PARTISAN REVIEW
473
of a bomb, the human body, like other bodies, disintegrates. Bombs
destroy and that, like Rennie's death, is a fact not to be mythologized.
For Fausto the children's nonhuman view of death is closer
to reality; the "nonhuman ... was the most real state of affairs."
The nonhuman in Pynchon differs from the inhuman and the in–
animate. "The inhuman means bestiality (though beasts have at
least the advantage of being animate)." Fausto here is close to
Lawrence's Birkin, who never tired of pointing out the difference
be–
tween the mechanical, the humanistic and the nonhuman. Yet nei–
ther Fausto nor Pynchon carries the argument as far as Lawrence
or Birkin. Where Lawrence's preoccupations were emotive, sexual
and biological, theirs are political and aesthetic. These two themes
coalesce in Stencil's quest, which pointedly satirizes the mythic jour–
neys in
The Waste Land
and
Ulysses.
Stencil is one of the classic
fools in literature; like Don Quixote and Dostoevsky's man from the
underground, he models his life on the literary forms of the previous
generation, turning the mythic and symbolic quest into a life-style.
This "child of the twentieth century" tries to learn what happened
to his father, what happened between his father and V. and the real
identity of V. He adopts from the modern conventions of the mythic
quest, the device of using different masks, which leads to what
Pynchon calls "forcible dislocation of personality," an obvious thrust
at Eliot's extinction of the personality. But where Murdoch would
argue that such role-playing violates the separate existence of others,
Pynchon demonstrates the violence this dramatic metaphor does to
the self. For example, in his various roles Stencil wears "clothes that
Stencil would not be caught dead in" and eats "foods that would
have made Stencil gag." Such antics gain him nothing, for playing
roles, Pynchon archly points out, is not the same thing "as seeing the
other fellow's 'point of view'''; rather it
is
a device for trying to
get what one wants. The Yeatsian dare to become the other thea–
trically leads only to self-violation without an expansion of sympathy
for and insight into other human beings.
But even worse, around each of these identities Stencil weaves
"a nacreous mass of inferences, poetic license and forcible dislocation
of personality into a past he didn't remember and had no right in,
save the right of imaginative anxiety or historical care, which
is
recognized by no one." "And all of this role-playing served to keep
