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A V

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Writing Pynchon
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Abstract

And so again a V, a spreading of pages, a bookmatching, thus: Godolphin, in the novel V., in the fictional city of Florence, unable to go to the Consul-General, must make his confession in the street to a rather bad priest, as it turns out, in the form of passing Englishwoman, VW, Victoria Wren. But fearing her connection with the press, he prefaces his confession as follows:

‘This isn’t for general dissemination … and it may be wrong. Who am I to know my own motives….’ (154)2

With a preface like this in place, it must be confessed that here, in ‘A V’, among other things, we rely on a prior reading of a passing figure or figures who, at least in part, at least as enigmatically as V. it- or herself, could be called ‘woman’ (or perhaps ‘women’). Though what that is (or those are) is an essentially problematic issue to be treated here also. In treating the figures of ‘woman’, a W, a doubling of V, in this text — woman having been so unclear in our earlier discussions as to be all but absent — we hope to resituate while reaffirming our earlier reading of V. We are spurred on from the start by a V as fold of the hymen, a two-fold fold which becomes also the points of a pen, and so of writing, and of writing-woman in particular.

Between the two, there is both confusion and distinction (‘exquisite confusion’), hymen, the dance of the penna, the flight of the Idea … a ‘hesitation’ turning into writing. In folding it back upon itself, the text thus parts (with) reference, spreads it like

(Jacques Derrida, Dissemination 1)

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Notes

  1. J. Derrida, Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 239.

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  2. A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Subsequent references are in the text and employ the abbreviation ‘AJ’.

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  3. T. de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Subsequent references are in the text and employ the abbreviation ‘AD’.

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  4. M.R. Siegel, Pynchon: Creative Paranoia in Gravity’s Rainbow (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1978), p. 53. For Clerc ‘the author’s sympathy for children comes through so genuinely’ in the case of Ilse and Bianca. See his Approaches to ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. 19.

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  5. G. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 17. J. Derrida, ‘Differance’, in his Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. D.B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 132. In mathematics, one of the ways of managing a sudden transgression or Aufhebung from one part of a system (to a second part not usually abutting the first) is through a ‘fold’ in the fabric of the system, a doubling-back. This is sometimes called a ‘catastrophe’. In the present case it is more of a cata-trope, a downward figure, a V. I. Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. W. Weaver (New York/London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Secker & Warburg, 1974), p. 39. Originally: Le città invisibili (Turin: Einaudi, 1972). W. Abish, ‘Crossing the great void’, in In the Future Perfect (New York: New Directions, 1977). On this see E. Grosz, ‘Derrida, Irigaray and deconstruction’, in J. Borghino et al. (eds), Leftwright, Intervention 20 (Sydney: Intervention Publications, 1986), pp. 71–81. We cannot follow all the aspects of AD’s unelaborated notions of textuality here. Many remain by implication within the notions of woman/women as discursive effect. Perhaps the most explicit statement made is surprisingly ‘deconstructive’ in approach (or is it a throwback to Althusser?), approving ‘symptomatic’ readings which seek out ‘the invisible subtext made of the gaps and excess in the narrative or visual texture of a film’ (p. 57). Yet, once again, what seems to be advocated is a corrective reading that will replace the missing woman with a satisfactory representation of her. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 32. AJ’s identification of the ‘ruse of reason’ with the strategies of modern man (or men) always risks marginalising feminism, reproducing it as a discourse of unreason and thus of desire and fantasy at the expense of, for example, rationality and analysis. This perhaps shows how difficult a course both AD and AJ are embarked on, writing ‘scholarly’ texts against the ‘ruse of reason’. The problem could be recast as that of the marginality of feminism though that would come as hardly any surprise or threat. The de marginalisation, the making ‘proper’ and ‘scholarly’ of feminist discourse — which AD, AJ and also the present text risk in their different ways — might, in fact, turn out to be no more than an incorporation, a pacification of that doodle in the margins: feminism. In the scenario as it now stands feminism appears as a character only in the most cryptic sense, that is, as a graphic mark. How is that mark transformed into a proper name …? How is it written, from the margins, into the body of the text? It might be said that feminism is written in … not as a character but as a body of knowledge. Let’s call that body of knowledge ‘Feminist Theory’. As marginalia feminism is not, however, a disciplined body. It is the activity of writing that constitutes a disciplining process — the transformation of a political movement into an academic discipline. Paradoxically it can be argued that this very process — the writing in of Feminist Theory, the disciplining of feminism — constitutes, at the level of institutional politics, a writing out of feminism. From L. Stern, ‘High noon in the valley of the dolls or the character of feminism’, Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, Special Issue on Literature and Popular Culture (1987), pp. 106–18. This quotation, p. 109.

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  6. M. Hite, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), pp. 54, 161. The Levine and Leverenz readings appear in the former’s ‘Risking the moment: anarchy and possibility in Pynchon’s fiction’ in G. Levine and D. Leverenz (eds), Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Boston: Little Brown, 1976), p. 136, n4.

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© 1990 Alec McHoul and David Wills

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McHoul, A., Wills, D. (1990). A V. In: Writing Pynchon. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20674-2_8

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