V'scape?A Deleuzean Reading of V.

V’scape—A Deleuzean Reading of V.
Abstract
This paper aims to map Thomas Pynchon’s Vheissu in V. as a V’scape, a
Deleuzean rhizomatic map with multiple entryways, opening up to possible lines of
flight from the impasses. The premise is that landscapes need be re-mapped
rhizomatically as works of art for their ontological and pragmatic efficacy in
(un)making the environment, setting up existential territories, or bringing forth an
entire new landscape from the uneven surface of the earth.
Vheissu, one of the mysterious identities of V., is a far-away Shangri-la/lost Eden
with rich soil for rhizomatic growth and culture. Likened to a dark tattooed savage
from head to toes without a soul beneath, Vheissu is alluring you. However, she soon
turns into a dystopia/an anti-landscape. There is no map, or any other solid data left.
To find her “heart” under the glittering integument, three plateaus are chosen to map
the V’scape : Vheissu (skin), Mondaugen’s story (flesh), and Mara’s story (heart).
Eventually, all of the points (offshoots) of V. will be transformed into lines (of
flight) to make an ever-growing rhizomatic V’scape, on which the possibility of
becoming-woman will be open to all, and lines of flight move smoothly in and out.
Pink on pink, the kaleidoscope colors on Vheissu will resurge and proliferate—eternal
return with a difference for a better becoming-world.
Keywords: rhizome, rhizomatics, multiplicity, cartography, map, trace, tourism,
arborescent, V., Vheissu, V’scape, plateau, lines of flight, becoming
Introduction
Just as the importance and the use of Deleuze’s philosophy has been gathering
momentum, 1 so has the literary study of Pynchon’s works been steadily growing. 2
This paper aims to connect these two great thinkers with concepts of rhizomatics.
Made of plateaus and constituting a model of continuing offshoots, the rhizome
travels horizontally and laterally, constantly producing connections 3 /becomings that
contribute to the dynamic multiplicity of creation and existence. Thus, when Deleuze
1 Michel Foucault declares that "one day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian," "Theatrum
Philosophicum," Critique 282: 885; Rachel Fensham shares similar evaluation, Foreword,
Understanding Deleuze, by Colebrook Claire (Crows Nest, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2002) v. And
to Deleuze, the use of philosophy is to expose “all forms of baseness of thought”—“an enterprise of
demystification,” Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans H. Tomlinson (London: Athlone, 1983) 106.
2 As early as the 70s, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Pynchon’s third novel, has been claimed ‘the Ulysses
of the seventies,” Frederick Karl, American Fiction 1940-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1983) 444.
3 John Rajchman pinpoints “connections:” “new connections, new passages, new synapses for new
compositions,” as the essence of Deleuze’s philosophy, The Deleuze Connections (The MIT P, 2001) 4;
see also Eric Alliez’s The Signature of the World, Or, What is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy?,
trans. Eliot Ross Albert and Albert Toscana (New York: Continuum, 2004) 103.
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meets Pynchon, the seemingly random/unconnected points (which Pynchon is famous
for) will be rhizomatically linked, creating new and dynamic concepts. 4 So, let’s start
from the beginning--actually it’s already the middle, 5 the “excluded middle” 6 --to form
a rhizome like “the orchid and the wasp”/“the partridge and the pear tree,”
exemplifying the symbiotic nature of rhizomatic growth. 7
A drawing is an act of creation, drawn ideally with the spirit of “the Pink
Panther,” imitating nothing, reproducing nothing, painting the world its color, “pink
on pink” (TP 11). Both V. and A Thousand Plateaus begin with a drawing/an epigraph,
which provides interesting comparison. Let’s first take a look at the drawing of V.
fractal, 8 A or a simulacrum of an isosceles triangle/inverted pyramid, made up of 8
rows of the letter V (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, respectively from the bottom to the top row)
appears on the first page of V., which consists of 16 chapters plus one epilogue, the
arrangement corresponding to that of A Thousand Plateaus, 15 sections/plateaus.
We notice that all of the V’s are identical, duplicating in a cloning manner, by which
Herbert Stencil weaves the genealogy of V. into a gigantic arborescent tree, fruit of
4 For more details of creating new concepts as the role of philosophy, see Deleuze Gilles and Felix
Guattari’s final collaboration, What is philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (New
York: Verso, 1994).
5 A rhizome “is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo,” Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1987)
25, subsequently cited as TP.
6 As Moly Hite points out, the philosophical principle/law of excluded middle: “Everything must either
be or not be,” is much ridiculed in Pynchon’s works; in contrast, “including middle,” a concept
corresponding to Deleuze and Guattari’s logic of “AND” (TP 25) would be more appropriate, Ideas of
Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Coloumbus: Ohio State UP, 1983).
7 “The orchid and the wasp” is a trope used in A Thousand Plateaus (10), while “the partridge and the
pear tree” appears in Thomas Pyncjon’s V. (London: Pan Book, 1975) 282, subsequently cited as V.
8 “Fractal cartography” is a constantly repeated motif in Pynchon’s fiction, and the drawing of “a
symbolic fractalic ‘V’” at the very beginning anticipates “a systematic pattern as symbolic
announcement of our human insistence on drawing patterns to interpret reality” lies hidden below the
“apparent narrative chaos,” Francisco Collado-Rodrigueza, “Trespassing Limits: Pynchon’s Irony and
the Law of the Excluded Middle,” Oklahoma City U Law Review 24.3 (1999). Online posting. 20 Aug.
2007
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“stencilization,” 9 whose root is European colonialism/imperialism. Then, the first
drawing on A Thousand Plateaus: it’s a piece of musical work. Distinctly different
from the piling up of V’s, or normal musical notes, what we see is two types of lines:
first, the original horizontal parallel lines of the staff pulled and stretched to form
shapes of various asymmetrical “V”; second, entangled/entwined lines forming
something like a surrealist decal, which may look like a map of Africa here, a female
face/body there and what not—it’s a rhizomatic V., shooting up offshoots at
random--all because the musical points have been transformed into lines (TP 8). Great
music, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “has always sent out lines of flight, 10 like
so many ‘transformational multiplicities,’ even overturning the very codes that
structure or arborify it; that is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and
proliferations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome” (TP 11-12).
Obviously, these two drawings are different: one develops from a point to a
multiplicity
of the same; the other extends from a line to multiplicities of difference.
We may conclude that (Stencil’s) V-diagram represents the “infinitely reproductive
principles of tracing,” which “always comes back ‘to the same’,” adding up “only to
the recurrence of an initial and a few dead objects” as well as “[Stencil’s] own
extermination,” while the piano piece, a rhizomatic/proliferating “map” of “multiple
entryways,” is “detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification” (TP 12;
V 445, 451). Thus, to map the V’scape, rhizomatics/rhizoanalysis 11 will do the trick:
all the “points” of V. could be assembled and extended into lines (of flight), just like
the first V. symbol--“mercury-vapor lamps” shining and “receding in an asymmetric V
to the east where it’s dark” (V 10). Eventually, all will rise up on the V’scape, and the
arborified V. would be replaced by the rhizomatic V., 12 which will be “reinjected into
still other lives, creating a fabric of heightened states between which the greatest
number of connecting routes would exist.” 13
heissu, 14 In V., the quest for the “real” meaning of V an exotically remote country
9
Shawn Smith regards Stencil as the text’s primary “historian,” attempting to solve the mystery of V. in
endlessly multiplying interpretations in “the closed historiographic system,” “‘Truth or Falsity Don’t
Apply’: V. and the Historiographic Method,” Pynchon and History: Metahistorical Rhetoric and
Postmodern Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon, ed. William E. Cain (New York &
London: Routledge, 2005) 19-58. Takashi Aso also points out “the monolithic Stencilian logic of
historical events” as the cause for Stencil’s failure in mapping V.’s history (17).
10
“Lines of flight” is an elusive term and Peter Fleming’s interpretation is close to the purpose here: it
is “ a metaphor for everyday resistance,” dodging “subjectification, ” “‘Lines of Flight’: A History of
Resistance and the Thematic of Ethics, Death and Animality,” 2002 ephemera 2(3): 193-208.
11
The term is used by Charles Stivale while interviewing Guattari, The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze
and Guattari :Interactions and Animations (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998) 214.
12
Tamsin Lorraine uses the terms “arborescent connections” and “rhizomatic connections”
to
distinguish the difference between the the arborified stagnation and the rhizomatic growth, Irigaray
and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy (London:Cornell UP,1999) 170.
13
Brian Massumi, Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy,” A Thousand Plateaus,
xv.
14
Critical comments on the meaning of Vheissu are rather divergent/rhizomatic: 1.[Vheissu is] the
subject of “international intrigue,” “an apocalyptic force, the negation beneath the surface of
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and an emblem of the protean V, is desperately undertaken by Hugh Godolphin, and
maniacally by Stencil; however, Vheissu refuses to yield up a fundamental referent.
Instead, it accretes other V words, making V. an eponymous character—“Venezuela,”
“Vesuvius,” “volcano,” “Victoria,” “Veronica (both the female rat 15 and a mysterious
woman),” etc.—and as Stencil struggles to synthesize all of them, piling them up
arborescently/genealogically, he is driven to construct an increasingly comprehensive
plot, finally postulating that the Vheissuean are plotting to infiltrate and conquer
Western civilization through the Antarctic subterranean network of natural tunnels.
What Vheissu ultimately signifies is lost to Godolphin and Stencil. But with lines of
flight, the reader can re-map Vheissu with what happens on the plateaus of
“Mondaugen’s story” and “Mara’s story,” connecting them all to form the V’scape.
Principle of cartography and decalcomania
Cartography and decalcomania, two principles of rhizome, involve the practice
of making maps and decals. The premise of cartography is that the world is
measurable and that we can make reliable representations or models of that reality.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the art of mapping is to avoid mere “tracing”--translating
the map into an image; transforming the rhizome into roots and radicles; organizing,
stabilizing, neutralizing the multiplicities on the basis of “the axes of significance and
subjectification” (TP 13). Pynchon thinks likewise, and in V. he uses the terms like
tourism/tourist/the Baedeker world/Baedeker land to express the tourist’s skin-deep
“tracing” of foreign places; for example, after Evan, Godolphin’s son, tells what he
knows about Vheissu to the Italian F.O., he is described thus: “in general he’d
exhibited the honest concern and bewilderment of an English tourist confronted with a
happening outside the ken of his Baedeker” (V 190). For the Baedekerland tourist, the
landscape is “two dimensional” as only surface complexity and internal hollowness
multiplicity” (Newman 54); 2. the private obsession of Godolphin, and a code name for Venezuela
(Patteson 23); 3. a paradigm for the entire book V., representing “lost civilization” (New 100); 4. the
“land of V.” because of its barbarity, color, femininity, and lack of soul (Fahy11); 5. linked to European
imperialism, serving “as a metaphor, a symbol of the horror of Europe’s imperialist ambitions,” but
also symbolizing “an ideal past” (Brownlie 26, 24); 6. prelapsarian beauty turning into “an Edenic
wilderness and the estrangement of man from nature,” “a symbol for entropic decline” (Safers 92-93);
7. “an inverted Eden,” “the Gnostic Garden of Evil,” and the insidious message: “V.’s you” (Eddins 65,
67); 8. a region symbolizing “gaudy glamour dressing a void” (Stimpson); 9. a land of surfaces without
heart or soul, lingering in the memory “as a play of shimmering, gaudy colors,” representing “the basic,
apolitical nihilism,” “an emblem of life itself, colorful and diverse, but ultimately without substance”
(Cowart 20, 21); 10. a weird fantasy land (Taner 44); 11. unappreciated “Shangri-la” by the British,
responding “in sadistic terror to these glimpses of mystery” (Mackey 16, 17); 12. a land both fabulous
and terrifying, a dystopia, its location vague, but its significance clear--the void and apocalyptic
annihilation (Kharpertian 77, 78); 13. “accountability” replaced with the eulogizing of the vanquished,
“the yearning and the imperialist nostalgia” (Kaplan 34); 14. “acts of sexual and geopolitical
domination” yoked, “exposing as pathological desire to mark, cover, and own various kinds of space”
(Russell 63); 15. humanized, dehumanized and reduced to a heap of garbage (Russell 64)—all of these
can be treated with different hues as the offshoots on the V’scape.
15 It’s interesting to mention in passing that while rats, swarming over each other, are considered
rhizomes in A Thousand Plateaus (6), in V. rats proliferate to such an extent that “American would
belong to the rats,” and Veronica, a female rat converted to Christianity might even be canonized (118).
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upon the Other is projected, and the desire to see the world is merely to caress “the
skin of each alien place,” or, akin to the power fantasies of the colonialist, to flay the
“glittering integument” from “the barbarous body of the exotic Other” (V 409, 184;
Mackey 18).
Different from tracing/tourist map, the rhizomatic map can be “torn, reversed,
adapted
to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social
formation”--a root-free living art (TP 12). Truly, maps provide much information
about the past, including the philosophy and cultural basis of the map; however, maps
are never realistic representations of the actual world, but estimations, generalizations,
and interpretations of true geographic conditions. In Graham Huggan’s view, the
contact between cartography and colonialism has much to do with “the procedures,
and implications, of mimetic representation,” which “not only conforms to a
particular version of the world but to a version specifically designed to empower its
makers,” and “the apparent coherence of cartographic discourse is historically
associated with the desire to stabilize the foundations of a self-privileging Western
Culture” (125, 127). Thus, “cartographic discourse” can play an exemplary role
demonstrating the empowering strategies of colonist rhetoric and the deficiencies of
these strategies so that “a link between a de/reconstructive reading of maps and a
revisioning of the history of European colonialism” can be connected (Huggan 130).
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the map opens up a “new space” for
post- colonial writing and a useful working model for the description of post-colonial
cultures and for the closer investigation of the kaleidoscopic variations of
post-colonial discourse, 16 including the possibility of “a feminist cartography”
17 —“‘new territories’ outlawed or neglected by dominant discourses which previously
operated in the colonial, but continuing to operate in modified or transposed forms in
the post-colonial, culture” (Huggan 133).
In a nutshell, the role of cartography
in contemporary writing is to put
“cartographic
connection” to work, implementing a series of creative revisions
registering the transition from a colonial framework within which the restrictions of
colonial space are reflected and recreated to a post-colonial one within which a series
of “territorial disputes” and “a (re)engagement in the ongoing process of cultural
decolonization” are engaged (by the writer) “in the pursuit of social and cultural
16 Fascinated with the map, post-colonial writers often response both to physical (geographical) maps,
having operated effectively, but often restrictively or coercively, in the implementation of colonial
policy, and to conceptual (metaphorical) maps perceived to operate as exemplars of, and therefore to
provide a framework for the critique of, colonial discourse (Huggan 125).
17 A number of contemporary women writers have adapted Deleuze and Guattari’s model to the
articulation of “a feminist cartography,” which dissociates itself from the “oversignifying” spaces of
patriarchal representation through the “deterritorizing lines of flight” to produce “an alternative kind of
map characterized not by the containment or regimentation of space but by a series of centrifugal
displacements” (Huggan 132).
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change” (Huggan 134). Furthermore, recent understanding of the human ecosystems
has led to a link between the notion of sustainability and harmonization of cultural
and biological evolution, rendering the producing of the rhizomatic map with its
multi-entryways for productive outgrows a new kind of cartography in need. 18
Plateau 1: Vheissu—the Skin
Hugh Godolphin, the Antarctic explorer and a British Empire
hero, is the original
teller of Vheissu, weaving the first line of its becoming. In 1884, he escorted a crew
of civilian engineers (altogether 13 men) to Vheissu to do “contour lines and
fathom-markings, cross-hatchings and colors where before there were only blank
spaces on the map”—“All for the Empire” (172). Fifteen years later in Florence, like
“the Ancient Mariner,” he eagerly/repentantly told Victoria Wren, the first avatar of V.,
things about Vheissu. First, he told her how, through a series of (anti-)landscape,
they managed to get to Vheissu: on camel-back over a vast tundra; past the dolmens
and temples of dead cities; crossing a sun-forsaken broad river, being so thickly
roofed with foliage; traveling in long teak boats carved like dragons and paddled by
brown men speaking incomprehensible language; over a neck of treacherous
swampland; across a green lake to come to the first foothills of the mountains which
rang Vheissu. Here, native guides left them, and it took two more weeks or so over
moraine, sheer granite and hard blue ice before the borders of Vheissu were reached. 19
On arrival at Vheissu, Godolphin was fascinated by the gorgeous colors. Next
wonder
was the iridescent spider monkeys, changing colors in the sunlight. Not just
that, everything from the mountains to the lowlands changed its color from one hour
to the next; it was as if “you lived inside a madman’s kaleidoscope,” and even “your
dreams become flooded with colors, with shapes no Occidental ever saw” (170). In
retrospect, Godolphin likened Vheissu to “a dark woman tattooed from head to toes” 20
and bore a wishful thinking of collecting himself “a harem of dusky native women”
(170). However, he soon discovered her skin, “the gaudy godawful riot of pattern
and color” was too much for him and in only a matter of days, he would pray to God
not only “to send some leprosy to her,” but to “flay that tattooing to a heap of red,
purple and green debris, leaving the vein and ligaments raw and quivering and open at
last to your eyes and your touch” (171). The sudden twist from intoxicating love to
maddening hatred was a puzzle. Vheissu simply became a restless place of “barbarity,
insurrection, internecine feud,” probably due to the fact that the English “have been
18 In “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Lynn White proposes another alternative--a
“religious” solution--for solving the worsening ecological crisis, which, in my opinion, is almost
unattainable, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and
Harold Fromm (Athens: The U of Georgia P, 1996) 3-14.
19 Deborah L. Madsen compared Godolphin’s travel to Vheissu with Dante’s travel down into Hell, The
Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon (Leicester, London: Leicester UP, 1991).
20 It is a truism to traditionally construct nature as feminine, but with “dark” and “tattoo” added to the
body map, the connotation apparently multiplies.
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jaunting in and out of places like Vheissu for centuries” (170). 21 Later, Evan,
recollecting what his father had told him as bedtime story, supplemented some more
details about Vheissu: human sacrifice, bathing with opalescent and fire-color fish
dancing around, cities inside volcanoes that erupted into flaming hell, blue-faced men
and women giving birth to sets of triplets only, and beggars belonging to guilds and
holding jolly festivals all summer long. The story fabricated by his father was so
incredible that Evan ceased believing in it years ago until now seeing English and
Italian governments “hagridden to alienation over this fairy tale or obsession” (193).
So, Vheissu’s lingering presence continues to be felt with much apprehension.
The whole surveying expedition led by Godolphin ends with only three escaping
narrowly:
Godolphin, his second-command “incurable and insensate” in a hospital
now, and a civilian who has “dropped out of human sight” (V 183). No maps of
Vheissu are made, only a report of failure and a line mentioning it in Godolphin’s
dossier kept in a secret F.O. memorandum condensed from “Godolphin’s personal
testimony” (190). What really happened in Vheissu is never clearly told by
Godolphin. We only know there was no second expedition as it was considered too
much of a luxury. Vheissu was simply “a bad country” and “it was all hushed up”
(172). We have to wait fourteen years later when Godolphin reaches the South Pole.
In 1898, Godolphin ventured into the Antarctic to find the truth about the “heart”
of Vheissu.
Considering himself a true explorer and distinguishes himself from the
Baedekerland tourists who want only “the skin of a place,” he “wants its heart” (V
204). What he finds at the South Pole is revealed to his friend Mantissa, who,
idolizing Venus as his Goddess, is plotting to steal Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” (hung
at the west wall at the Uffizi Gallery) with a hollow Judas tree. 22 And the truth of
Vheissu is: “Nothing” (204). This epiphany dawned on Godolphin when he began to
dig a cache at the South Pole after planting the flag (a sign for the sovereignty of the
British Empire), and there it was: “Staring up at me through the ice, perfectly
preserved, its fur still rainbow-colors, was the corpse of one of their spider
monkeys”—“a mockery of life, planted where everything but Hugh Godolphin was
inanimate” (205-6). Believing that it was the doing of the Vheissuean, who, fearing
that Godolphin might reveal the secret of Vheissu to the outside world, had been after
him slinkingly ever since he left Vheissu, Godolphin lamented: “If Eden was the
creation of God, God only knows what evil created Vheissu. . . . a dream of
annihilation” (206). 23 What Godolphin fails to delve is the profound but simple truth:
21
Dwight Eddins holds a different view thinking the “provenance of Vheissu is the most explicitly
gnostic of any symbol” in V. and that only Satan with the demiurgic forces is capable of creating his
own Garden like Vheissu with its madman’s colors and barbarous people (65).
22
Judas tree is said to be the one from which Judas Iscariot hanged himself after betraying Christ.
23
Josephine Hendin likens Godolphin’s trip to Vheissu to Kurts’s to Africa in Heart
of Darkness in that
he “went to Africa to civilize the natives and discovered the cannibal in himself, the need to murder
the
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it is the (West/European/White) man who did this to Vheissu. 24 Mantissa somehow
learns the lesson, and he gives up the larceny at the last moment—forming a line of
flight escaping “annihilation/nothingness/ontological void”--by saying affirmative
“Yes,” to his partner Cesare’s protest, “You have come all this way, and now you will
leave her?” (210). 25 However, it is still only Venus, hung at the “west” wall, the White
Goddess, who is saved; the black/the marginalized/the preterite/the female
represented by Vheissu are all still in dire situations. 26
Still, we are left with the intriguing question: what on earth is Vheissu’s treasure?
“Colors,
music, fragrances” are what Godolphin remembers about Vheissu (204).
How about ivory, diamond, uranium, gold, or other valuable minerals? Without
solid evidence, it’s hard to nail down the exact answer; however, from Godolphin’s
description, its splendid natural beauty and unique people may well be the key. If so,
Vheissu’s “asset” is kept perhaps due to the fact that it’s far away and hard to reach
(you have to pass through the valley of death) as well as that her people, that “feral
and lunatic dominion cannot afford to let [Godolphin] escape,” wouldn’t be
tamed/dominated without fighting back barbarously and forming their lines of flight--
these may be the reasons why the British Empire finally decides to give Vheissu up,
letting it remain the “blind” spot on the imperialist’s map (205). As to why Godolphin
couldn’t let it be off his memory, it is simply due to his nostalgic sentimentality of the
Empire’s past glory. All he really cares about is “the glittering integument;” thus, he
deliberately hides the “hard dead-point of truth” from “the lovers of skins”—“the
same kind of truth” of every foreign land which “can be phrased in identical words”
in all cases—even England’s (184). Not surprisingly, he can neither find the heart
nor share it with others should he find the truth because he himself, representing the
colonial sensibility, has no heart for the preterite.
Thus, although there might indeed be some other
treasures hidden somewhere in
the kingdom
of Vheissu besides the natural beauty, they are, in comparison, too
insignificant to really matter. Once a rhizomatic landscape has turned into an
arborified anti-landscape, be wary of the counterattack from Nature.
So far, the story of Vheissu seems to be but another invasion of the British
beauty whose sexual pull made him want to mutilate her,” and his fleeing to the South Pole made him
realize he would “never escape the destructiveness in himself;” thus, he “embodies civilization’s
crucial question: how to keep the monkey off your back” (43); Molly Hite thinks so likewise (60).
24 Based on imperial viewpoint, Godolphin’s “blindness” is shared by Sidney Stencil, who “maps”
Valleta as an “aseptic administrative world,” “surrounded by an outlying vandal-country . . . ill-lit
except for rendezvous points, which stand out like sequins [the off-color Vheissu ] on an old and
misused ball-gown” (V 468).
25 Saying “NO” to the alluring surface and the void beneath it, Mantissa preserves himself and provides
himself with a line of flight from subsequent sense of guilt and annihilation (Newman 55).
26 See Hazel Carby’s “White woman listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood,” for
including black women’s experience in rewriting the narrative of “herstory,” The Empire Strikes Back:
Race and Racism in 70s Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1982) 212-35.
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Empire. However, all that metaphorically pictured by Godolphin--his carnal and
sadist
desire (with the imperial and masculine pose) of flaying and deflowering
Vheissu--will be materialized vividly in flesh in the next plateau, “Mondaugen’s
story,” supported by stark historical facts/flesh, making the scenery on the V’scape
more gruesomely “colorful.”
Meroving, another avatar of V., to the old-age Godolphin in his seventies: “This siege.
It’s
The rational connection between the two plateaus is the remark made by Vera
Vheissu. 27 It’s really happened,” to which Godolphin’s reaction is laughing,
saying: “Vheissu was a luxury, an indulgence. We can no longer afford the likes of
Vheissu” (248). Because of the war, “our Vheissu are no longer our own, or even
confined to a circle of friends; they’re public property . . . No more Vheissu,” and
with that Godolphin erases his Vheissu from the surface of he earth (248, 249).
Plateau 2: Mondaugen’s Story--the Flesh
Tersely put, Deleuze's philosophical enterprise is to develop in new ways
a
commitment to an immanent ontology, stressing the importance of
the social and the
political
to the very heart of being, and affirming difference over the transcendental
hierarchy in every aspect. The final comment made by Cesare after the aborted theft
of Venus, “things and people can be found in places where they do not belong,” serves
as a good starting point for Mondaugen’s story, in which the Germans’ intrusive
presence, another colonial exploitation on the Dark Continent, is an even more
fiendish nightmare that denies “the affirmation of difference” (V 212).
Historically, western imperialism was a process by which only a few people
within a few states, “took possession of much of the rest of the world and
(re)named
it;” at
its height, in the late 19th and early 20th century, “much of the production of
the entire human race went to support and enrich those living in a few European
countries” (Ivison 134). 28 Mondaugen’s story tells a tale of this kind. Here,
Godolphin’s private fantasies based on Vheissu have been transformed into public
realities of a most grisly sort, and the gaudy “dream of annihilation” associated with
“iridescent” spider monkeys and Antarctic wastes is literally realized in this plateau
heaped with native corpses “bejeweled green, white, black, iridescent with flies and
their offspring”(V 269). Eventually, the “might have been” “has finally happened.”
Godolphin provides mostly “the skin” of Vheissu, and although he has
desperately tried to find her “heart,” without “the flesh,” it all ends in vain. The
27 Kerry Grant thinks the comment is made due to the association of the Bondel insurgents with the
“barbaric and unknown race” of Vheissu, supposed by the intelligence services of Italy and Britain to
be about to invade Europe via the network of tunnels beneath the Antarctic ice, A Companion to V.
(Athend and London: The U of Georgia P, 2001) 129.
28 Michael Harris’s “Pynchon’s Postcoloniality” has a through discussion of (post)colinialism in
Pynchon’s novels, Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins, ed. Niran Abbas (Cranbury, NJ:
Associated UP, 2003) 199-214.
9

line/ yarn is abruptly snapped with his “Nothing;” however, with the cue: “It’s Vheissu.
It’s finally happened,” some connection can certainly be built with “Mondaugen’s
story,” whose background is “Foppl’s Siege Party” in 1922. On this plateau, two
historical uprisings of the African natives against the colonial domination are
described, 1904’s massacre and 1922’s uprising, consequently generating two other
“infamous trees,” impeding the rhizomatic growth/network (Massumi xiii).
South-West Africa was the German colony, and German settlers were drawn to it
by economic possibilities in diamond and copper mining, and especially
farming.
Due to all kinds of unnamable atrocities done to the native, on January12th, 1904, the
Herero people rose in rebellion against the German colonial rule. In August German
general Lothar von Trotha finally defeated the Herero. 29 When von Trotha was
replaced due to a public outcry, it was too late to help the Herero, as the few survivors
had been herded into camps, where many died of overwork, malnutrition or disease.
In total, von Trotha’s extermination order resulted in the slaughter of fourth-fifths of
the Herero; 30 consequently, it has been called “the first genocide of the 20 th century,”
and some historians draw a direct lineage between von Trotha’s plan for the
extermination of the Herero and the holocaust sponsored by the government of Nazi
Germany. Historically significant, in V. the native slaughter of 1904 is related to the
extermination of the Jews—“This is only 1 percent of six million, but still pretty
good” (V 245). And colonialism persists as a live issue into 1922 as there is a very
strong continuity between the Herero’s uprising in 1904 and the Bondel’s revolt in
1922 (Seed 95). 31 Ironically, Mondaugen and the other European settlers withdraw
into Foppl’s villa. The whole event is presented through the innocent eyes of Kurt
Mondaugen, whose “ignorance parallels that of the reader and the narrative partly
enacts his and our learning of historical facts” (Seed 96). As if reflecting the dire
human pathos, the landscape in Mondaugen’s narrative is of “sheer strangeness,” a
“wasteland” with “huge spaces, strange light and proximity [to] the Kalahari (‘that
vast death’),” making it “a positive threat” dwarfing the human figure—“a landscape
29 Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha, Commander in Chief of German South West Africa in 1904,
issued orders to crush the native Herero rebellion by encircling them on three sides so that the only
escape route was into the waterless Omaheke-Steppe, a western arm of the Kalahari Desert. The Herero
fled into the desert and von Trotha had water holes poisoned, erected guard posts along a 150 mile line
and shot on sight any Herero, be they man, woman, or child, who attempted to escape; hence, many
dying of thirst. His Vernichtungsbefehl, or extermination order, was in marked distinction to that of
the Herero leaders, who were, in the main, careful to ensure that only German soldiers were attacked..
30 Prior to the uprisings, there were estimated to be 80,000 Herero. In the 1911 census, 15,000 were
found. Von Trotha’s troops also routed the Nama. On April 22, 1905, he sent a message to Nama,
suggesting they surrender, and mentioning the fate of Herero. Eventually, approximately 10,000
Nama died during the fighting, the remaining 9,000 were confined in concentration camps.
31 After the massacre done by Trotha’s order, the survivors were gathered in concentration camps and
put to hard labor. They hoped that they would receive better treatment under the Union, but they fared
no better and in 1922 Abrahan Morris, the Bondelswaartz leader, returned illegally from exile and an
attempt to arrest him led to a tribal uprising. The Union authorities massacred these rebels with
machine guns and bombs dropping from aeroplanes “for the first time in history”(Seed 95).
10

where death is constantly present and offers an appropriate context to mass killing”
(Seed 96). Without offshoots of rhizomatic growth, lines of flight are arborified.
A worshipper of von Trotha, Foppl attempts to re-create the ambience of 1904,
forcing his guests to dress in accordance with the earlier period, addressing the native
he is beating as a loving parent, 32 and watching the massacre of the natives from the
villa as if it were a private entertainment. Surrounded by this kind of ambience,
Mondaugen is involuntarily caught up in a common purpose as were the German
soldiers of 1904. In his dream he re-creates the uprising of eighteen years earlier
through the persona of an anonymous German cavalryman, 33 who follows von
Trotha’s counsel, putting aside guilt and accountability for the forced labor, rape,
mutilation, and random murder. With the colonizer’s superior status, he takes by
force as his concubine a Herero girl named Sarah, who has been held in the thorn
enclosures and whipped until her back is a “text” of scars (Weisenburger 150). He
hides her in chain in his hut, not willing to share her with others. However, Sarah is
found and gang raped. 34 She escapes afterward, but only to drown in the ocean
nearby. The following day her body is washed up on the beach, with her breast half
eaten by jackals, a scene not unusual as the entire coast is “actually littered each
morning with a score of identical corpses” (273). 35 Witnessing such a gruesome scene,
even nature ceases “becoming,”
A sun with no shape, a beach alien as the moon’s Antarctic, restless
concubines in barbed wire,
salt mists, alkaline earth . . . the inertia of rock,
the frailty of flesh, the structural unreliability of thorns, the unheard
whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary cry of the strand
wolf in the fog. (274)
32 Mondaugen witnesses how Foppl sadistically tortures a Bondel male, whose naked body is a map of
flesh sjamboked open like “so many toothless smiles,” with “the white vertebra” winking at him from
one long opening [a realization of Godolphin’s sadistic desire of flaying Vheissu], while Foppl tells the
Bondel to be joyful, sing hymns of thanks, and love him as his parent (V 240).
33 Though the name is not clearly given, from the context I share with David Seed’s opinion,
identifying the cavalryman as Foppl, the host of the party and the admirer and follower of von Trotha.
34 In Dana Medora’s view, the gang rape of Sarah, “the pivotal scene of brutality in the novel,” takes
“the horror of male domination even further,” and her death is “an act of refusal to be violated further
or to yield her body, her labor, to the [concentration] camp’s enterprise” (22).
35 The death of the young Herero woman derives from a book, which is basically a travelogue, South
African Cinderella: A Trek through Ex-German Southwest Africa, by an Englishman named Rex
Hardinge, in whose eyes Southwest Africa was a Cinderella-land of immense potential stifled by
colonial mismanagement and apartheid, and he found solid proof for all the cruelty described in
V.--hangings, disembowelings, and the slow strangulation of victims by stringing them up between the
v-shaped branch of a tree. One of Hardinge’s witnesses recalled that many of the young women held in
the thorn enclosures and violated at random by the German men had attempted to escape by swimming,
and their corpses were washed up on the beach. “One corpse,” the witness recalled, “was that of a
young woman with practically fleshless limbs, whose breast had been eaten by jackals” (227). It was,
as Mondaugen imagines it to be, evidently a common sight at the time. So, the “contours of history
merging with the smallest folds of the fictional narrative: in V., during one of the more self-consciously
fantastic portions of the narrative, a dream, the outlines of the episode are nonetheless verifiable as
historical fact” (Weisenburger 151-52).
11

Vividly, this
catalogue “captures the non-humanized, alien nature of the landscape”
(Seed 99). Thus, the “dream of annihilation” beneath the skin of Vheissu becomes the
actual systematic annihilation of native tribes in South-West Africa, a “humanity’s
defeat by the inhuman” (Patteson 25). From “an imagistic viewpoint,” the siege
party’s “animated variant of the ‘iridescent’ Vheissu dream has degenerated into an
African-coast variant of Antarctic bleakness and alienation, the wasteland in which
Godolphin had experienced the final extension of Vheissu’s tentacles” (Eddins 70).
(Seed 98). se
36 Leaving the villa, he meets a kind Bondel (“a good Samaritan”) who
families
are all mercilessly killed but he gives Mondaugen a donkey ride. Mondaugen
map of
Vheissu,
devoid of humanistic concern, 37 we find Mondaugen’s story contains too
and flicking his buttocks rhythmically with a sjambok. Vheissu is no longer
his
nightmare,
but we haven’t forgotten the “soul” he has failed to find yet.
On the V’scape, with lines of flight we jump from the plateau of
Vheissu, on
which the gaudy skin eventually gets “wrinkled” through Godolphin’s
“nightmares”
and
Significantly, Mondaugen “makes a gesture of rejection by leaving the villa”
rests his face against the scarred back of the native, and “a minimal human contact” is
established—a line of connection/flight created on the V’scape (Seed 99).
With Mondaugen’s story, the map of German South-West Africa can surely be
re-mapped anew with the “cartographic connection.” Unlike Godolphin’s
much human pathos, which, with “the cartographic turn,” can be turned into a new
space worthy of being “judged like works of art for their ontological and pragmatic
efficacy in making and unmaking the environment, setting up existential territories, or
bringing forth entire world from the uneven surface of the earth” (Bosteels 147).
We last see Godolphin in Vera’s clothes, dancing about a Bondel’s hanging body
Plateau 3: Mara’s Story--the Heart
is “all there had ever been,” to the plateau on Foppl’s villa, on which
massacre/genocide arborifies even nature’s growth/becoming, and now to another
plateau on Malta, on which Vheissu’s heart/soul will finally be found and liberation of
female body complete (V 206).
This time the connection is a talk between Sidney and Demivolt in which the
name of Vheissu is mentioned. Twenty years ago (1899) in Florence when Vheissu
became
a live file again, they both worked to solve the riddle of Vheissu, which came
to naught. Yet, even now “the Vheissu affair” is still anxiously remembered for likely
36 Jimme Cain sees Foppl’s fortress as “closed systems,” and only Mondaugen “escapes the physically
and spiritually debilitating fortress, Foppl’s haven of arrested time” (74, 76)
37 Jessica Berman thinks there is a concerted effort of geographers to remake their discipline as a new
science of ongoing human-landscape relations, and the essential key words in this new cultural
geography were relationship and change, especially as applied to human existence in landscape over
the long term, “Modernism’s Possible Geographies,” Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity,
ed. Laura Dlyle and Laura Winkiel ( Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2005) 281-96.
12

chaotic situation that none “wants to see lit into holocaust” (470, 194).
The current status of Malta is that massacre has been predicted and “a
Situation-in-the-process-of-becoming” is going on (470). 38 The unpleasant
remembrance
of Vheissu causes Sidney to lament, “Can’t Vheissu ever be a dead
file?” to which Demivolt answers, “Call Vheissu a symptom. Symptoms like that are
always alive, somewhere in the world” (473). It’s a symptom of a certain disease,
whose name is not specified but can surely be inferred as the insatiable encroachment
of colonialism/imperialism. Demivolt’s remark also rings a bell of Godolphin’s final
remark on Vheissu’s becoming “public property,” and to deal with it, the soul is to be
found through “Mara’s Story,” which will provide new rhizomatic connections.
On Malta, “Island of sunshine,” Mehemet, an experienced master told Sidney
Mara is “an inconstant goddess,” and “Be wary of her” (V 457). According to the
legend,
Mara is a historical personage (known for doing only good deeds, nursing the
shipwrecked and teaching love to every invader) who turns into a saint, then a spirit
living in Xaghriet Newwija, and Valletta (capital of Malta) is her domain. Early in
1565, two privateers captured a Turkish galleon belonging to the chief eunuch of the
Imperial Seraglio. In retaliation Mara was taken prisoner and brought back to
Constantinople. On the way back, the Turks lashed Mara to the bowsprit and that was
how she entered Constantinople: a living figurehead. On drawing near that city, she
was heard to cry: “Night, so be it.” The Turks thought she was either raving or blind.
Disguise was one of her attributes, and she’d always been attributed magical
talents, “a quaint, hermaphrodite sort of deity,” which might “embarrass the
Anglo-Saxon
nerves” (V 462). Tall, slim, small eyes of wide spacing, small-breasted
and bellied, she was not a beauty, but she was a good teacher of love. Having pleased
the Sultan, she was installed as a concubine. Yet, once in the seraglio she raised hell.
A few weeks after Mara entered the seraglio, the Sultan noticed a certain
coldness infecting his nightly companions: “a reluctance, a lack of talent;” even the
attitude
among the eunuchs changes, a kind of “smug and keeping a bad secret of it”
(463). To find out the truth, he had certain girls and eunuchs severely tortured, but
all in vain. Shy concubines once pacing with ladylike steps—“limited by a slim
chain between the ankles”—and downcast eyes were now smiling and flirting
promiscuously with the eunuchs, who flirted back (463). Girls left to themselves
38 Some historical facts of Malta might help develop our interest here. In 1814, Malta voluntarily
became part of the British Empire. During World War II, Malta survived relentless raids from German
and Italian military forces (1940-43). In recognition, King George VI in 1942 awarded the George
Cross "to the island fortress of Malta--its people and defenders." President Franklin Roosevelt,
describing the wartime period, called Malta "one tiny bright flame in the darkness." Victory Day,
celebrated on September 8, 1943, commemorates victory in the 1565 Great Siege, and the end of the
WWII attacks in Malta. Malta became a Republic on December 13, 1974.
13

would suddenly leap on one another with fierce caresses, even making abandoned
love loudly without shame (462-63). Finally, Mara was summoned. Standing before
him “in a shift fashioned of tiger-moth wings,” 39 she faced Sultan with a wicked smile,
admitting “I have done it all,” and reciting sweetly: “taught your wives to love their
own bodies, showed them the luxury of a woman’s love; restored potency to your
eunuchs so that they may enjoy one another as well as the three hundred perfumed,
female beasts of your harem” (463). Bewildered at such ready confession, the
Sultan argued with sarcasm that eunuchs couldn’t have sexual intercourse. “I have
provided them with the means,” replied Mara triumphantly. Suddenly, the Sultan
began to feel “an atavistic terror,” knowing “he was in the presence of a witch” (463).
Both of the practice of keeping concubines and eunuchs are in keeping with the
patriarchal system and male chauvinism—another version of the atrocious
exploitation
of the Other’s body by the colonizer/imperialist. Unlike the heaviness
of Sarah’s case, Mara’s doing is a carnival decrowning and debasement, making penis
the phallus symbol redundant/unessential. Magically, the weak have been liberated
both physically and spiritually with the principle of love.
Meanwhile, back home the Turks had laid siege on Malta. However, they
suddenly retreated because the Witch Mara had sent the
Sultan’s into a kind of
mesmeric
trance, detached his head and sent it to Malta to provide false information;
consequently, general retreat was ordered and church bells all over Xaghriet Mewwija
began to ring. The Turks fled, and history attributes it all to bad reconnaissance. The
head returned to Constantinople and its owner, and the sly Mara, disguised as a cabin
boy, returned back to Valletta. “Beware of Mara,” Sidney is told once more: “She’s
restless. She will find ways to reach out from Valletta, a city named after a man, but of
feminine gender, a peninsula shaped like . . . a chastity belt. But there are more
ways than one to consummation, as she proved to the Sultan” (V 465). 40 Thus, the
female body in bondage (including the eunuch’s castrated/feminine body) is liberated.
The epilogue ends with the antiheroic and mysterious death of Sidney Stencil,
39 Of particular interest is the rhizomatic link between “the black moth” and “the tiger moth.” While in
Godolphin’s memory of Vheissu, “there would come to him hints of the perfume those people distill
from the wings of black moth;” in Mara’s case, when sent by the Sultan, she is dressed “in a shift
fashioned of tiger-moth wings” (169, 463). The plain black moth of Vheissu has metamorphosed into a
much more colorful and fearsome tiger moth, the design of whose wings varies: the front wings are
brown with a white pattern, the back wings orange with a pattern of black dots. The conspicuous
patterns serve as a warning to predators because the moth's body fluids are poisonous. The colors are
also ideal for frightening predators such as small birds: the moth normally hides its hindwings under
the cryptic forewings when resting. If a threat is perceived, the moth quickly shows its red color and
flies away. In this way, it successfully confuses and warns off the predator. Considered a witch/spirit,
Mara certainty knows the art of “camouflage” and has fooled others by disguise (V. as the Bad Priest
does the same thing); most of all, she is feared by many, especially those who have to travel across her
domain.
40 Women’s capacity for multiple orgasmic sexual pleasure help them to reclaim female sexuality.
14

the proto-V.-quester,
swallowed up by a sudden giant watersprout 41 out of the deep
sea within Mara’s domain on a cloudless day, a mystery kept from young Stencil’s
knowledge. It is believed to be Mara’s doing—having her revenge done with simple
but mysterious natural force. Thus, Mara, a Maltese, is the reification of Vheissu the
reification of V. 42
While Vheissu’s
existence remains a mystery, the history of Malta, on which
Mara lives, is a fact. One passage in V. describes Malta significantly as such:
Malta is a noun feminine and proper. Italians have indeed been attempting
her defloration since the 8 th of June. She lies on her back in the sea, sullen;
an immemorial woman. Spread to the explosive orgasms of Mussolini
bombs. But her soul hasn’t been touched; cannot be. Her soul is the
Maltese people, who wait—only wait—down in her clefts and catacombs
alive with a numb strength, filled with faith in God His Church. How can
her flesh matter? It is vulnerable, a victim. But as the Ark was to Noah so
is the inviolable womb of our Maltese rock to her children. Something
given us in return for being filial and constant, children also of God. (318)
An emblem of the female spirit, Mara embodies this soul of the Maltese. Thus, the
trinity of the skin, the flesh, and the soul is connected, and a rhizome is
formed—V’sacpe.
At the beginning of the Epilogue, Mehemet told Sidney that whenever he came
to Malta, he felt as if “a great hush were on this sea and the island its heart,” as if he
had come back to something his own heart “needs as deeply as a heart can” (457).
That is, coming to Malta is like returning home to the heart’s desire. And the heart
which Godolphin couldn’t find in Vheissu nor at the South Pole can be found here at
Malta, “a matriarchal island” (321). That Sidney Stencil finally dies here in Mara’s
domain is not absurd at all. He dies in the sea, returning to the womb, back to nature.
Conclusion
A positive ontology to establish a positive
theory of ethics and social
organization
is one way of reading Deleuze’s philosophy, 43 which is basically a
philosophy of becoming that begins with and pass through “becoming-woman,” 44 “the
41
The dramatic event brings reminiscence of Captain Ahab’s death on the water by Moby Dick, the
gigantic and mysterious white wall. Theodore Kharpetian considers the waterspout as another “V” (84).
42
Deborah Madsen draws an analogy between V. and Mara, relating both through Mara’s association
with Venus. See “Vacillating in the Void? Verbas Vivification in V.” (29-53).
43
Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1993) xviii.
44
Charles Stivale envisages “becoming-woman” as “the very dynamic zone intermezzo,” The
Two-Fold Thought
of Deleuze and Guattari, 135. For some feminists, “becomiong’woman” is a
controversial metaphor as analyzed in-depth by Elizabeth Grosz’s “A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism
and Rhizomatics,” Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed., Constantin Boundas & Dorothea
Olkowski (New York: Routledge, 1994) 187-210. Also see Tamsin Lorrine’s analysis in “Deleuze’s
Becoming-Imperceptible,” Irigaray & Deleuze (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP)165-88; Claire
15

key to all other becomings” to the becoming of BwO (Body without Organ), 45 “a
living body all the more alive and teeming,” “full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance,” as it
“does away with mental and physical obstacles and smoothes out space,” “opens one
out onto the world in a way that encourages immanently produced connections with
other BwOs,” and “allows the individual to situate herself as a plateau whose
singularities can be brought into a continuum with the singularities of surrounding
territories” (TP 277, 30, 150; Conley 22; Lorraine 170). V’scape, made of a series of
correlated plateaus, is a kind of BwO, celebrating the spirit of rhizomatics (TP 158).
Rhizome is to A Thousand Plateaus what Vheissu is to V. The meaning of
Vheissu can be broadened to be a lesson of endangered wilderness, or uncultivated
lands of beauty, threatened by the ever-encroaching civilization: the spider monkey is
an example. 46 It can also be interpreted as the herstory of the female body. 47 Though
not fully discussed here, Vheissu as an emblem of V. is part of the process of her
metamorphosis from a pure/religious virgin ready to wed Christ to the Bad Priest, a
cyborg 48 and BwO (“what remains when you take everything away”) whose
disassembled bodily pieces 49 are further metamorphosed into other avatars just like
Colebrook’s “Becoming,” Gilles Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 2002) 125-146; and Alice Jardine’s
insightful analysis/critique of “becoming woman” and BwO in “Becoming a Body without Organs:
Gilles Deleuze and His Brothers,” Gynesis: Configuration of Women and Modernity (London Cornell
UP, 1985) 208-26.
45
Ian Buchanan considers BwO “the least understood and the most easily misunderstood of all the key
components of the Deleuzean hermeneutic apparatus” in Deleuzism: A Metacommentary (Durham:
Duke Up, 2000) 147, and, due to the scope of this paper, I have no intention of delving in-depth into
this issue here. However, it’s worth mentioning in passing that Verena Conley juxtaposes Helene
Cixous’s NBW (New Born Woman) with Deleuze’s BWO for discussion, emphasizing “becomings,” as
it is “all important for women to remain vigilant, to avoid a becoming molar of feminisms, to . . .
continue to draw new lines of flight,” “Becoming-Woman Now,” Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. Ian
Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh UP, 2000) 36. Also, Rosi Braidotti points out that for Luce
Irigarary BwO is “woman’s own historical condition,” “Toward a New Normandism: Feminist
Deleuzian Tracks,” Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1994)168.
See too Stefan Mattessich’s “Imperium, Misogyny, and Postmodern Parody in V.” for discussion of
BwO in V., Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Works of Thomas
Pynchon (London: Duke UP, 2002) 23-42.
46
Alison Russel points out explicitly that Pynchon’s sociopolitical critique illuminates the related
ecological concern alluded from the anxiety provoked by Vheissu, but even the anxiety of a holocaust
does not quell the desire to appropriate objects, people, and places (66).
47
For more detailed discussion of the female body, see Dana Medoro’s “Traces of Blood and the
Master of a Paraclete’s Coming: The Menstrual Economy of Pynchon’s
V.,” Pynchon Notes 44-45
(1999): 14-34; Christopher Kocela’s “Retelling Lesbian Fetishism in Pynchon’s V.,” Pynchon Notes
46-49 (2000-2002): 105-130; Eleanor Kaufman’s “Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Mind,” Deleuze
and Feminist Theory, ed. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh UP, 2000) 128-47.
48
Welcoming the conceptual blurring of boundaries and embracing a “cyborg identity,”feminist Donna
Haraway claims that she “would rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,”
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991)181. And with
cyborg bodies, according to Sue Thornham, “cyborg feminism” has become a new kind of feminism,
Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies: Stories of Unsettled Relations (London: Arnold, 2000)178.
49
John Stark treats the Bad Priest’s disassembling as a theme of V., which is further developed into
Gravity’s Rainbow with Slothrop’s “disassembly”/“disintegretation” (53). In Sue Thornham’s view,
however, reclaiming female subjectivity through “disassembled and reassembled, postmodern
collective and personal self” is no longer sufficient for cyborg feminists, who desire to go beyond
corporeality for an ideal post-colonial subject with “hyphenated identity” [concept similar to Pynchon’s
“excluded-middle” and Deleuze’s “AND”], the “impure, both-in-one insider/outsider” or
16

accomplish this, “we must first be convinced of our humanism,” even though it’s
getting more and more difficult (V 322). “The street of the 20 th [and 21 st ]Century, at
whose far end or turning—we hope—is some sense of home or safety” (V 323-24).
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