The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Thomas Pynchon · a novel in sixteen chapters and an Epilogue · J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1963 · scored on Pynchon’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Comic picaresque of the present joined to a secret history of the century; quest novel, spy novel and historical pastiche in one book
Mythos
The quest for a goddess, Venus, the Virgin and the White Goddess, built into a woman who turns by stages into a machine; Henry Adams’s Virgin and Dynamo made one figure; the schlemihl as anti-quester
Phase
From Christmas Eve 1955 in Norfolk, Virginia, to Malta in 1956, with historical chapters reaching back to 1898 and an Epilogue set in Valletta in 1919
Presentation
Fiction; sixteen numbered chapters and an Epilogue, many titled in the old form that begins “In which”; the historical chapters told through borrowed narrators and framed as one man’s reconstructions; songs throughout
Register
From slapstick, jazz talk and the slang of 1956 to Baedeker pastiche, the spy story, a confessional journal and the dispatches of a colonial siege
Scale
Two men, a crew of New York bohemians, and the twentieth century from Fashoda to the siege of Malta
Governing Proposition
An ex-sailor drifts between the coasts and through the sewers and parties of New York in 1955 and 1956, while another man pieces together, from his father’s journal, a woman or a thing called V. who seems to appear wherever the century turns violent, from Fashoda to the siege of Malta. The wager of the novel is that the two lines, one horizontal and aimless, one vertical and obsessed, mean nothing apart and one thing together: that across the century the human has been passing over into the inanimate, and that the man who finds a plot in that passage and the man who refuses all plots are both its creatures.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens on a date, “Christmas Eve, 1955”, and on a man passing through Norfolk, Virginia. Benny Profane is an ex-sailor, a schlemihl, a human yo-yo who shuttles up and down the East Coast with no end in view. Many of the chapters are titled in the old form that begins “In which”, the form of the picaresque, and the first is his. From Norfolk he drifts to New York, and the book follows him at his own pace, which is to say without a destination.
Beside him runs a second line, and it is his opposite. Herbert Stencil has found in his father’s journal a name, or an initial: V. He has made it his life to learn what V. was, and his search takes the form of a reconstruction of the century. Its chapters reach back to Alexandria and Cairo in 1898, at the time of Fashoda; to Florence in 1899; to German South-West Africa in 1922, with a memory of 1904; to Malta under the bombing of the Second World War; to Paris in 1913; and, in the Epilogue, to Valletta in 1919. One line is horizontal and aimless, the other vertical and obsessed, and the book alternates them.
The unit is the novel as published by J. B. Lippincott in Philadelphia in March 1963, when its author was twenty-five: sixteen numbered chapters and an Epilogue, about 490 pages in the first edition. One chapter had an earlier life as a story. “Under the Rose” (1961) became, rewritten, the third chapter, and it is part of the one work. The first novel of an unknown received the William Faulkner Foundation award for a first novel in 1963 and stood among the finalists for the National Book Award.
Movement II
In New York Profane falls in with the Whole Sick Crew, a set of bohemians who give parties, sing songs and talk. Much of their talk is noise by design, and the book does not pretend otherwise: the Crew are the present line’s chorus, and the present is a time in which nothing happens to anyone in particular. Their names are a running joke, Pig Bodine, Rachel Owlglass, Fergus Mixolydian, and their jazz and slang are those of 1956. Some of the comedy is the book’s best and some lands below it.
The best of it carries the book’s law. Profane works on the roads and then under them, hunting alligators in the sewers of the city; the sewers have their own legend, Father Fairing and his parish of converted rats. Esther has her nose remade by a surgeon, in a scene written as surgery and seduction at once. Profane is at war with objects, and he talks with SHROUD, a synthetic man, who tells him that people will become like him. SHOCK, the other synthetic man, stands beside it. The slapstick and the thesis are one thing.
Against the drift the book sets one motto, McClintic Sphere’s: “Keep cool, but care.” It is the nearest thing the present line has to a counsel, and it names the double failure the book watches. The Crew keep cool and do not care; Stencil cares and cannot keep cool. Profane does neither. Between them the human is passing over, by indifference, into the condition of the objects that surround it, and the book’s comedy is the record of that passage as it looks in the street.
Movement III
Stencil’s first reconstruction is set in Alexandria and Cairo in 1898, and it is told not by Stencil but through a series of borrowed narrators: a waiter, a conductor, a spy, among the eight impersonations by which the quick-changing Stencil enters the past. Egypt appears as Baedeker land, a world seen by tourists and agents as a set of stage flats. A young Englishwoman, Victoria Wren, is there, and in the plot of spies around her Stencil’s quest begins to find its figure.
In Florence in 1899 the plot is for Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and the goddess is the object of the quest in the oldest sense. In the historical line Godolphin tells of Vheissu, a country of iridescent surfaces, and of what he found beneath the ice at the Pole: a void. The image stands for the whole historical line. Under the coloured skin of the century there is nothing, or there is a plot, and the book will not say which.
The chapters are Stencil’s productions, and the form knows it. He speaks of himself in the third person, so that the seeker is one more of his impersonations, and the coherence of the century becomes the construction of the man who needs it. The paranoid and the historian are one figure. Behind the quest stands Henry Adams’s opposition of the Virgin and the Dynamo, and the book builds the two into a single being, a woman who turns by stages into a machine. Whether she is one woman or a run of coincidences is never settled.
Movement IV
The ninth chapter is the book’s strongest. It is Mondaugen’s chapter, and Mondaugen is a man of science, a student of sferics. In 1922, during the Bondelswarts rising in German South-West Africa, a party of Europeans is besieged at Foppl’s farm, and the siege becomes a long party, a decadence held over the drumming of the rising.
Foppl remembers 1904, when the Herero were exterminated under von Trotha, and he remembers it with nostalgia. The chapter reads the campaign of 1904 as a rehearsal for what Europe would do later, and it does so not by argument but by showing Europeans in 1922 recalling it as pleasure. That is a disclosure of a historical condition, and it holds whatever one thinks of the book’s larger thesis. The colonial state, here, is where the human first learns to treat the human as an object.
The chapter reaches the reader through two hands, Mondaugen’s telling and Stencil’s reshaping of it, and the book keeps the doubt in view. It can also stand alone, and it has been read alone, in postcolonial terms its first reviewers did not see. It reads more pertinently now than in 1963. The material did not stay in this book: it passed into Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and from there into a wider reckoning.
Movement V
Malta is where the two lines meet. In the historical line it is the island under the bombing of 1940 to 1943, told in the confession of Fausto Maijstral, a man whose vocation has lapsed and whose selves divide as he writes: the best sustained prose in the book. Its height is the disassembly of the Bad Priest, a figure on a Maltese street, in the ruins of the bombing.
The present line ends in Malta in 1956, and the quest goes no further. On the Maltese shore Profane says what his drift has taught him, and it is the book’s last word on its hero: “I haven’t learned a goddamn thing.” Whether that is wisdom or default the book does not decide.
The Epilogue goes back to Valletta in 1919, to Sidney Stencil, the father whose journal began the search, in the months of the Maltese riots of June, the Sette Giugno. It shows the source of the quest without confirming its object. Off Malta a waterspout takes the father’s xebec, and the century’s plot, if it is one, closes over him. The son’s search has been for the thing the father saw; the book ends where the seeing began.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is required. Take away Profane and Stencil’s quest has no present to be the delusion of; take away Stencil and Profane’s drift is a comic novel of bohemian New York. The historical chapters pass the subtractive test almost without loss: the chapter of Mondaugen and Foppl’s farm, and Fausto’s confession, could not go. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the Whole Sick Crew: the parties, the songs, the running gags and whole conversations that are noise by design but still noise. The alligator hunt is the exception, since it carries the theme. Perhaps a fifth of the New York line is permitted rather than compelled, and the cap is cleared by one tenth.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Across the century from Fashoda to 1956 the human has been passing over into the inanimate, and the passage runs through the violence of the colonial state, through tourism, a world seen through the Baedeker as a set of stage flats, and through a decadence that loves the object more than the person. Its strongest form is the ninth chapter: Europeans besieged at Foppl’s farm in 1922, during the Bondelswarts rising, recalling with nostalgia the extermination of the Herero under von Trotha in 1904, read as a rehearsal for what Europe would do later. Held off the top because the thesis sometimes arrives as an idea the characters state rather than a condition the book finds.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The heights are dreadful, and frequent in the historical chapters. The ceiling is Mondaugen’s chapter, the siege party’s decadence over the drumming of the rising; Fausto’s Malta under the bombs, and the disassembly of the Bad Priest in the ruins, which Fausto’s confession records; Godolphin’s account of Vheissu, a country of iridescent surfaces, and of the void he found beneath the ice at the Pole; the waterspout off Malta in the Epilogue that takes Sidney Stencil’s xebec. The comic heights count too: the alligators in the sewers, Father Fairing’s parish of rats. Held below the higher reaches because the New York chapters run long at a deliberately low pitch, and the heights are spaced.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Myth built, not cited. The frame is a quest, and it bears the load: Stencil seeks V. as knights sought the grail, and the object is a goddess in the old sense, Venus, whose image by Botticelli is the prize of the Florentine plot of 1899, the Virgin, the White Goddess. The book takes Henry Adams’s opposition of the Virgin and the Dynamo and builds it into a single figure, a woman who turns by stages into a machine. The particular stays particular: Victoria Wren is a young Englishwoman in Cairo, the Bad Priest a figure on a Maltese street. Held a step down because the letter V proliferates, Valletta, Vheissu, Veronica the rat, until the archetype becomes a game, which thins the deep.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the American novel of the 1950s, realist or Beat, and behind it Joyce, Nabokov, Conrad’s colonial fiction, the spy novels of Buchan and Maugham and Henry Adams’s Education. The swerve: a novel whose historical chapters are not history but one obsessive’s reconstructions, each told through a borrowed narrator, set against a present line that refuses plot; a book that treats the twentieth century as one conspiracy with a feminine name and does not say whether the conspiracy exists. The stake was real: a first novel by an unknown of twenty-five, wagering a long book on an unresolved quest. Held off the top because Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) had taken part of the risk eight years before.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the central knowledge goes. The historical chapters are framed as Stencil’s productions, so the form knows what a straight historical novel could not: that the coherence of the century is a construction of the person who needs it, and that the paranoid and the historian are one figure. Stencil speaks of himself in the third person, which makes the seeker one of his own impersonations. The alternation of the two lines makes structural the opposition of horizontal and vertical, drift and quest, the inanimate in the street and the inanimate in history. Held below the top because the episodic present line is often a container rather than an instrument: its scenes could be reordered or cut, and the form there carries mood more than knowledge.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: sixty years of criticism have not settled the book. Who or what V. is, one woman or a set of coincidences; whether the father’s journal is evidence or the first link in an inherited delusion; whether the Epilogue confirms the quest or only shows its source; whether Profane’s last words, “I haven’t learned a goddamn thing”, are the book’s wisdom or its default. The historical chapters reward return as separate works, Mondaugen’s above all, now read in postcolonial terms its first reviewers did not see. Held below the top because much commentary on Pynchon goes through Gravity’s Rainbow, for which this book is often read as preparation, and because part of the yield is decoding of the V-motif, puzzle before depth.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is the American novel of the mid-twentieth century. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the book is one of the first full statements of the encyclopedic paranoid novel, joining a comic picaresque of the present to a secret history of the century, and making the question whether history has a plot into the novel’s own form. Held below the top because much of the reach was achieved by the later books, which did more fully what this one began, and because Gaddis and Heller shared the opening. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book made Pynchon’s name; with The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow it set the terms of American postmodern fiction; the line through DeLillo, Wallace and the systems novel runs from it; and its Herero material passed into Gravity’s Rainbow and a wider reckoning.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Sixty-three years is a real demonstration, and form and fabric are whole: the text survives as published, has never been out of print and is translated into the main European languages. Presence is continuous but narrower than its author’s other early books: it is read mainly by Pynchon’s readers and in the academy, and outside courses on postmodern fiction it is less taught than The Crying of Lot 49. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment, in the Crew’s jazz and slang of 1956. The historical chapters have outlived their conditions, and the chapter of the Herero reads more pertinently now than in 1963. The figure sits between the usual and the charged because presence is charged in part, not throughout.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on Pynchon’s English, the original. The command is of pastiche and register, at a level few first novels approach. The historical chapters are written in borrowed voices: the Baedeker world of Cairo seen through a waiter, a conductor and a spy; Fausto’s confessional journal, the best sustained prose in the book; Mondaugen’s tale as told to Stencil and reshaped by him. The set pieces are exact: the alligators in the sewer, the nose job written as surgery and seduction at once. The charges are a first novel’s, and real: the songs, the names (Pig Bodine, Rachel Owlglass, Fergus Mixolydian), jokes that land below the book’s level, and long passages of the present line where the prose coasts. The sentence is often brilliant and often loose.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Profane on the alligator patrol under New York, and the siege party at Foppl’s farm in 1922. One law governs both, the animate tending toward the inanimate, by indifference in the street and by violence in history, and the human who prefers objects. The slapstick obeys it too: Profane is at war with objects, Esther is remade by a surgeon, and SHROUD, the synthetic man, tells Profane that people will become like him. The range is wide and mostly held. Charged: the Crew’s comedy sometimes runs on a looser law than the book’s, gags for their own sake, and the refusal to say whether V. is one being lets incompatible tones sit side by side without collision.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Many orders, held by one question: what the century has done to the human. History is the agent here, not the ground: Fashoda, the Florentine plots of 1899, the colonial wars in South-West Africa, Paris before the war, the Maltese riots of June 1919, the Sette Giugno, and the siege of Malta. The state, as empire and as military; science, in Mondaugen’s sferics and the synthetic men; the sacred, in the Bad Priest, Father Fairing’s converted rats and Fausto’s lapsed vocation; consciousness, in Stencil’s obsession and Fausto’s divided selves. Labour is present, in Profane’s road and sewer work, but lightly. Held below the top because the family is thin, father and son Stencil the one bond the book lives in, and the present line’s people are types more than lives.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 8.8, then The Unconcealment and The Imperishable at 8.7. A first novel that set one obsessive’s reconstructions of the century, each in a borrowed voice, against a present that refuses plot, and wagered a long book on a quest it never resolves; a disclosure of the human passing into the inanimate, strongest in Europeans of 1922 recalling the destruction of the Herero as pleasure; and sixty-three years in print, whole, with the historical chapters outliving their conditions.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.6, held by the Whole Sick Crew: the parties, the songs, the running gags and conversations that are noise by design but still noise, perhaps a fifth of the New York line permitted rather than compelled. Next above it, The Made and The Inner Law at 8.3: pastiche few first novels approach beside songs, names and jokes below the book’s level and passages where the prose coasts; and one law that governs the sewer and the siege, loosened where the comedy runs for its own sake.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by one tenth. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 8.8, The Unconcealment at 8.7, The Imperishable at 8.7, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.5, which The Inevitable, The Made and The Inner Law hold down most.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Thomas Pynchon’s V., his first novel, published by J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, in March 1963. It is scored as one novel in sixteen numbered chapters and an Epilogue, in the text as published. The story “Under the Rose” (1961), rewritten as the third chapter, is part of the one work and is not judged apart. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Pynchon’s English, the original, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening date, McClintic Sphere’s motto and Profane’s last words; the form “In which” is named as the form of the chapter titles, not quoted from any one of them. The William Faulkner Foundation award (1963) and the place among the finalists for the National Book Award are given from the record. Facts that could not be verified, among them the titles of the historical chapters, the later names the figure of V. is thought to take after Victoria Wren and the particulars of her changes, the particulars of the Bad Priest’s disassembly, the book’s own word for Stencil’s reconstructions, and the book’s place among the first American treatments of the Herero genocide, are not given. Citations are by chapter.