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enough for the second; "Love with your mouth shut, help without
breaking your ass or publicizing it; keep cool but care." This is the
stoical resolve of an embattled underground in a world increasingly
governed by Ionesco's rhinoceri, to mention a vision markedly simi–
lar to Pynchon's. Efforts at human communications are lost among
Pynchon's characters, nearly all of whom are obsessed with the pre–
sumed cryptography in the chance juxtaposition of things, in the
music and idiom of bars like the Vino or the Scope or merely in
"the vast sprawl of houses" that Oedipa sees outside Los Angeles,
reminding her of the printer circuit of a transistor radio with its
"intent to communicate."
Even the title
V.
is cryptographic. Available to
all
interpreta–
tions, it is answerable to none. Though the letter V probably did not
have Vietnam as one of its meanings in 1963, the novel so hauntingly
evokes the preconditions of international disaster that Vietnam must
retrospectively be added to the long list of its other possible mean–
ings. In that part of the novel, neaTly half, given to an international
melodrama of spying in the years since the Fashoda incident of 1898,
V.
shows how international, no less than personal, complications ac–
cumulate from an interplay of fantasies constructed by opposing sides,
each sustaining the other's dream of omnipotence, each justifying its
successes by evoking the cleverness of its opposition, each creating
the opposition, and, in some mysterious and crazy way, the moves
and successes of the other side as a provocation to its own further
action.
"Plots" are an expression in Pynchon of the mad belief that
some plot can ultimately take over the world, can ultimately control
life to the point where it is manageably inanimate. And the ascrip–
tion of plots to an opposition is a way of explaining why one's own
have not achieved this ultimate control. Nearly from the outset, the
people of Pynchon's novels are the instruments of the plots they then
help promote. Their consequent dehumanization makes the prospect
of an apocalyse and the destruction of self not a horror
so
much as
the final ecstasy of plotting and of power. In international relations
the ecstasy is thermonuclear war; in human relationships it can
be
sadomasochism with skin itself as leather, leather a substitute for
skin, where parts of the body are made of jewelry or metal, inter–
changeable, detachable, unscrewable. Pynchon makes this process
