The way we're heading
Tout "V." dans un seul et bref dialogue:
"'Where we going', Profane said. 'The way we're heading', said Pig."
Et les deux derniers extraits:
“This is a curious country, populated only by a breed called ‘tourists’. Its landscape is one of inanimate monuments and buildings; near-inanimate barmen, taxi-drivers, bellhops, guides: there to do any bidding, to varying degrees of efficiency, on receipt of the recommended baksheesh, pourboire, mancia, tip. More than this it is two-dimensional, as is the Street, as are the pages and maps of those little red handbooks. As long as the Cook’s Travellers’ Clubs and banks are open, the Distribution of Time section followed scrupulously, the plumbing at the hotel in order (…), the tourist may wander anywhere in this coordinate system without fear. War never becomes more serious than a scuffle with a pickpocket (…); depression and prosperity are reflected only in the rate of exchange; politics are of course never discussed with the native population. Tourism thus is supranational, like the Catholic Church, and perhaps the most absolute communion we know on earth: for be its members American, German, Italian, whatever, the Tour Eiffel, Pyramids, and Campanile all evoke identical responses from them; their bible is clearly written and does not admit of private interpretations; they share the same landscape, suffer the same inconveniences, live by the same pellucid time-scale. They are the Street’s own.”
“But we reach a point (…) we old campaigner, when the habits of the past become too strong. Where we can say, and believe, that this abattoir, but lately bankrupt, was fundamentally no different from the Franco-Prussian conflict, the Sudanese wars, even the
Le service habituel reprend la semaine prochaine.
Forcible dislocation of personality
« Around each seed of a dossier, therefore, had developed a nacreous mass of inference, poetic license, 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. He tended each seashell on his submarine scungille farm, tender and impartial, moving awkwardly about his staked preserve on the harborbed, carefully avoiding the little dark deep right there in the midst of the tame shellfish, down in which God knew what lived: the island Malta, where his father had died, where Herbert had never been and knew nothing at all about because something there kept him off, because it frightened him. »
« Stencil fell outside the pattern. Civil servant without rating, architect-by-necessity of intrigues and breathing-together, he should have been, like his father, inclined toward action. But spent his days instead at a certain vegetation, talking with Eigenvalue, waiting for Paola to reveal how she fitted into this grand Gothic pile of inferences he was hard at work creating. Of course too there were his “leads” which he hunted down now lackadaisical and only half-interested, as if there were after all something more important he ought to be doing. What this mission was, however, came no clearer to him than the ultimate shape of his V-structure – no clearer, indeed, than why he should have begun pursuit of V. in the first place. »
« Living as he does much of the time in a world of metaphor, the poet is always acutely conscious that metaphor has no value apart from its functions; that it is a device, an artifice. So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Fausto’s kind 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. »
Psychodontie et Eros
« For those who keep an eye on such things, bright little flags had begun to appear toward the end of Eisenhower’s first term, fluttering bravely in history’s gray turbulence, signalling that a new and unlikely profession was gaining moral ascendancy. Back around the turn of the century, psychoanalysis had usurped from the priesthood the role of father-confessor. Now, it seemed, the analyst in his turn was about to be deposed by, of all people, the dentist.
It appeared actually to have been little more than a change in nomenclature. Appointments became sessions, profound statements about oneself came to be prefaced by “My dentist says…” Psychodontia, like its predecessors, developed a jargon: you called neurosis “malocclusion”, oral, anal and genital stages “deciduous dentition”, id “pulp” and superego “enamel”.
The pulp is soft and laced with little blood vessels and nerves. The enamel, mostly calcium, is inanimate. These were the it and I psychodontia had to deal with. The hard, lifeless I covered up the warm, pulsing it; protecting and sheltering. »
« The eyes of
Bird lives, Major Tom says
Il y a déjà quelques temps, je m’étais décidé à consacrer mon mois de novembre à relire Pynchon. Des contraintes principalement externes ne m’ont pas permis de donner à cette entreprise le temps qu’elle mériterait, j’ai donc remis les opérations à plus tard non sans tout de même me replonger dans « V. » - merci à Antonio de m’avoir donné une bonne raison. Après quelques dizaines de pages, je suis submergé par le plaisir authentique ressenti par la grâce de cette écriture. Et je suis tombé sur le passage qui suit, sorte de digression gratuite à l’occasion d’une soirée passée par Paola Maijstral dans un club de jazz. Certains disent que McClintic Sphere est en fait Ornette Coleman. C’est faux chronologiquement – on est en 1956, Coleman débarque sur la scène new-yorkaise en 1959- mais les spécialistes disent que tout indique que c’est bien de lui qu’il s’agit. Peut-être que, vers 1961, le Pynch’ voulut donner par cette scène un hommage à la fois à Parker et à Coleman, son héritier, indiquant ainsi dans son récit « the shape of jazz to come » ? Et puis cette histoire de tags "Bird Lives" un peu partout, n'est-ce pas un précurseur de WASTE? Quoiqu’il en soit, voilà qui nous rappelle, si besoin en était, que, quand bien même les références rock affleurent dans les livres suivants, Pynchon, c’est avant tout le jazz qu’il nous chante, dans sa prose comme dans les péripéties de ses personnages.
« Horn and alto together favored sixths and minor fourths and when this happened it was like a knife fight or tug of war: the sound was consonant but as if cross-purposes were in the air. The solos of McClintic Sphere were something else. There were people around, mostly those who wrote for Downbeat magazine or the liners of LP records, who seemed to feel he played disregarding chord changes completely. They talked a great deal about soul and the anti-intellectual and the rising rhythms of African nationalism. It was a new conception, they said, and some of them said: Bird Lives.
Since the soul of Charlie Parker had dissolved away into a hostile March wind nearly a year before, a great deal of nonsense had been spoken and written about him. Much more was to come, some is still being written today. He was the greatest alto on the postwar scene and when he left it some curious negative will –a reluctance and a refusal to believe in the final, cold fact- possessed the lunatic fringe to scrawl in every subway station, on sidewalks, in pissoirs, the denial: Bird Lives. So that among the people in the V-Note that night were, at a conservative estimate, a dreamy 10 per cent who had not got the word, and saw in McClintic Sphere a kind of reincarnation. »
