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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998 by Kenneth Kupsch

Whether or not Pynchon had actually read Gibbon, it would be difficult to find a passage more saliently attuned to the novel he has written. For not only is the idea of "Religion as she" one that the novel unquestionably seeks to invoke, but so too is the notion of a deity in human form taking up residence among a race of inferiors. In V. this happens at the transitional moment between phases, and readers are given a second glimpse of the phenomenon in the person of Victoria Wren.

Following V.'s transition through the historical episodes is thus of critical importance not only in determining what kind of motive force she has been, but ultimately what kind she has become. In this regard one of the first things we learn about Victoria Wren is that she is English Catholic, and not a member of the Church of England. The resonance of this point would seem hard to miss now, since even at the end of the nineteenth century, when the first two historical episodes take place, England was, and had been for hundreds of years, a nation whose established religion was Protestant. What is unmistakable here is that V. begins her new life as part of a diminished class that still retains, however tenuously, its old religious ties to Rome in a country that has long since formally severed them. This effect of the Protestant Reformation is only one of the causes touched on by the novel (the progress of science is certainly another) that serves to underscore how the process whereby the Catholic Church is losing its sway in the world as a motive force has long been under way. Within this context, Victoria first emerges while touring Egypt with her younger sister and their widowed father, Sir Alastair Wren. There she has a brief affair with an English spy named Goodfellow before breaking away from her family and turning up in Florence, determined to pursue a career as a dressmaker. In Florence she seduces another English spy, Stencil's father Sidney, thus raising the question of whether or not she is Stencil's mother. Once again, the novel provides only circumstantial evidence, all of which boils down to this: who ever heard of a detective novel that presents only one suspect? The standard gambit of such works is to create enough credible suspects to keep the reader guessing until the smoking gun conveniently appears to sort them out. In V. the only real question is how close the reader can push the evidence toward what in effect is the sole explanation. Surely by now one could have expected so determined and assiduous a detective as Stencil to have produced another suspect, if one existed, to explain so singular a mystery in his life.

This ostensible mystery next leads to Paris in 1913, where V., as she is for the first and only time known, appears as a wealthy patroness, apparently having succeeded as a couturiere just as strikingly as she failed as a mother. Her newest romantic liaison involves a nubile and ill-fated ballerina named Melanie in a relationship more remarkable for its voyeuristic than its lesbian nature. Melanie's bizarre death during the premier of a ballet reminiscent of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps leads V. to abandon Paris in favor of Malta, where she arrives on the eve of World War I. There she adopts the name Veronica Manganese, and there she again meets Stencil's father in 1919. Viewed chronologically, this meeting between former lovers reveals a notable inversion of a device employed by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. In that work the title character first appears as a man of 20, and over the course of almost as many years, he fails to display any sign of physical change. The most memorable scene occurs when the brother of Sybil Vane (the namesake of an equally suicidal Nabokov character) threatens to murder Gray, blaming him for his sister's death 18 years earlier. Gray, however, manages to cleverly extricate himself by convincing his would-be executioner that he is too young to be the man he is accused of being. Interestingly, there is no real reason why a man in his late 30s could not look very much like he had looked at 20. By the same token, there is no reason why V. could not have so drastically changed over the almost identical span of her life that even a man who had known her intimately might have difficulty initially recognizing her. Such is the case with Stencil's father, who senses immediately that he has previously met Veronica (476), yet cannot positively identify her until hearing the sound of her voice (486). It should be noted, then, that in and of themselves, V.'s various changes (name, appearance, residence, sexual habits, and so on) amount to little more than so many curious, and indeed plausible, idiosyncrasies. But by subtly and elaborately weaving into the story this evocation of one of English literature's most famous metaphysical rules, Pynchon has helped to lay the basis for reading V.'s metamorphosis as a genuine event.