PARTISAN REVIEW
471
collect the kind of unambiguous quotes one needs to state a theory.
Only through a kind of accumulation and repetition of ideas do we
come to see the novel's
dianoia.
Like
all
ironic works, the total struc–
ture reveals more
than
any part.
As
in many modern satiric novels,
all the characters are fools; but some fools, because they face in a
slightly different direction than others, seem a little less foolish.
One such character, Fausto Majistral, a Maltese poet and man
of letters, writes his memoirs and comes as close as anyone to reveal–
ing the aesthetic theory of the novel. He is specifically concerned with
the problem of metaphor. "Living as he does, much of the time
in
a world of metaphor, the poet is always acutely conscious that meta–
phor has no value apart from its function; that it is a device, an
artifice. So that while others may look on the laws of physics as leg–
islation and
God
as a human form ... ," poets "are alone with the
task of living
in
a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking
that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so
that the 'practical' half of humanity may continue
in
the Great Lie,
confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share
the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as
they." According to another character, metaphor, instead of hu–
manizing an "innate mindlessness," translates the human into the
in–
animate, "foisting off the humanity that we have lost on inanimate
objects and abstract theories." Where Robbe-Grillet sees
in
meta–
phor a tragic distortion of reality, Pynchon sees it transforming the
human into the inanimate, and
in V.
"alignment with the inanimate
is
the mark of a Bad Guy." The metaphor-making poet is always in
danger of becoming one of the supreme bad guys.
Pynchon, presumably in
his
own narrative voice, gives us a
graphic demonstration of the process by which metaphor dehu–
manizes, by extending to a logical reduction the metaphor "that the
act of love and the act of death are the same." "That single melody,
banal and exasperating, of
all
romanticism since the Middle Ages,"
leads to the grotesque fetishism of both the affair between V. and
the dancer Melanie, and the ballet,
The Rape of the Chinese Maid–
ens,
in which Melanie performs. Summarizing the consequence of
the death-love metaphor Pynchon writes: "Dead at last, they would
become one with the inanimate universe and each other. Love play
until then becomes an impersonation of the inanimate, a transvestism
