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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998 by Kenneth Kupsch

V.'s metamorphosis is taken up far less subtly in the later historical episodes through the depiction of her "obsession with bodily incorporating little bits of inert matter" (488). Actually, Stencil's father, we are told in the epilogue, had noticed this characteristic 20 years earlier: "she would never let him touch or remove" (488) a five-toothed ivory comb. Roger B. Henkle points out that a similar comb was traditionally worn by Venus (100) - information he traces through the novel's reference to Robert Graves's The White Goddess. As for her more recent incarnation, by 1919 she has added a star sapphire to her navel, as well as a glass eye which she eagerly displays to Stencil's father before pushing off from Malta for Fiume in time to be a part of that city's brief seizure by the Italian forces led by Gabriele d'Annunzio. In 1922 Vera Meroving, as she next calls herself, appears in South West Africa, where her sexuality takes a sadomasochistic turn as part of a group of besieged holdovers from the period of Germany's ruthless colonization of that country. Ultimately, in her most shadowy guise of all, V. returns to Maim, where she appears during World War II as a mysterious figure known simply as the Bad Priest. There the full extent of her obsession with replacing body parts with artificial ones is revealed when what's left of her dying body is effectively disassembled by a band of little children whose own insensitivity to suffering is of no small account. One particularly noteworthy detail here is the tattoo of the crucifixion of Christ uncovered on the bare skull after V.'s wig is cheerfully removed (342). Careful readers will remember that crucifixion was also the subject carved into her ivory comb, although in that case the victims were five British soldiers executed in 1883 during the successful Mahdist rebellion in Khartoum (167). Finally, it should be noted that all this takes place in a novel that begins, not accidentally, on Christmas Eve.

Such is the basic tale of V. as reassembled from the text and supplemented with information from appropriate sources. This tale gives rise to a series of important questions. Firstly, what does all this suggest about V.'s most recent emanation as a motive force? Secondly, what was going on in the world at the time of the putative death of the Bad Priest that Pynchon may have intended for his readers to connect with that event? Lastly, where might we find the clues in the text that will lead us to the correct answers? Clearly, V.'s metamorphosis has something to do with the idea of a human being resembling a machine, or perhaps a machine resembling a human being. As for the second question, the fact that V.'s "death" occurs against the enormous backdrop of the European theater of World War II can be very easily and confidently understood, if once again the reader is willing to follow the clues. Here the most important clue is an odd detail in the description of V. as she metamorphoses through the historical episodes. That detail is the clock mechanism in the iris of the glass eye already acquired by 1919, a mechanism that can be found in any accurate description of the chief components for what came to be known as Vergeltungswaffe Eins, or the V-1. It was, of course, Kurt Mondaugen who, after his youthful days spent in South West Africa where he met V., went on to work as part of the engineering team at Peenemunde that developed and built this so-called Vengeance Weapon. This weapon, by use of a magnetic compass and a clock mechanism, was able to fly without the aid of a pilot over a preset distance of up to 150 miles before diving toward its target. By locking the missile's elevators and diving it into the ground, the clock mechanism effectively replaced the need for a pilot's eyes.