PARTISAN REVIEW
519
forting since parody gives us the old fonn to hang on to. The choice
between paronoia and chaos, between Herbert Stencil and Benny Pro–
fane of
V.,
is further complicated here. Slothrop, the novel's rough
equivalent to Profane, shares without understanding it an obsession like
Stencil's. But his paranoia is justified by the facts - or almost. He strug–
gles with the Stencil-Profane qualities in himself, and as he simulta–
neously recognizes and resists paranoia, he becomes less and less a self
to be contended with. The primary focus of the reader's narrative con–
cern through the center of the book, Slothrop attracts to his rescue
several of the other major characters - particularly Katje Borgesius (a
cross between Lucrecia and Borges ) and Pirate Prentice (the psychic
who takes over other people's perceptions); and he is the focus of a
plot by Ned Pointsman (the master Pavlovian) which ends in the mis–
taken castration of Major Marvy. Yet the Slothrop plot is not resolved,
or even unresolved. Like Slothrop, it simply dissolves in the antiparanoid
condition of chaos. At one point, the rather obscure multivoiced narra–
tor alludes to the two aspects of Slothrop:
"If
there is something com–
forting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also
anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not
many of us can bear for long. Well right now Slothrop feels himself
sliding into the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city
around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and
only pasteboard images now of the listening Enemy left between him
and the wet sky. Either they have put him here for a reason, or he's
just here. He isn't sure that he wouldn't, actually, rather have that
reason."
I'd prefer a reason, too. Somebody, somewhere, must have a reason
for something. Or, in the tradition of naturalistic fiction in which na–
ture brooded indifferently over the fates of heroes and heroines, at least
the strength and the suffering of the protagonist could imply values
brought by man into the indifferent world. But here people become ob–
jects, aspects of that very indifferent world they fear. Moreover, the
indifferent world may not, after all, be indifferent, though it is surely
unintelligible or translatable only into the formulas of mechanics. Yet it
is impossible not to follow the clues Pynchon plants as he leads us on
with symbols, allusions, suggestive images, repetitions. But the patterns
are almost impossible to decode, or can be decoded as Weissman decoded
the spherics in
V.:
"The world is everything that is the case." The
curious pleasure that comes with recognition of such clues as that
Gravity's Rainbow
is about V-2 or tha t an orgy takes the shape of a
