Rereading "V."--II: Keep Cool, but Care

I have several theories about rereading favorite novels--several because they change every time I try and fit my experiences into my last speculation. My hypothesis this time was that the first time I had read V., I loved it because it was fresh, new, funny, well written, and I was young. The second time I read it was dulled by my having to teach it; I thought I did a bad job of that because an otherwise excellent student hated the book, couldn't finish it.*

But as I reread the book now, and once again enjoyed it this side of idolatry, I realized the my present enjoyment was different than my initial pleasure, and also, that I perhaps had skewed my memories towards the negative about teaching V. I can tell this from my notes. I decoded parts of the book I probably missed the first time, because I had not then read the works alluded to--or undergone the experiences that Pynchon writes about. The problem with teaching a long, complex novel like V. is losing sight of the larger picture, getting bogged down in the minutiae--El Gaucho is like Nostromo, Satin is like Diaghilev, Wittgenstein is parodied in a pop song, and so on, ad nauseam. We had just gone through Nabokov's Pale Fire, which in itself is a novel that cries out for a key (which Brian Boyd has since elegantly provided in Nabokov's "Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery). V. is entirely about a search for meaning: who is V.? What is she? Is she animate? What does it mean to be animate--to have an anima, a soul? Which way does the novel finally lean: can meaning be discovered? The "hero" of the novel professes at the end that he hasn't learned "a goddamned thing," and his scholarly doppelganger refuses to stop searching, because if he did stop, he would learn that what he suspects is true--his life has no meaning outside of his search.

The key to all mythologies is that there is no key. Venus? Victoria? Vhiessu? Spin Fortuna's wheel, and you may be staring at a spider monkey encased in ice at the southern still point of the turning world.

What if you strike through the mask, and there is nothing behind it all? A void? Time rewound and recovered is not paradise regained, but merely a vector in a different direction, like Schoenmaker's elaborate looking-glass clock? The universe plays dice with itself, inimical and implacable.

Fun stuff, huh? But never has such an apprehension of the nullity behind all things, the futility of signification, been presented with such zest, such chortling, particularly in the 1956 chapters. I noticed for the first time the motif of Westerns throughout the novel. In one chapter Benny Profane watches Westerns on TV, beginning with a Randolph Scott Western, then Tom Mix, and ending with The Great Train Robbery, further back than which you cannot go--not only is it the first Western, but the first narrative movie (and I doubt if New York television stations were showing it during the 1950s). Regression? Decadence?

And the "Real McCoy" joke without its punchline! (Pig's "story about the coke sacker, the cork soaker and the sock tucker.")

And these are balanced by the horrors and the nausea in the chapters about the past: Egypt, Florence, Namibia, Paris, Malta. The skull beneath the skin with a vengeance. But even that phrase has its humorous echo in Benny Profane's job (which the Space/Time Employment Agency [!!!!!] has gotten for him), where he talks with a test dummy that includes a real skull beneath artifical skin (SHROUD).

And maybe it is all palatable because the meaning that adheres and inheres in the narrative is given to it by the artist. Evan Godolphin, the wounded flyer whose gruesome treatment inspires Schoenmaker to become a plastic surgeon, is also Veronica Manganese's servant on Malta, etc. In a Victorian novel, this would be derided as coincidence; in a postmodern novel, it is a pattern. Nabokov's triumphant identification of the man in the mackintosh in Ulysses in his Cornell class would have led Pynchon to this point--although I don't think Pynchon is anymore likely to appear in his own fiction than he is to do a Charlie Rose interview.

When reading becomes too much like work, the decoding too arduous, too removed, the game (and the best literature is ludic) is not worth the candle. But the glorious times when it does seem worth it. I live for the days when I look up at my class and say, "I can't believe I get paid to do this!" Almost makes up for grading first-year essays.

Almost.


*On further thought, I think this student, an ardent Catholic, was put off by Father Fairing, the sewer-dwelling, rat-converting priest, and was probably better off not finishing it.