PATTERNS

Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V., which came out in 1961, is soaked with history to the point of lethal saturation. It was illustrative to read it after The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and the short stories presented in the collection Slow Learner: out of order as it were. In some ways Pynchon’s impulses and preoccupations are on display here in a way that they perhaps aren’t in later works. And not as smoothly and assuredly as in later works.

Pynchon is famously challenging to readers who are unprepared. He brings on hordes of characters with bizarre names and doesn’t always sketch them out or differentiate them from one another; the reader is just supposed to track them. Maybe readers in 1961 would be used to this from reading 19th century fiction, I wasn’t. Pynchon has reservoirs of intimate knowledge of world history and science and philosophy, to the point of ostentation. I am curious to learn—and may never know—the sources of his information in writing novels like V. He is famously a user of Baedeker guidebooks by which he has apparently reconstructed whole cities in Europe and the Mediterranean, down to the drinking fountains on street corners: echoes of Joyce’s granular Dublin. No intricacy of early 20th century micro-politics goes unexamined. The student movements of Malta, proto-fascist parties of Italy, the Fashoda crisis in Egypt—all are treated with the loving brushstrokes of a master painter of crowd scenes. What it all adds up to is teasingly elusive, another quality Pynchon is famous for. The systems of world politics and knowledge make a pattern but we are too exhausted to fully outline it.

The novel’s plot revolves around a discharged drunken sailor Benny Profane (Wikipedia, our current day Baedeker, notes that the character of Freddy Quell from PT Anderson’s The Master is partially based on Profane). The sailor in 1955-1956 is embroiled with a group of pseudo-bohemians and Beatnik types in New York City called the Whole Sick Crew, Pynchon’s first flirtation with American counterculture which will be a long love affair. The Whole Sick Crew drink like Irish fish, go to jazz clubs and try to dig the music, paint, write, and cause Situationist chaos to unfold. Their parties are legendary and Pynchon spends a lot of time chronicling the devastation of these folks in free fall. Benny Profane tries to get several jobs to prevent his yo-yo-ing up and down the East Coast. He’s also looking for love and gets ensnared by several women, one of whom has ties to the larger intrigues of the paranoid plot.

Paranoia and pattern-seeking are represented by the other major character, Herbert Stencil, a middle-aged eccentric who exists in the orbit of the Whole Sick Crew. Stencil refers to himself in the third person throughout the book, to some confusion, and is the son of a British diplomat and spy. The senior Stencil found himself at several flashpoints of espionage and secret conflict throughout the beginnings of the 20th century, World War I and associated spasms of history giving violent birth to itself. Stencil (both father and son) are in multigenerational pursuit of several mysterious women, places, concepts, all beginning with the letter V. This twenty-second letter of the alphabet occurs with ominous frequency at points of the first four decades of the 20th century, hypnotizing and tormenting the Stencils like nightmare outbreaks of gematria. The novel alternates between scenes of the Whole Sick Crew’s path of destruction in NYC focusing on Profane and historical chapters which are really like linked short stories where Pynchon shows off the ungodly amount of reading and research he must have done: newspapers, books, chronicles, ledgers, maps of Cairo, Florence, Paris, Malta. Stencil and various other spies and agents and personae—a dizzying array of names—populate the historical chapters and you need a strong stomach for proper nouns to hack your way through the book and find the patterns.

Tolstoy in the almost intolerable essays embedded in the end of War and Peace gave his theory of history, which is that history is not shaped by individual men like a Napoleon, but by an infinite, immeasurable “swarm” of decisions by unknown individuals unremarked on by history books. History gives lessons which are unknowable because the patterns are too finely-grained and beyond our ability to discern. Pynchon struggles with this and would eventually come to outline 20th century as one of death, military technology, and political undertow that subtly undermines indivisible agency, to the point where paranoia is the only rational response. This is a relevance which is persistent as the 20th century went through the 1960s under Pynchon’s watch and took pre-millennial, then post-millennial shape where we are today. Completing reading V., I have only now read the early Pynchon so I don’t know what later lessons he has to give.

Two final comments: I just read Kerouac’s Big Sur which I felt like for me personally was an inferior novel to V., even though they were written at approximately the same time about somewhat similar groups of people (I’m talking about Pynchon’s Whole Sick Crew as a kind of rendition and perhaps critique of the Beats). The current in V. is more oceanic than in Kerouac’s novel; there are more heavy thematic interconnections in Pynchon that appeal to me and speak to me in 2022 than in Kerouac’s novel about a guy just needing to be alone and get sober.

The other note I want to deliver is about David Foster Wallace, who claimed when he wrote The Broom of the System to have never read Pynchon. That seems like an easily deconstructed lie. Pynchon’s fingerprints are all over DFW’s writing whether people like to admit it or not. And while DFW is a kind of update of Pynchon for our times and our profundities, the argument could be made that Pynchon’s fiction might be broader and resound into futurity, casting deeper shadows in time, in a way DFW’s won’t. I think that one of many differences between the two writers is that Pynchon seemed to have ventured out into the world more than Wallace did; was in the Navy and wrote technical journals for Boeing and was more externalized than Wallace, who mapped the interior of a mentally ill America more than Pynchon did. Both are important spaces to chart, both speak to present threats, but Pynchon’s consciousness and identification of evil is more holistic perhaps.

There should be more maximalist encyclopedic novels a la Pynchon I think. I probably won’t be able to read them: towards the ends of V. and Gravity’s Rainbow I found myself running out of steam and rushing, missing the finer points. But what points I did pick up along the way were profound and had pinpricks of crucial suffering and pity that characterize great art to me. Maybe the length of the novel is crucial to cast the appropriate spell or trance on the reader to deliver the medicine. Or perhaps big art is more mysterious and less utilitarian than that.