Finding V - author Thomas Pynchon's book 'V'

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998 by Kenneth Kupsch

Well then, how and where should one begin? Quite as Tanner suggests, by seeking to remove the confusion among the chapters; that is, by placing them in chronological order and playing out, as it were, the story of the woman most closely associated with the idea of V. Presumably, the historical episodes are scattered as they are through the text so as to mimic, albeit inexactly, the order in which Stencil acquires the information they contain. The information in two of those episodes, Mondaugen's story and the Confessions of Fausto Maijstral (and, arguably, the epilogue as well), is acquired during the course of the novel. In any case, Pynchon very helpfully sets readers along the correct path by presenting the first two of these episodes in chronological order; after that, however, readers are on their own. Therefore, I should like to present the answer to the question "Who is V.?" that can be inferred by proceeding along purely chronological lines, beginning where Pynchon began: with Henry Adams.

In his essay "V. and V-2," Tony Tanner states:

Thomas Pynchon made his intentions clear from the outset. The title of his first important short story is "Entropy" and it contains specific references to Henry Adams. Whereas some novelists would prefer to cover the philosophical tracks which gave decisive shaping hints for their novels, Pynchon puts those tracks on the surface of his writing. (16)

And so he does. While Thomas Pynchon, philosopher, interests me not at all, insofar as his extraliterary interests "gave decisive shaping hints" about the architecture of his fiction, the tracks interest me very much indeed. For in tile end it is not what Pynchon may have gleaned of Adams's philosophy that gave rise to his astonishing first novel so much as what was suggested to him in terms of fresh literary possibilities. As many critics have realized, it is the chapter entitled "The Dynamo and the Virgin" from The Education of Henry Adams that the novel expects us either to know or be willing to familiarize ourselves with. What Adams muses upon so famously there is really a very simple though fascinating idea - namely, the idea of deity as motivating force. What he noted about Gothic cathedrals, for example, was the way in which the very idea of the Virgin Mary became indistinguishable from the idea of an actual forceful deity working its will on the world, as human beings over large expanses of time and space were motivated to perform deeds that presumably they would never have performed otherwise. As Adams puts it: "All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres" (388). Earlier in the same passage he describes his awakening to this idea:

he [Adams] knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus as force, and not everywhere . . . possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles, - but otherwise one must look for force to the Goddesses of Indian Mythology. (388)

Or perhaps not so far. Just as Joyce used Homer's Odyssey as his elaborate groundplan and source of inspiration for Ulysses, so too Pynchon followed the more general groundplan suggested by Adams. Readers of Adams will be struck by how, in the above-quoted passage, Adams rather casually equates the Virgin Mary and the Roman goddess Venus. Most of us know that Venus was the Roman goddess of love adapted from the Greek goddess Aphrodite. Fewer, perhaps, know that Aphrodite was herself adapted by the Greeks from the Phoenician goddess Astarte. Pynchon knew this, although he never stated it explicitly; instead, he left it for readers to discover on their own. References to Astarte begin and end the epilogue, she being the figure head on Mehemet's doomed xebec which carries Stencil's father to his death. The fact that those references are withheld until the story's end itself constitutes an important clue, since one expects to learn something of special significance at the end of a novel organized in the manner of a detective story. And that is exactly what one learns here: the origin of V.