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『V.』(ブイ)は、トマス・ピンチョンによる処女長編小説。メタフィクション。1963年発表。フォークナー賞を受けるが、ピンチョンはマスコミを避けて遠くの山までバスで逃げだしたという。通常ポストモダン文学に分類されるものの、あらゆる分類を拒否するような複雑怪奇な物語はいかなる形容も困難である。
物語には大きく分けて二つのパートが交互に出現する。
一つは現代(1955年 - 1956年)のニューヨークを舞台とした、元海軍兵の放浪者ベニー・プロフェインのアンチヒーロー物語である。彼は非人間的な「物」の一切と相容れることができず、また数多くの女性と関係を持つが常に女性の向こう側にみえる「物」性を恐れている。このパートは過去から未来へと進行する伝統的な小説形態を取り、また文体的にも特筆すべき部分はない。しかし物語に筋らしい筋はなく、コミック的に誇張され混沌とした現代風景がひたすら進行していく。
もう一つはハーバード・ステンシル(彼自身はプロフェインと同時制の人物)が収集した「Vの女」についての順不同の挿話群である。Vは歴史の影の存在として目されており、エジプト・カイロのヴィクトリア、極南の地ヴェイシュー、ヴェネズエラ人の暴動計画、「ヴィーナスの誕生」略奪事件、マルタ島のヴェロニカなど、Vのイニシャルを共通項とし「女性性」「破壊的な力」「人工世界の侵攻」などのイメージをまとって出現する。しかし読者が確定した事実と判断できるのは、父シドニー・ステンシルがVの女についての記述を手帳に残したというステンシル自身の語りと、父が死の直前にVの女と再会したという(ステンシルが入手していない)過去時制の物語だけであり、それ以外はステンシルが入手した情報に彼自身の想像・妄想が入り交じった真偽不明の断片に過ぎない。ただし、過去の物語との統合性から全ての情報が部分的には真実であることを示しており、単なる幻視の物語として受け流すことも許されない。このパートは文体的にも「スパイ小説」「告白小説」「ゴシック小説(「ソドム百二十日あるいは淫蕩学校」のパロディ)」など多様な技法を用いて記述されている。
この作品にはあらゆる領域の情報が利用されているが、中心となる概念としてサイバネティクスと(情報理論の)エントロピーが挙げられる。
正しいとも正しくないとも判定不能な物語群は、すなわち情報エントロピーの最大化の方向へと進行している。そしてそのような小説自体が一種の情報であると同時に「情報についての物語」をも構成し、読者を真偽に関するフィードバックのループへと巻き込んでいく。しかも小説は歴史的事実を語ると同時に歴史的事実の捏造を行っているため、メタフィクショナルなループは現実をも侵食していることになる。
表題でもある「V」という文字は、そこから連想されるあらゆる言葉 (vicious, veracius, verify, version, void,...) を表象すると同時に、このような真実と幻視のV字交差点という意味も併せ持つ自己導入、自己増殖的なものである(小説の見開きにはVの字の集合で作られた大きなVの字が描かれている)。物語の二重構造のうち、前者はステンシル、後者はプロフェインにほぼ相当し、両者の相互流入が小説内の情報の流れを産み出している。
「ヴィヴァルディ作曲カズー笛協奏曲」なる偽作は、他のピンチョン小説にもたびたび顔を出す。プロフェインの友人ピッグ・ボーディンは『重力の虹』にも登場している。
『V.』に「全国にでたらめに散在する工場を有し、処理能力を上まわる政府契約を請負っている会社」として登場する「ヨーヨーダイン」は、『競売ナンバー49の叫び』で主人公エディパを遺言執行人に指名する元恋人ピアスが筆頭株主をつとめる会社としても登場する。
この項目は、文学に関連した書きかけの項目です。この項目を加筆・訂正などしてくださる協力者を求めています(プロジェクト:ライトノベル/Portal:文学)。 項目が小説家・作家の場合には {{Writer-stub}} を、文学作品以外の本・雑誌の場合には {{Book-stub}} を貼り付けてください。 |
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Cover of first edition
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Author | Thomas Pynchon |
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Country | United States |
Language | English |
Genre | Post-modern Fiction, Metafiction Mystery, Satire |
Published | 1963 (J. B. Lippincott & Co.) |
Pages | 492 |
V. is the debut novel of Thomas Pynchon, published in 1963. It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveller named Herbert Stencil to identify and locate the mysterious entity he knows only as "V." It was nominated for a National Book Award.
The novel alternates between episodes featuring Benny, Stencil and other members of the Whole Sick Crew (including Profane's sidekick Pig Bodine) in 1956 (with a few minor flashbacks), and a generation-spanning plot that comprises Stencil's attempts to unravel the clues he believes will lead him to "V." (or to the various incarnations thereof). Each of these "Stencilised" chapters is set at a different moment of historical crisis; the framing narrative involving Stencil, "V.", and the journals of Stencil's British spy/diplomat father threads the sequences together. The novel's two storylines increasingly converge in the last chapters (the intersecting lines forming a V-shape, as it were), as Stencil hires Benny to travel with him to Malta.
The opening chapter is set in Norfolk, Virginia Christmas Eve, 1955. Benny Profane, a recently discharged seaman, is at a local sailor bar called the "Sailor's Grave" in which every waitress is named Beatrice and the beer taps are rubber model breasts that the sailors suck on. Here Profane meets Ploy, a short violent sailor, his musician friend Dewey Gland, and the Maltese barmaid Paola Hod. Bar owner Mrs. Buffo begins to play a rendition of It Came Upon the Midnight Clear to celebrate Christmas only to be immediately assaulted by Ploy and the rest of the intoxicated sailors. The disorder triggers a raid by the military police. Pig Bodine, Paola, Dewey Gland and Profane escape the chaos to Pig's apartment.
The chapter opens with Rachel Owlglass confronting the plastic surgeon Shale Schoenmaker who she accuses of manipulating her friend and roommate Esther Havitz into debt through repeated rhinoplasty. Schoenmaker responds by entering into a monologue on the nature of Jewish women and the nature of appearance.
Section II is set during a party at Rachel's apartment attended by the "Sick Crew", Paolo, Esther, and Debb. This section introduces the character Herbert Stencil, a troubled man who is obsessed with his father's mysterious death in Malta and the identity of "V", a woman mentioned in his father's journal.
This chapter, set among the British community in Egypt toward the end of the 19th century, consists of an introduction and a series of eight relatively short sections, each of them from the point of view of a different person. The eight sections come together to tell a story of murder and intrigue, intersecting the life of a young woman, Victoria Wren, the first incarnation of V. The title is a hint as to how this chapter is to be understood: Stencil imagines each of the eight viewpoints as he reconstructs—we do not know on how much knowledge and how much conjecture—this episode. This chapter is a reworking of Pynchon's short story "Under the Rose", which was first published in 1961 and is collected in Slow Learner (1984). In the Slow Learner introduction, Pynchon admits he took the details of the setting ("right down to the names of the diplomatic corps") from Karl Baedeker's 1899 travel guide for Egypt. Stencil's reconstruction follows the same basic conflict as "Under the Rose", but it gives the non-European characters much more personality.
Section I details the history of Shale Schoenmaker, M.D. and how he began his career as a plastic surgeon. During World War One he eagerly enlists in the A.E.F. hoping to become a pilot but, is instead given a position as an engineer. While serving he witnesses Evan Godolphin, a handsome pilot whom he idealized, become horribly disfigured during an air raid. A month later Schoenmaker visits Godolphin in the hospital while he is recovering from reconstructive surgery, discovering that an incompetent surgeon, Halidom, treated him using the archaic method that would inevitably lead to further disfigurement by infection. This event traumatizes Schoenmaker, causing him to now see it as his mission to help people like Godolphin, a conviction that slowly decays over time.
Only marginally part of the Stencil/V. material, this chapter follows Benny and others, as Benny has a job hunting alligators in the sewers under Manhattan. It figures in the Stencil/V. story in that there is a rat named "Veronica" who figures in a subplot about a mad priest — Father Linus Fairing, S.J. — some decades back, living in the sewers and preaching to the rats; we hear from him in the form of his diary. Stencil himself makes a brief appearance toward the end of the chapter.
The chapter follows Profane, Geronimo, Angel, and his sister Josephine "Fina" into the city over several nights of drinking. Fina and Profane's relationship develops amid concerns over her status within a local mercenary street gang known as the Playboys, who see her as a spiritual figurehead. The chapter ends amid a massive brawl, nearby which Fina is found lying naked and smiling.
In Florence in 1899, Victoria appears again, briefly, but so does the place name "Vheissu", which may or may not stand for Vesuvius, Venezuela, a crude interpretation of wie heißt du, translating into who are you in the German language, or even (one character jokes) Venus. The chapter also revolves around an attempted burglary of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus by Hugh Godolphin through the Venezuelan consulate.
The chapter begins with Benny Profane, freshly unemployed after being laid-off from sewer-alligator hunting, in search of a job in Manhattan. After briefly contemplating the nature of money on a park bench, he, by chance, looks at an advertisement issued by The Time/Space Employment Agency. Once arriving at the agency he finds, much to his annoyance, that the secretary is his former lover Rachel Owlglass. In section IV Stencil continues his investigation of the perplexing "V." (whom he now believes is either Victoria or the rat Veronica) meeting up with a Yoyodyne engineer Kurt Mondaugen.
Kurt Mondaugen, who will appear again in Gravity's Rainbow, is the central character in a story set in South-West Africa (now Namibia) partly during a siege in 1922 at which one Vera Meroving is present, but most notably in 1904, during the Herero Wars, when South-West Africa was a German colony.
McClintic Sphere, an alto sax player in a jazz band, returns home to his boarding house in Harlem. The previous week, spent playing primarily for condescending, snobby Ivy League students, has left him exhausted, and he relaxes in his room with a prostitute named Ruby. Benny, meanwhile, finally gets a job at Anthroresearch Associates, where he's introduced to SHROUD, a synthetic humanoid with whom he holds imaginary conversations. Pig Bodine and Roony Winsome get into a fight, based on Roony's suspicion that Pig is involved with his (Roony's) wife, Mafia. Meanwhile, Mafia aggressively pursues sex with Benny, who declines. Schoenmaker and Esther get into a few arguments because he says he wants to bring out her inner beauty by performing more plastic surgery on her. The chapter finishes out with the Whole Sick Crew hanging out in various places: Sheridan Square, the Rusty Spoon, Slab in front of his Cheese Danish No. 35 canvas. Stencil, looking for Rachel at her apartment, comes upon Paola who gives him the Confessions of Fausto Maijstral.
Fausto Maijstral, Maltese civilian suffering under the German bombardment and working to clear the rubble during World War II writes a long letter to his daughter Paola, who figures in the Benny Profane story; the letter comes into Stencil's hands. The letter includes copious quotations from Fausto's diary. Besides the place name Valletta, V. figures in the story as an old — or possibly not-so-old — woman crushed by a beam of a fallen building.
Roony and Mafia continue fighting, so Roony meets up with McClintic at the V-Note, and they travel to Lenox, Massachusetts. Returning to Matilda's boardinghouse, they meet up with Ruby, who Roony recognizes as being a member of the Crew in disguise. Esther tells Slab she is pregnant. He wants to send her to Cuba to get an abortion, and raises the money by announcing his intentions and asking for money at a party the Crew is throwing in an abandoned warehouse. Roony's attempts to deal with his wife then take a dark turn, but he is saved by Pig. At an airport, Esther and Slab attempt to catch Esther a flight to Cuba, but meet some resistance. Paola, traveling with McClintic, reveals her true identity to him. He delivers the line, "Keep cool, but care," considered the novel's central theme,[1] as they drive off into the Berkshires.
Benny loses his job at Anthroresearch Associates by sleeping in and not being at work to notify the attendant technician that several calamities have occurred in the lab. Rachel nudges him to get a new job, and says that she will find one for him herself. An amusing story unfolds about Benny and Pig during their Scaffold days. Benny, unable and unwilling to get work, instead takes a self-described vacation and chooses to spend his spare time at the Rusty Spoon. He gets drunk with Stencil, who relates the entirety his knowledge of V. as it stands to this point in the novel. Valletta being the last place on Stencil's journey to find information about V., he asks Benny to accompany him and Paola to the island. Benny and Stencil commit a robbery in perilous circumstances, and then, in late September, they embark for Malta with Paola on board the Susanna Squaducci.
In this chapter V. is entranced by a young ballerina, Mélanie l'Heuremaudit. The story centers on a riotous ballet performance, almost certainly modeled in part on the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. The performance centers on a virgin sacrifice by impalement. The young ballerina fails to wear her protective equipment and actually dies by impalement in the course of the performance; everyone assumes her death throes simply to be an uncharacteristically emotional performance.
Benny and Pig Bodine have one last adventure with two girls, Flip and Flop, as they all get drunk and wander around Washington D.C.. There are two going away parties for Benny, and the chapter ends with Benny, Stencil, and Paola leaving for Malta aboard the Susanna Squaducci as the Crew looks on and says goodbye.
As the Royal Navy mass on Malta in the early stages of the Suez Crisis, Stencil arrives with Benny in tow, searching for Fausto Maijstral. (As always, Kilroy was here first, and Pynchon proposes a novel origin for the face: that Kilroy was originally a schematic for part of a band-pass filter.)
The last chapter is a flashback to Valletta when Stencil, Sr. was still alive. After World War I he is sent to Malta to observe the various crises going on involving the natives and their desire for independence. He is implored by Maijstral's wife (who is pregnant with Fausto)[2] to relieve him of his duties as a double agent because she fears for his life. Stencil, Sr. meets Veronica Manganese or V and implicitly has sex with her (she is now largely made up of artificial limbs). It is revealed they had trysted in Florence after the riots. He finds out that Maijstral is having an affair with her as well.
Linus Fairing is also working as a double agent for Stencil, and when he leaves for America, having tired of the life of a spy, Stencil's purpose for being in Malta is null.
V releases Stencil from her auspices and Maijstral as well.
Stencil sails off into the Mediterranean and a waterspout blows the ship up into the air, then down into the depths, not too dissimilar from the conclusion of another American masterpiece, Moby-Dick, also a sailor's story.
Time wrote "In this sort of book, there is no total to arrive at. Nothing makes any waking sense. But it makes a powerful, deeply disturbing dream sense. Nothing in the book seems to have been thrown in arbitrarily, merely to confuse, as is the case when inept authors work at illusion. Pynchon appears to be indulging in the fine, pre-Freudian luxury of dreams dreamt for the dreaming. The book sails with majesty through caverns measureless to man. What does it mean? Who, finally, is V.? Few books haunt the waking or the sleeping mind, but this is one. Who, indeed?"[3]
Writing in The New York Times, George Plimpton called Pynchon "a young writer of staggering promise", lauding his "vigorous and imaginative style", "robust humor" and "tremendous reservoir of information".[4]
In 1964, the novel was awarded a William Faulkner Foundation Award for best debut novel.
In 2012 it emerged that there were multiple versions of V. in circulation. This was due to the fact that Pynchon's final modifications were made after the first edition was printed and thus were only implemented in the British, or Jonathan Cape, edition and the Bantam paperback. The fact was forgotten soon after in the U.S., so most US editions, including the newly released eBook, follow the first printing and are therefore unauthorized versions of the text, while the British editions, which follow the first edition printed by Jonathan Cape, contain Pynchon's final revisions.[5]
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Works by Thomas Pynchon
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Novels |
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Short story collections |
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Films |
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Authority control |
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