Abstract
The text, V., does not use the signifier, ‘V.’ to represent a character, V., in the way that Robinson Crusoe uses the signifier, ‘Robinson Crusoe’, to represent a character, Robinson Crusoe. Something has changed in/as the novel — almost imperceptibly — in the space of the texts between, texts which we call ‘history’. For a start, V. is always absent, hinted at, forced into a shadowy (non-) existence in the way Bowie mimes out a glass cage which is not ‘there’. V.: she/it is pure signifier — the (as we used to say) conscious pure effect of signification.
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Notes
The quotations making up the V of the title have the following sources. The one on the left is spoken by Weissmann and translated by Mondaugen in Pynchon’s V. (pp. 258–9). Mondaugen claims to have ‘heard that somewhere before’. The ‘somewhere’ is possibly the opening proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. See L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 6. However, Mondaugen would have had to have been very quick off the mark to recognise the proposition as Wittgenstein’s. Mondaugen hears it in 1922, the year after the first publication of the Tractatus in the Annalen der Naturphilosophie. So, stuck in the middle of Deutsch-Südwestafrika, Mondaugen would most likely have required a postal subscription. Interestingly enough, Wittgenstein himself, as late as November 1921, only thought of the Tractatus as ‘in press’. See the correspondence in L. Wittgenstein, Letters to C. K. Ogden, ed., trans. G. H. von Wright (Oxford/London: Blackwell/Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). This and other quotations, shown in parentheses throughout the chapter, are from the New York, Bantam Books edition of V., 1964. The second title quotation is from J. Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), p. 401. Plater makes quite a deal out of the world being all that is the case, reading that proposition as committing both ‘Pynchon’ and ‘Wittgenstein’ to a theory of ‘closed systems’. The current chapter works directly against the grain of that reading. See: W.M. Plater, The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 2–63.
J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) p. 320.
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. H. R. Lane, R. Hurley and M. Seem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 1.
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© 1990 Alec McHoul and David Wills
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McHoul, A., Wills, D. (1990). V. In: Writing Pynchon. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20674-2_7
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