SPOILERS AHEAD

SPOILERS AHEAD

So, uh, what happened with Vheissu? That part of the narrative was unceremoniously abandoned after Florence.

How/why did Veronica turn into the Bad Priest? Seems like a waste of talent.

What's the source of Veronica's obsession with turning (part of?) her body inanimate?

Why all the shitting on Wittgenstein?

Why did Paola pretend to be black, why whore herself out, why get back with Pappy at the end?

it's pynchon i aint got to explain shit

it's pynchon i aint got to explain shit

>finish book
>ask google for an explanation
>only get pretentious reviews about symbolism that explains nothing about the plot

I just want to fucking know who was who in disguise and why the lady was a cyborg and what Vheissu was

For the disguises: V = Victoria Wren = Veronica Manganese = The Woman = Vera Meroving = The Bad Priest

Paola was Ruby

I think that's it.

>forgetting the Stencils

Who are they disguised as?

Is Benny's last name supposed to be pronounced "profane" as in the English word, or pro-fah-nay as if it were an actual Italian name?

I just want to know why Roony's best friend was a black dude when he married his wife because of racist jokes and eugenics

good questions

read Jung

Something that caught my attention: Pynchon shows quite a lot of contempt for "the mob" here. Kinda reminded me of Coriolanus or Henry VI. Never got that vibe from any of his other books.

>how, why did Victoria turn into the bad priest?

It doesn't matter. We witness her initiation amidst the Italian riots, and gain a sense of what she was before entering 'the profession'. This is the pathos. Her becoming good at what she does from that point on (and before that point in the timing of the novel) is masked, as it should be. She becomes top spy, perhaps ultimately works solely for herself, we don't know, it doesn't matter. That image of her as a bright, polite young lady keeps with us, and is what renders her fate so heartbreaking. Like everyone else, knowingly or not, she got caught in the mill, but performed.. beautifully? It's the first word that comes to mind.

I've given the priest thing some thought. When dressed as the priest she goes around telling girls not to have sex and to enter a convent. The reason: she thinks she fell into the spy game not because of those Italian riots in Florence, but because that British spy took her virginity in Egypt.

Why is this bad? When we see her in Malta in 1919 she seems perfectly happy with the situation. What changes is WW2. She used to be associated with Futurists/Fascists, which she later regrets when Malta is being bombed. Hence the about-face.

He says in his introduction to Slow Learner that he was a lot more politically conservative around the time he wrote V. and his early short stories

Vheissu was putatively a system of underground tunnels, that apparently could be accessed (at one point) somewhere near Pompeii

All the incarnations of V., Victoria, Veronica, Vera, Priest, "V. in Love," etc., were all the same girl.

Wittgenstein tried to undermine the certainty we could have in doubt itself, i.e. he essentially said that doubt/skepticism was inherently predicated on belief, so the whole enterprise of skepticism was like an ouroboros. Anyways Pynchon loves Paranoia, Doubt, etc so it makes sense he would shit talk """our boy"""

Conservative Tommy is best Tommy

>"Wha." He looked into the bedroom. Pig had managed to get atop Paola and seemed linked to her pillow by a long string of drool which glittered in the fluoresecent light from the kitchen.

>"Help?" Profane puzzled. "Rape?"

>"Get this pig off of me," Paola yelled.

>"Pig, hey. Get off."

>"I want to get laid," protested Pig.

>"Off," said Profane.

>"Up thine," snarled Pig, "with turpentine."

>"Nope." So saying, Profane grabbed the big collar on Pig's jumper and pulled.

>"You are strangling me, hey," said Pig after a while.

Perhaps a hint for V's quest for objecthood, this is from Esther when she's getting her nose done.

>Never had she felt so helpless. Later she would say, "It was almost a mystic experience. What religion is it - one of the Eastern ones - where the highest condition we can attain is that of an object - a rock. It was like that; I felt myself drifting down, this delicious loss of Estherhood, becoming more and more a blob, with no worries. traumas, nothing: only Being . . ."

If V. suspected her fetishism at all to be part of any conspiracy leveled against the animate world, any sudden establishment here of a colony of the Kingdom of Death, then this might justify the opinion held in the Rusty Spoon that Stencil was seeking in her his own identity. But such was her rapture at Melanie's having sought and found her own identity in her and in the mirror's soulless gleam that she continued unaware off-balanced by love; forgetting even that although the Distribution of Time here on pouf, bed and mirrors had been abandoned, their love was in its way only another version of tourism; for as tourists bring into the world as it has evolved part of another, and eventually create a parallel society of their own in every city, so the Kingdom of Death is served by fetish-constructions like V.'s, which represent a kind of infiltration.

What would have been her reaction, had she known? Again, an ambiguity. It would have meant, ultimately, V.'s death: in a sudden establishment here, of the inanimate Kingdom, despite all efforts to prevent it. The smallest realization - at any step: Cairo, Florence, Paris - that she fitted into a larger scheme leading eventually to her personal destruction and she might have shied off, come to establish eventually so many controls over herself that she became - to Freudian, behaviorist, man of religion, no matter - a purely determined organism, an automaton, constructed, only quaintly, of human flesh. Or by contrast, might have reacted against the above which we have come to call Puritan, by journeying even deeper into a fetish-country until she became entirely and in reality - not merely as a love-game with any Melanie - an inanimate object of desire. Stencil even departed from his usual ploddings to daydream a vision of her now, at age seventy-six: skin radiant with the bloom of some new plastic; both eyes glass but now containing photoelectric cells, connected by silver electrodes to optic nerves of purest copper wire and leading to a brain exquisitely wrought as a diode matrix could ever be. Solenoid relays would be her ganglia, servo-actuators move her flawless nylon limbs, hydraulic fluid be sent by a platinum heart-pump through butyrate veins and arteries. Perhaps Stencil on occasion could have as vile a mind as any of the Crew - even a complex system of pressure transducers located in a marvelous vagina of polyethylene; the variable arms of their Wheatstone bridges all leading to a single silver cable which fed pleasure-voltages direct to the correct register of the digital machine in her skull. And whenever she smiled or grinned in ecstasy there would gleam her crowning feature: Eigenvalue's precious dentures.

Also, an unrelated bit that I really liked:

>It was a foolish thing," Godolphin said, "what I did. There was nearly a mutiny. After all, one man, trying for the Pole, in the dead of winter. They thought I was insane. Possibly I was, by that time. But I had to reach it. I had begun to think that there, at one of the only two motionless places on this gyrating world, I might have peace to solve Vheissu's riddle. Do you understand? I wanted to stand in the dead center of the carousel, if only for a moment; try to catch my bearings. And sure enough: waiting for me was my answer. I'd begun to dig a cache nearby, after planting the flag. The barrenness of that place howled around me, like a country the demiurge had forgotten. There could have been no more entirely lifeless and empty place anywhere on earth. Two or three feet down I struck clear ice. A strange light, which seemed to move inside it, caught my attention. I cleared a space away. Staring up at me through the ice, perfectly preserved, its fur still rainbow-colored, was the corpse of one of their spider monkeys. It was quite real; not like the vague hints they had given me before. I say 'they had given.' I think they left it there for me. Why? Perhaps for some alien, not-quite-human reason that I can never comprehend. Perhaps only to see what I would do. A mockery, you see: a mockery of life, planted where everything but Hugh Godolphin was inanimate. With of course the implication . . . It did tell me the truth about them. If Eden was the creation of God, God only knows what evil created Vheissu. The skin which had wrinkled through my nightmares was all there had ever been. Vheissu itself, a gaudy dream. Of what the Antarctic in this world is closest to: a dream of annihilation.

I always thought the novel's structure reflected V herself.

It's a patchwork of loosely related stories (stencil chapters) attached to a connected core (profane chapters). V herself was dismembered and rebuilt with odly mismatching mechanical parts, so this sort of makes sense.

Or am I just crazy?

Am I retarded because I don't see how this quote relates to Vheissu just being a tunnel under Pompeii

Think about Euripides' Bacchae. In it, Dionysus (half cthonic) appears in a variety of forms: character giving monologue, priest in disguise, earthquake, voice in the sky, and a final invisible end.

This would have made sense to a Greek audience, which was accustomed to thinking about gods in different forms and seeing them run a gamut of embodiments in their theater.

Similarly, V manifests her presence in a wide range of forms and figures. She is not a static character that tries on different disguises or bodies; she simply appears and disappears as a cthonic deity might.

Add that to some of the more obvious jungian things at play re: the cthonic spirit, and you get a pretty simple reading of V

DUDE AMBIGUITY AND LOOSE ENDS DISGUISED AS DEPTH DUDE POST MODERN WHACKYNESS AND CHARACTERS WITH SILLY NAMES XD.

It's been almost two years since l read V., please jog my memory: I know Victoria Wren was the woman in Egypt, in the first Stencil chapter, but who was Veronica Manganese?

Also, people in the thread keep referencing the Italian riots. That's when they steal the painting, right?

It's not.

I'm almost done with the book, when Profane is heading to Malta with Paula and Stencil. When did Stencil meet Profane before?

Vheissu is a play on words with the german question: Wie heißt du? (who are you), wich connects with the mistery behind V's identity such as the monomania towards boticelli's birth of venus that forms ulterior perfection and beauty in signor mantissa's view . Veronica turned into the bad priest because (this is only interpretation) as the progression of history becomes more tragic in the xx century so does its inherent nature, you can't completely say that the rat Veronica declines or transforms into the bad priest. But more accordingly, that all these woman (Victoria, Veronica, Vera) and their seemingly unnconected lives are individuals who are determined by the historical chaos that two world wars developed. This connects directly with V's obssesion with inmovility, the tragedy of the XX century deception it's a sour truth in face of the progressive nature of past history. That's why the kids of Valleta dismember the bad priest, the ending of the confessions of Fausto Maijstral carry a hopeful note, and that is that in the maeltrom of history's deceptions and catastrophes a new generation may have the power to deny such destiny (I think a lot of Pig Bodine's seemingly obssesion with Sartre). With that a new V is born: Valleta, a city in which its children are not offspring of their carnal mothers but of the ruined city which will be rebuild by its new citizens (think about this in a global scale). In the case of Paola I see an anecdotic quality in pretending to be black, while it's more important that she worked towards revealing the mistery of V to Stencil, I think that Pynchon used this elasticity in her identity in the same way that it is used with propane and stencil: she's an Outcast who can play with her own identity while her end goal is certain, in this case Propane is really interesting due to his yo-yo nature, his end goal is to understand why he doesn't have an end goal. The case of Wittgenstein, for what I remember, is to show how the sexual views of the v-note owner wife (I don't remember their names, was her name mafia or something?) while trying to be liberal and open are actually a reductionism of sexual behaviour.

I've only read V once, and it was a year ago. These are a few of my interpretations.

With the sick crew, to which Profane meets from Rachel.

I read half of this book before putting it down. Was the antagonistic spy in the desert chapters a robot?

Maybe.