V.

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
novel
title V.
Original title V.
country United States
author Thomas Pynchon
publishing company JB Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia
First publication 1963
expenditure Vintage Classics, London 2007

V. is the debut novel by the American writer Thomas Pynchon (* 1937 ) , published in 1963 . The German first edition was published in 1968 under the same title in a translation by Dietrich Stössel.

This novel is considered an important work of American postmodernism , which immediately earned its author the reputation of being one of the most important contemporary authors. V. was awarded the William Faulkner Foundation First Novel Award shortly after its first publication in 1964 and was also nominated for the National Book Award in the same year .

Illustration: Schlemihl's Encounter with the Shadow by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938)

The episodic, epically very broad work with frequent jumps in time , an abundance of bizarre, sometimes gruesome incidents and a difficult to understand arsenal of figures , entwines around the loosely interwoven stories of two opposing figures, Des Schlemihl and Picaros Benny Profane, who made his way through New York in the 1950s Years to drift, on the one hand and the historian Herbert Stencil on the other, who obsessively seeks V.

The title V. refers to an initial that appears in the diaries of Stencil's late father. Stencil suspects that his mother could be hiding behind it. In his search for V. he pursues increasingly absurd references in which the letter “V” appears again and again in different geographical locations and at different historically significant times.

content

Inundated with a seemingly inexhaustible variety of incorporated events is Pynchon's novel in episodic change of chapter alternating the action to Profane and Stencil is. Stencils father, working for the British Office Foreign stood was in 1919 on a mysterious mission to Malta were killed and records left behind by a person he only as V. designated. For his son, who is now trying to identify V. , the effort to clarify the identity and background of this person becomes a process of finding one's own identity .

According to the chronology, which is broken up in the novel itself by an anachronological form of performance, V. Stencil first appeared in Cairo in 1893 as Victoria Wren, who was involved in the Faschoda crisis . A year later, Victoria Wren appears in Florence and is linked with an attempt to steal Botticelli's Venus from the Uffizi ; it is also apparently linked to the attack by an Argentine gaucho on the Venezuelan consulate.

Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War , according to Stencil's research, an owner of a Parisian fashion salon, referred to only as V. , falls in love with a fifteen-year-old prima ballerina who dies masochistically while staging a “maiden sacrifice” during a premiere (Pynchon plays here on Igor Stravinskis Ballet Le Sacre du Printemps , which premiered in Paris in 1913). In 1919 a certain Veronica Manganese was embroiled in the unrest on the occasion of Malta's struggle for independence . Stencil's father left Malta after contact with V. , whom he had first met in Florence, and then disappeared with his boat in the Mediterranean. In 1922 Herbert Stencil identified V. as Vera Merowing, who experienced the cruel suppression of a native uprising while staying as a guest on a farm in the former German colony of South West Africa . Apparently V. was finally disguised as "Bad Priest" (Eng. "Bad Priest"), killed in a bomb attack in 1942 on Malta. However, there are also indications in the novel that V. could be a rat named Veronica who is trying to convert a priest in the New York canal system. However, V. may also refer to “ Vheissu ”, a mysterious country that, as the “fatherland of promise”, may be planning a conspiracy against the rest of the world. Despite the countless place and person names beginning with the letter "V", Stencil, confused by the countless hints, can ultimately not clarify who or what is hidden behind this initial. In a kind of Faustian desperation, he finally suspects that V. is perhaps nothing more than the repetitive appearance of a simple letter.

At the same time, the story of Benny Profanes is told loosely. By his own definition, a modern Schlemihl, he lets himself go and is not ready to commit in any way. A series of incredible adventures befell him, all of which he accepts with serenity. Although it can be used again and again by others, it can also be endured by them. In the end, an American college student on a European tour, which he meets in Malta and who admires him because of his adventures, asks whether he has learned anything from his experiences. Without having to think for a long time, Profane replies that, speaking offhand, he hadn't learned the slightest thing (" ... offhand I'd say I haven't learned a godamn thing ", p. 454).

The story of Profanes, a former member of the United States Navy , begins with a visit to a former fellow Marine in Norfolk , Virginia . Here Profane meets Paola, the daughter of Fausto Maijstral, who is himself the son of a Maijstral whom the father Stencils met in Malta in 1919. Profane saves Paola from the intrusiveness of another former marine and then goes with her to New York, where he moves in different, loosely connected circles. The most important of these circles, the so-called " Whole Sick Crew " (German: "the whole broken gang"), consists of artists, critics and others who spend their lives mostly drinking orgies, whoring around and inconsequential conversations. Her main pastime is " yoyoing ", i. H. the going back and forth, which the profane in turn describes as a " state of mind " (Eng. "state of mind"). The yo-yo , which turns around itself and moves up and down, is a sign that the members of the "Broken Gang" have come to terms with the meaninglessness of their lives. However, the members of this gang are also suspected of holding the strings of world politics and world events in their hands with their toy factory Voyodyne for the production of yo-yos, which has developed into a company for space equipment .

Interpretative approaches

Pynchon's first novel is characterized by an essential element that also determines his later novels: paranoia . The protagonists and characters in V. , who feel lost in their worlds, try obsessively to track down and recognize connections in order to make sense of them. The fictional reality of the novel is accordingly revealed to the reader from the paranoid point of view of the characters, so that the reader is constantly in danger of being drawn into their obsessions and of defining a meaning in the meaning of the novel, but only as one of each of several possibilities is to be understood. In order to get a picture of these possibilities, however, it is inevitable in the interpretation of the novel to play with the various meanings offered.

The individual, mostly loosely linked episodes are presented by Pynchon in different ways and from different perspectives , with the stencils perspective dominating. However, Stencil is characterized by the author as a completely unreliable narrator figure; As his name suggests ( stencil”), he presents the facts he learns in a stencil-like form ( “stencilised” ) and sometimes only reproduces what others tell him. For example, the events surrounding the Faschoda crisis - as a description learned by Stencil - are reproduced from the perspective of people who are not or at least marginally affected by the events. The events from the time of the Herero uprising are presented as a mere feverish dream through the report of a German soldier.

In this way, with the help of various signals, Pynchon warns his readers not to take what is being told at face value and thus characterizes the determination of reality as problematic in principle. Stencil's research thus becomes an obsession in which he tries to interpret all events and appearances of reality as links in a chain that is supposed to make up the story Vs. In this way, from Stencil's point of view , V. ultimately even becomes the rat Veronica in Manhattan's sewers . It is said that a Jesuit priest once left his congregation to convert the rats; while he is in a special way by him in the name Veronica baptized have turned rat. In the epilogue of the novel it is stated that this is the very same Father who met Veronica Manganese in Malta in 1919. This grotesque identification Vs in turn only documents the futility of all Stencil's attempts to understand reality and moreover himself on the basis of supposed facts that he believes he can infer from the past.

Stencil always speaks of itself in the third person; In this form of self-distancing or self-objectification, however, he does not see himself in a position to determine his own identity. He is also afraid of actually being able to fathom such a thing. When he learns of V's death , which appears to be extremely likely , he uses an excuse not to have to give up his search and takes even more than flimsy references to as yet unexplained aspects as an opportunity to continue his research. In a sense, Stencil's identity exists solely in the search for it. This search, however, represents an addition of details that can only be understood as connected links in a chain from a paranoid point of view. At the same time this contains a paradox : Paranoia is determined precisely by the fact that it incorrectly regards incoherent things as connected; the paradox for its part only dissolves under the assumption of an absurdity in which paranoia then becomes “the normal behavior of human beings”.

Despite the author's various text signals that the narrator's statements are indispensable, his exceptionally pictorial narrative style encourages the search for meanings that go beyond Stencil's own interpretation. In another interpretation approach, for example, the development that V. goes through in the course of the novel becomes significant . First portrayed as a loving woman, V. later becomes a whore , a lesbian and finally a transvestite and in this development takes on increasingly fascist traits. She is said to have been friends with Benito Mussolini in Malta ; In addition, her companion in South West Africa was one of Hitler's early supporters . In this way, their development is characterized by a growing "dehumanization and materialization". Your last appearance as " Bad Priest " is, so to speak, "dismantled" by children who find the corpse. The corpse, clamped by a collapsed beam, is composed of nothing but artificial parts, such as a glass eye with a built-in clock, a sapphire sewn into the navel, or metal feet.

On the one hand, this chain of development can apparently be understood as a process of dehumanization, on the other hand, however, other images that are used for characterization refer to the manifestations of Astartes , the Venus or white goddess or fertility goddess par excellence. In turn, this series of images could also be understood from the point of view of dehumanization, provided that the feminine is understood as the driving force of Western history in the sense of Henry Adams ' The Virgin and the Dynamo , which is also fully materialized at the beginning of our century . In such an interpretation, V. would accordingly be a “demythologization” of the “mother and woman image of the western world” handed down from Isolde to Goethe's Gretchen to the present day.

The accusation of a nihilistic core statement by V , which was repeatedly expressed in criticism against Pynchon, can in turn be refuted by reference to the numerous Gnostic elements of the novel, which are mainly contained in the figure of the Paraclete . The figure of Fausto Maijstral is under the sign of the Holy Spirit ; Fausto is reborn as a new person after the death of his wife and the encounter with the dying Bad Priest during a bomb attack; his daughter Paola finally returns to her husband, whom she had left before , after her adventures, which have various similarities to the story Vs. She gives him the ivory comb that Veronic Wren had originally bought in a bazaar in Cairo. British soldiers crucified by the Mahdis are carved on the back of this ridge . Accordingly, both Fausto's fate and that of his daughter could be symbolically interpreted as a rebirth “beyond a world that has fallen into disrepair”.

Without a reliable narrator, however, such an interpretation perspective remains as questionable as alternative interpretive approaches. Fausto's autobiography , which he intends to write, remains a fragment, just as the “redemption” from the material world is only a mere hint.

In Profane's World, the African-American alto saxophonist McClintic Spiker appears, who - exhausted from making music - visits a brothel in Harlem to relax . Behind his girl Ruby, however, is Paola again. Unlike the profane, it is not enough for Spiker to face the world calmly; for him, life runs to the rhythm of "flip and flap"; the excitement of war, the flip, is followed by indifference, the flap. In order to be able to go on living, however, the flip is always required, for example in the form of meeting Paola.

Similar to Maijstral and Paola, this suggests an alternative for the attitude and behavior of the profane. Profane resigns itself to having to live with chaos and is satisfied with its serenity. However, by trying to combine the data that he is experiencing in order to find meaning, everything becomes identical with everything and in this way loses its original identity.

It is again Stencil who, as the narrator, checks the possibilities of connections in the novel. Although these connections reflect the characteristic features of his obsession from his perspective, they nevertheless acquire a certain pictorial significance. Outside of such a context, albeit at least partially misleading, what happens in the novel remains a kind of Kabbalah , in which each reader individually has to find his own meaning. In Pynchon's novel, which alludes to Kabbalah in the text itself, the readers and interpreters are ultimately only provided with an “arsenal of possible meanings that will repeatedly elude complete decoding.” As in Pynchon's subsequent novels, it remains at the end open whether the (fictional) world depicted suffers from paranoia, or whether the person who wants to portray or decipher it suffers from paranoia.

Finally, a similar paradox also appears in the passages of the novel that could be classified as pornography . In the possible context of interpretation outlined above, the meaning of pornography itself would be clearly defined as dehumanization; In this way, the novel, which seeks to depict the dehumanization of the world, would in turn, as pornographic literature, paradoxically become the product of this very dehumanized world.

reception

In a book review after V.'s first publication in 1963 , the New York Times praised the “powerful and imaginative narrative style” (“ vigorous and imaginative style ”), the “solid humor” ( “robust humor” ) and the huge reservoir of information ( “ tremendous reservoir of information ” ) in this debut novel by Pynchons and praised its author as“ a young writer of staggering promise ” with “ remarkable ability ” .

In 1968, on the occasion of the publication of the German first edition of the novel, Der Spiegel wrote in its review that the hunt for V. led “through an ingeniously intertwined jumble of episodes that could easily have provided material for ten novels”. Furthermore, it is praised that Pynchon presented in V. “his monstrous, perhaps allegorical nightmare of civilization”, which was “artfully prepared”.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the American first edition of V. the New Yorker described the protagonist Stencil in a new review of Pynchon's novel in 2013 as the “classic desperado ” of American literature, who - comparable to the title character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or the central figure of Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby-Dick - feeling uncomfortable in the world, but nothing can change that (" ... a classic desparado of American fiction, on the order of Gatsby and Ahab, all three uneasy in the world, all three unable to do a thing about it ").

The renowned Americanist Hubert Zapf sees the two protagonists Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil as two characters "whose attitudes and motivation exemplify the postmodern situation". Profane reminds "as a typical representative of a willless person driven by external forces in New York of the 50s ... of ways of life of the Beat Generation ", while Stencil is "obsessed with his historical passion", "to decipher his father's diary", something but present him with unsolvable problems. Just as Profane guides the reader “through the streets and underground system of New York”, “so follow the reader Stencil on its worldwide tour”. In the course of the narrative, the novel generates “more and more offers of meanings”, but the story presented, and thus Pynchon's novel, ultimately eludes “an indubitable interpretation”.

The novel is considered an important work in postmodern slipstream literature.

expenditure

The American first edition of V. was published in 1963 by JB Lippincott & Co. , Philadelphia. Shortly thereafter in the same year, a British edition was published by Jonathan Cape- Verlag, London.

After printing the first edition, Pynchon made various changes to the manuscript, but these were only taken into account in the British editions, for example by Jonathan Cape- Verlag or in the paperback edition as a licensed edition by Penguin Verlag . The more recent American editions, including the 2012 e-book, on the other hand, contain the originally printed version of the novel, which, however, due to Pynchon's later modifications, can no longer be considered a version authorized by the author in the true sense .

The German first edition appeared in 1968 under the title of the same name in a translation by Dietrich Stössel by Rauch Verlag, Düsseldorf. Later editions were published in several editions under the same title in the translation by Dietrich Stössel and Wulf Teichmann in Rowohlt Verlag , Reinbek bei Hamburg 1976, ISBN 3-499-25074-8 together with an afterword by Elfriede Jelinek . In 1987 the (East) Berlin publishing house Volk und Welt published a licensed edition for the then GDR ( ISBN 3-353-00216-2 ).

Secondary literature

  • Franz Link: "V., 1963" . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 339-343.

Web links

  • Pynchon Wiki: V. . Annotations in English and further literature references. On: pynchonwiki.com . Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  • V. . English-language analysis and further information. On: the modern word . Retrieved July 21, 2014.

Individual evidence

  1. See Thomas Pynchon . On: Famous Authors . Retrieved July 20, 2014. See also National Book Awards - 1964: Finalists . On: National Book Foundation. Retrieved July 20, 2014.
  2. See Franz Link: "V., 1963" . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 340.
  3. ^ David Cowart: Thomas Pynchon. The Art of Illusion . Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1980, pp. 74 f.
  4. See also the chronologically ordered table of contents in Franz Link: "V., 1963" . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 340.
  5. See also Franz Link: "V., 1963" . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 342.
  6. See Franz Link: "V., 1963" . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 341 f.
  7. See Franz Link: "V., 1963" . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 339 f.
  8. See Franz Link: "V., 1963" . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 340.
  9. ^ Franz Link: "V., 1963" . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 340 f.
  10. ^ Franz Link: "V., 1963" . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 340 f.
  11. ^ Franz Link: "V., 1963" . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 341.
  12. ^ Franz Link: "V., 1963" . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 342 f.
  13. ^ Franz Link: "V., 1963" . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 343.
  14. See Franz Link: "V., 1963" . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 343.
  15. ^ The Whole Sick Crew . In: The New York Times , April 21, 1963. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  16. ^ Thomas Pynchon: "V." . In: Der Spiegel, October 21, 1968. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  17. "V." AT L: PYNCHON'S FIRST NOVEL TURNS FIFTY . In: The New Yorker , March 29, 2013. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  18. Hubert Zapf : Postmodernism (60s and 70s) - Thomas Pynchon . In: Hubert Zapf u. a .: American literary history . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , pp. 354–358, here p. 355.
  19. A Working Canon of Slipstream Writings , compiled at Readercon July 18, 2007 (PDF), accessed on October 5, 2018.