V'scape?A Deleuzean Reading of V.

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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). 4
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). 5
Page 1 and 2: V’scape—A Deleuzean Reading of
Page 3: “stencilization,” 9 whose root
Page 7 and 8: jaunting in and out of places like
Page 9 and 10: Empire. However, all that metaphori
Page 11 and 12: where death is constantly present a
Page 13 and 14: chaotic situation that none “want
Page 15 and 16: the proto-V.-quester, swallowed up
Page 18 and 19: accomplish this, “we must first b

V'scape?A Deleuzean Reading of V.

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