11. Also for Irony: Historical Realism and the Move of a Chapter for the Final Version of V. (1963) by Thomas Pynchon

Luc Herman and John M. Krafft1

©2024 Luc Herman & John M. Krafft, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0426.11

V. is a historical novel that intersperses chapters set largely in 1956 New York with an almost chronological sequence of chapters set in various locations in Europe and Africa from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. The 1956 storyline centres on the picaresque adventures of ex-sailor, former roadworker, sometime alligator hunter, sometime nightwatchman Benny Profane among an array of other characters including former shipmates, would-be girlfriends and the members and satellites of a group of hedonistic pseudo-bohemian New Yorkers known as The Whole Sick Crew. The other storyline, anchored in the first, centres on Herbert Stencil, the middle-aged son of a British diplomat-cum-spy, and especially on his efforts to find out about the reference to a certain V. in his father Sidney’s diaries. From 1956, Stencil is trying to trace the supposed role of this mysterious V. in the violent and chaotic events of the twentieth century, from the potentially apocalyptic Fashoda crisis of 1898 as seen from Egypt, to the siege of Malta during the Second World War. The result of Stencil’s investigation, so to speak, is the sequence of historical chapters mentioned above, chapters that narrativise his ‘findings’ about the mysterious V.

The Lippincott first edition of V. (like the later Modern Library [1966] and Harper Perennial [1986] editions) consists of 492 pages divided into sixteen chapters plus an unnumbered epilogue. An untitled typescript (1961) of V. acquired in 2000 by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, consists of 685 numbered pages divided into thirty chapters. All in all, the published novel has about 25,000 fewer words than the typescript. So, what happened? In the spring of 1962, Pynchon rewrote his novel, following a few suggestions from his editor, Corlies (‘Cork’) Smith, but the Pynchon-Smith correspondence shows that the author had merely been waiting for these suggestions to expound his own ideas for the revision: Pynchon responded on 13 March with a fourteen-point plan to a 23 February letter in which Smith had made only three remarks.2 However, Pynchon did address these remarks, so they must have seemed important to him.3 For instance, in order to avoid the reader’s potential confusion at the relatively late moment the typescript switches from New York 1956 to Egypt 1898 for the first of the historical chapters, he moved the chapter forward and added a two-page introduction to it in which he thematises historiography and frames the multiple focalisation in that Egypt chapter as an imaginative way of transcending the vantage point of an individual narrativising character and (by extension) author who is trying to make sense of the twentieth century. The added introduction insists on the creative power of the historical imagination, and—judging from other historical chapters in the published novel, including ‘Confessions of Fausto Maijstral’ (a long letter to his daughter containing journal entries about the bombing of Malta during the Second World War) and ‘Mondaugen’s Story’ (the rewritten version of the typescript chapter on the 1922 Herero uprising in German South-West Africa)—Pynchon was clearly keen on pushing the boundaries of that imagination. What he does, for instance, with the dreams in the South-West Africa chapter in terms of intersubjective-consciousness evocation is absolutely stunning. In other words, in many historical chapters in V. the historical imagination runs riot.4

Still, after all the historiographical grandstanding of the so-called ‘Stencilized’ (Pynchon 1963, 228) chapters (‘Stencilized’ because they have been narrativised, to various degrees, by Stencil),5 the book ends on what looks like a relatively simple example of historical realism, a more or less conventional presentation of the past as Georg Lukács found it in the work of Walter Scott and other nineteenth-century authors (see Lukács, The Historical Novel). Interestingly, this chapter, 22 in the typescript, which deals with events on Malta in 1919 and is called ‘June Disturbances’, was moved to the end of the novel in the course of the rewriting in 1962, becoming ‘Epilogue 1919’. In what is perhaps the last letter to his editor about the rewriting of V. (2 June 1962), a slightly exasperated Pynchon addresses the position of that historical chapter set on Malta: ‘I put 1919 at the end primarily because there’s nowhere else to put it. Also for irony […]. If it could go better anywhere else I’d like to know’. The chapter could easily have kept its place in the nearly chronological arrangement of historical chapters, so ‘there’s nowhere else to put it’ sounds merely impulsive. Pynchon’s declaration of ‘irony’, on the other hand, merits further scrutiny, not least because this term can have a number of meanings. In order to elucidate Pynchon’s use of the term, we need to say more about the rest of the novel.

In both typescript and published novel, the historical chapters set in Egypt (1898), Florence (1899), South-West Africa (1922) and Paris (1913) are all more or less explicitly narrated by Stencil. Maijstral’s ‘Confessions’ is obviously not, and we don’t need Pynchon’s 24 March 1962 letter to Smith saying that typescript chapter 22, ‘June Disturbances’, which became the published novel’s ‘Epilogue 1919’, is not one of those ‘in a sense “told” by Stencil’ to infer that the chapter is neither narrated by Stencil nor limited to his perspective. And although as late as 2 June Pynchon was still uncertain about the wisdom of having moved his ‘favorite chapter’ to the end of the novel, we can recognise that one effect of giving the chapter such pride of place is to emphasise the ways it provides outside, even higher-level narratorial support for some elements of Stencil’s historical constructs. For example, it confirms a V. figure in the place and role Stencil imagines in the Florence chapter (see Pynchon 1961b, 444–45; Pynchon 1963, 487). That is, we think the epilogue and, by extension, the novel as a whole, despite Stencil’s own anxieties and other characters’ criticisms, do more to corroborate than to undermine Stencil’s idiosyncratic historiographical project.6

‘Stencilizing’, seeing patterns and making meaning of them, though risky, keeps Stencil from ‘resuming [his] prewar sleepwalk’ (Pynchon 1961b, 61–2; Pynchon 1963, 54), sinking ‘back into half-consciousness’ (Pynchon 1961b, 62; Pynchon 1963, 55), a state he both fears for himself and sees ‘horrifying[ly]’ mirrored in the shallow, merely present-minded Whole Sick Crew (Pynchon 1961b, 63; Pynchon 1963, 56). (Stencil attributes to the Crew the ‘hothouse sense of time’ [Pynchon 1961b, 65; Pynchon 1963, 57] that many critics attribute, we think wrongly, to Stencil himself.)

If we see the relocated epilogue as to some degree authorising Stencil’s project, that is to claim practical use value for his narratives, not truth value. Uncertainty (though less ridicule) remains, and scepticism is still a virtue. The narrator of a 1956 chapter (possibly the same narrator as, or similar to, the epilogue’s) tells us that the millions of readers of newspaper headlines in New York City ‘read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history’s rags and straws’, but that ‘Stencil fell outside the pattern’: ‘he was hard at work creating’ a ‘grand Gothic pile of inferences’ (Pynchon 1961b, 339–40; Pynchon 1963, 225–26). We read a ‘grand Gothic pile’ (a fair—perhaps self-conscious—description of V. itself) as qualitatively superior, but we acknowledge that, as a description of Stencil’s construction, it may be just a bigger rathouse.

Deletion of the short typescript chapter 16, ‘No Man’s Land’, a present-day conversation between Herbert Stencil and the dentist Dudley Eigenvalue following the Florence episode, strengthens our argument that Pynchon’s relocating the epilogue was part of an effort to lend credence to (or lessen doubt about) Stencil’s procedures. There (Pynchon 1961b, 312) the typescript Eigenvalue overestimates the wisdom of Sidney Stencil’s ‘theory’ of the ‘Situation’ (Pynchon 1961b, 286–88, 439–40; Pynchon 1963, 189–90, 483–84), seeing Sidney as not prone, like Herbert, to willful self-projection, even though it is Herbert who has just portrayed Sidney to Eigenvalue and given him not only Sidney’s theory but also an example in practice: the imaginary Vheissu plot and the way it was, first, diplomatically negotiated into (fictional) being in all its flagrant comic absurdity (Pynchon 1961b, 294–96; Pynchon 1963, 196–98) and, then, simply abandoned (Pynchon 1961b, 310; Pynchon 1963, 211). We have no reason to think Herbert himself takes the literal existence of the Vheissu plot seriously (see Pynchon 1961b, 249; Pynchon 1963, 155), although its imaginary existence is just as symptomatic, historically indexical, as his V. construct is. In the (un-Stencilized) epilogue, Sidney’s partner in espionage, Demivolt, praises their bureaucratic superiors’ ‘guesswork [that] draws from a really first-rate intuitiveness’ and claims the ‘hunch’ that ‘“something [was] wrong”’ in Florence ‘was right’ about ‘symptoms’ if not about ‘whatever the disease [was]’ (Pynchon 1961b, 426; Pynchon 1963, 473), and Sidney does not demur. We are sceptical (as Demivolt is not) of ‘all elaborate games of this sort’ (Pynchon 1961b, 426; Pynchon 1963, 473) and of the people who play them precisely because they can get things as absurdly and catastrophically wrong as the Stencilized Florence episode shows they did.

What, then, does it mean to be right about symptoms and wrong about the disease, and how does the distinction bear on Herbert’s view of V. as a ‘symptom’ (Pynchon 1961b, 588; Pynchon 1963, 386)? We do not read Demivolt’s credulity as a reflection on the younger Stencil that necessarily compromises the latter. Still, we take Roony Winsome’s denunciation of his fiction-writing wife as ‘smart enough to create a world but too stupid not to live in it’ (Pynchon 1961b, 554–55; Pynchon 1963, 360) to be cautionary, and we understand that it serves as a warning about the risks involved in Stencil’s (hi)story-making as well. So whatever his potential as a historian may be, perhaps it is just as well that Stencil is not, ‘like his father, inclined toward action’ (Pynchon 1961b, 340; Pynchon 1963, 225).

If the Stencilization of history has its risks in terms of action, it might also have its limits as a type of discourse about the past that testifies to the powers of the imagination and is not so much tied to the facts as inspired by them. The ‘irony’ of moving the ‘June Disturbances’ chapter in the typescript to the end of the novel could then refer to the fact that after all the historiographical grandstanding of the Stencilized chapters—notably in the reworked South-West Africa chapter, with its fancy evocations of consciousness—the book ends on what looks like a relatively simple example of historical realism. Pynchon wonders in his 24 March 1962 letter to Smith whether he ‘shouldn’t just keep [the names and places] historical and “realistic” as in the June Disturbances chapter’.

As a method of historical evocation, what we call ‘historical realism’ includes the construction of a narrative situation (similar to the ones developed in nonhistorical realism from, at the latest, Jane Austen to Arnold Bennett and beyond) in which a mostly unobtrusive narrator uses a limited degree of internal focalisation to show us characters whose thoughts and actions will be recognisable even to an audience that isn’t familiar with the historical circumstances at hand. The emphasis in this narrative situation is on measure: historical realism avoids a spectacular evocation of the past that would draw attention to itself, but instead goes in for a relatively detached creation of the illusion of historical reality that easily allows readers to draw their own conclusions about past and present from the supposed ‘truth’ of what is shown. Lukács’s insistence on realism as the only correct mode of representation for the past was accompanied by a requirement for authors to provide a Marxist interpretation of historical events and developments, but the postmodernist reaction against historical realism led by Linda Hutcheon (see, for example, her Poetics of Postmodernism) has pushed this ideological aspect into the background, probably because Hutcheon’s ‘historiographic metafiction’ wanted to claim its own progressive potential. Stripped of its ideological load, historical realism became an ideal whipping boy because of its alleged simplicity and lack of literary invention.

With Pynchon’s relocated epilogue, we have, at first sight, come full circle in terms of historical representation—not to the published novel’s first historical chapter (the Egypt episode we have already mentioned), because the multiple focalisation there is already a decisive step away from convention, but rather to the original version of that chapter in Pynchon’s short story ‘Under the Rose’ (1961). An apprentice (even boyish) tale about scheming secret agents, set against the background of the Fashoda crisis in 1898, the earlier story-version of the chapter does already contain a character, Bongo-Shaftsbury, who has an electric switch sewn into his skin and could thus undermine verisimilitude; but otherwise it displays all the hallmarks of historical realism as just described: brief instances of the characters’ perspectives are repeatedly included in the presentation of their thoughts; the narrator is very much in control and avoids any showboating that would undercut his required detachment; and the plot offers a clear truth in that it foreshadows the possibility of an all-out war.

As we have suggested, the published novel’s epilogue is also geared to historical realism, but, just as in the case of Bongo-Shaftsbury’s electric switch, at least two (but see note 7 below) small yet important elements may well indicate that Pynchon is quite aware of the artificial normality of conventional historical representation to which he seems to be ‘ironically’ returning after all his fancy historiographic footwork—‘ironically’, in our reading, because the epilogue’s relative clarity and simplicity expose that footwork as extravagant and perhaps somewhat hollow. Importantly, one of the elements we have just brought up even has a genetic dimension, which perhaps reinforces the significance of the decision to turn the typescript’s ‘June Disturbances’ chapter into the novel’s epilogue.

To begin with, the skipper who brings Stencil senior to Malta, Mehemet, has mythological proportions. Mehemet claims to ‘[belong] to the trade routes of the Middle Ages’ (Pynchon 1961b, 408; Pynchon 1963, 459), and he tells a tale of the legendary Maltese sorceress Mara (a being with explicit similarities to the novel’s V. figure) and of her role in breaking the Turkish siege of 1565. This tale at the outset of the novel’s epilogue doesn’t entirely break its realist mould, but it does foreground a kind of historiography that is much more majestic and convoluted than the coordinates of historical realism ordinarily allow. This aspect of the published novel’s epilogue is already there in the typescript, but it does connect rather nicely with the work of the somewhat grandiose historians (James Frazer, Robert Graves and Henry Adams) who are explicitly mentioned in the introduction added to the Egypt chapter, thus creating another full circle, if you will, this time within the boundaries of the novel itself.

The other antirealist element in the epilogue consists of a set of eight small images of a hand with a pointing index finger (Pynchon 1963, 471–72). These manicules precede consecutive short descriptions of various discontented factions on Malta. Although this set of images threatens the realistic illusion created by the narrator, we do not read it as signalling Pynchon’s forthright rejection of historical realism. Rather, given their sudden appearance and equally abrupt disappearance, we prefer to read the manicules as signalling Pynchon’s awareness of the constructedness of what usually passes for historical verisimilitude—a tenuous illusion rather than the objective narrativisation of historical truth of the kind so admired and even prescribed by Lukács.

Interestingly, the manicules are not present in the typescript (see Pynchon 1961b, 424–25), and neither does the typescript provide an indication that they should be included in print. The manicules are also absent from the galleys, but they do appear in the advance reading copy of the novel. We have no evidence to date of who came up with the idea of inserting the manicules, but that doesn’t prevent us from speculating about their presence. Having explicitly pondered (in the pages added to the Egypt chapter during the rewriting of V.) the force of the historical imagination, Pynchon may have wanted (or must at least have agreed, if it wasn’t his own idea) to include the manicules even later in the composition process to reinforce his hint (through the mythological skipper) at the insufficiency of historical fictions that feign an allegiance to the facts of the past to get their own purported truth across to readers. As we have already suggested, the return to historical realism in the epilogue is ironic because it suggests the limits of ‘Stencilization’ as an extremely imaginative type of historiographic discourse, but Pynchon’s sly practice of that realism at the end of the novel also suggests that he does not mean to offer it as the perfect alternative. Moving the ‘June Disturbances’ chapter to the end of the novel would then be ironic because Pynchon is not actually committed to an unqualified historical realism.

Taken together, in a chapter that otherwise avoids anything that might be disparaged today as postmodernist showboating, the mythological character of Mehemet and the manicules create what we would call an enhanced historical realism.7 They reveal an author using the final pages of his historical novel to show that it doesn’t take much to undo the objectivity the narrators of classical historical realism seem to practice. But far from entirely negating the historical truth on offer, Pynchon augments it with an insight into its relativity, thus perhaps reinforcing what we might call the powers of the historical imagination he has displayed earlier. Of course, it remains to be seen which historical truths the reader will want to take away from either form of historical evocation, but the way Pynchon relates them to each other in V. gives us a very young author in complete control of the genre he is performing.