Talk:V.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Literature Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Novels, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to narrative novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit one of the articles mentioned below, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and contribute to the general Project discussion to talk over new ideas and suggestions.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class.
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the importance scale.
Assessment comments This article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

Contents 1 Kilroy 2 Hereros and Jews 3 Publication of V. 4 Clean up? 5 Kilroy, redux 6 Pynchon Please Respond

[edit] Kilroy

Is Pynchon's origin for the Kilroy face in fact "novel"? Has anyone actually researched that? -- Jmabel | Talk 01:58, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

I'm open to rewording. I've never seen it mentioned anywhere else, including the various outside pages linked from the Kilroy was here page. In general it seems to conflict with the explanations others have provided. --Elijah 23:28, 2004 Dec 9 (UTC)

[edit] Hereros and Jews

After "Pynchon clearly sees the German treatment of the Herero at that time as prefiguring the Holocaust of the Jews in the Nazi era" someone recently inserted, without citation or explanation "(a correspondence he would come to reject in Gravity's Rainbow)". I don't remember that being the case at all, but I read these books over 25 years ago. If someone can explain and/or cite, great. Otherwise I will revert. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:58, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

The edit had no summary, and came from an IP with no other edits: not usually a good sign. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:00, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

While there is an explicit connection made between the repression of the Hereros and the Holocaust in V. (p. 245), the historical depictions in Gravity's Rainbow resist such a facile correlation. For example, tribal suicide is mooted as one of the factors contributing to the Herero genocide in the later novel (pp. 317-18). 60.228.45.83 08:15, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

The suicide rate was rather high among those who survived the Nazi camps. In any event, your remark on a talk page, pointing me to a page number without even saying what edition you are using doesn't answer my request in the article for a citation, which I see you have removed.-- Jmabel | Talk 05:08, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

You asked for an explanation and citation on this page, so they were provided on this page. Pagination for Gravity's Rainbow is the same in all editions except for the 1974 Bantam paperback. Here is an excerpt from the relevant passage: "It was a simple choice for the Hereros, between two kinds of death: tribal death or Christian death. Tribal death made sense. Christian death made none at all." (p. 318) Nothing to do with suicide rates. See also the letter Pynchon wrote to Thomas F. Hirsch describing the research he undertook on the Hereros whilst writing Gravity's Rainbow (the letter is reprinted in David Seed's book The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon, London, MacMillan, 1988, pp. 240-3): "[...] When I wrote V. I was thinking of the 1904 campaign as a sort of dress rehearsal for what later happened to the Jews in the 30s and 40s. Which is hardly profound; it must occur to anybody who gets into it even as superficially as I did. But since reading McLuhan especially, and stuff here and there on comparative religion, I feel now the thing goes much deeper. [...] I feel that the number done on the Herero head by the Germans is the same number done on the American Indian head by our own colonists and what is now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam by the Christian minority in Saigon and their advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and integration." (p. 241) Abaca 07:29, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Now that is an excellent citation. And should be quoted in the article. - Jmabel | Talk 06:00, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Don't worry. In a quest to remove the 'H' word from Wikipedia, Ernham has decided to remove the Herero HOLOCAUST (sorry Ernham I had to say it) reference because he doesn't like it. It makes the later point about how the Pynchon changed his mind a bit silly without the original reference, but hey, we mustn't offend Ernham's sensibilities! Now, it may seem to some that he hasn't read the book and shouldn't be involved in things where he knows nothing, but then he's never been one to let a good fact get in the way of one of his holiness Ernhams's opinion. :) Greenman 19:53, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Publication of V.

My edition of V., New York: Harper, 1990, has the original copyright date as 1961. The 1999 edition says that V. was first published in 1961 by J.B. Lippincott Company. Why do we list the publication date as 1963?

• The short story 'Under the Rose' was published in 1961. The novel was published in 1963. Abaca 22:02, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Clean up?

Well, the way the chapter outlines are formatted seem odd to me, but maybe others do not agree with the placing of a clean up message. --Godtvisken 19:11, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

The chapter titles, and how they are laid out, is odd, but the oddness is Pynchon's. - Jmabel | Talk 06:59, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Why are only the so called Stencil chapters included in the plot outline? That's only half the book. Tudwell 03:03, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Only because when I put a couple of hours into this article two years ago, that was what I felt like working on, and no one has come back and done the rest. Feel free. - Jmabel | Talk 08:02, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Kilroy, redux

I have restored the Kilroy which another user removed as cruft. I don't see anything crufty about it, or at least no cruftier than anything else about the book. Pynchon, an engineer by background, proposed a novel explanation for the origin of Kilroy, accompanied by what I believe is the only illustration in the book. The passage about Kilroy is certainly memorable (while I didn't originally put it here myself, I read the book a good 30 years ago and that passage stuck in my mind). He specifically is dealing with British usage of Kilroy (the soldiers write on the wall, among other things, "Wot, no Yanks?"). - Jmabel | Talk 15:57, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

• And again 5 months later, restoring anonymous unexplained deletion. - Jmabel | Talk 18:10, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Well putting a caption on it to show it's relevance might prevent further occurances. As it stands it does look rather like vandalism. DamienG 22:07, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
• It's immediately next to the passage about it in the article text: "As always, Kilroy was here first, and Pynchon proposes a novel origin for the face: that Kilroy was originally part of a schematic for a band-pass filter." But if you really think it needs a caption to say what is in the adjacent text, so be it. - Jmabel | Talk 03:13, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pynchon Please Respond

When Pynchon went to Cornell, one of his lit profs, before it became fashionable, forcefully advocated deconctructionism as a way of approaching and analyzing the novel. Late in "V", in the basement, in bombed out Malta, children playing in the rubble deconstruct a woman, V? Is this anticipatory of future students deconstructing his novels? Is this possibly criticism or homage to this lit prof? 160.93.167.36 (talk) 20:39, 7 May 2008 (UTC) pete

Wikipedia talk pages aren't great for homework. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.188.131.228 (talk) 00:55, 3 June 2008 (UTC)