"The larger principle of the V, the allegory of increasing death and dehumanization as the Modern world begins the downward slope of the parabola of “gravity’s rainbow,” the parable of self-destruction inscribed in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Distinctions, political and otherwise, disappear, revealing a broader concept, the V, the idea of convergence of possibility into certainty, of diversity into uniformity.
"We discover in “Entropy” the origin of Pynchon’s symbol of the V... "Henry Adams, three generations before [Callisto’s] own, had stared aghast at Power; Callisto found himself now in much the same state over Thermodynamics, the inner life of that power, realizing like his predecessor that the Virgin and the dynamo stands as much for love as for power “ (280). Pynchon may have found the title for V--and the concept of the V as allegory--in Henry Adams’s Education. In the novel V, the V is embodied in a female principle of death, the Lady V. In Gravity’s Rainbow, it is the V-2 rocket.
"Pynchon also shows in “Entropy” that he has copied Henry Adams’s historical method and that his novels are “historical” in the sense that, like Adams, he rewrites history to deal with events and signs that conventional history tends to ignore.
[from allegoria paranoia on Pynchon's early short story Entropy]
"But to [Henry] Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel... Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.
"[The virgin and the dynamo] were as different as a magnet is from gravitation, supposing one knew what a magnet was, or gravitation, or love. The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force -- at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either.
"The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force, as the mechanist might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ignoring their value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done; the historian's business was to follow the track of the energy."
(This one also supports what I would call Pynchon's apocryphal use of history and culture) "Historians undertake to arrange sequences, -- called stories, or histories -- assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about."
[from The Education of Henry Adams]
The whole idea of a converging point of history seems similar to Bolano's use of the year 2666, a date set far enough in the future that the meaning of current events is like a shadow leading toward it. A similar concept is the singularity; technological, astronomical, apocalyptic, or otherwise. Pynchon's beauty is setting the horror and sublimity of any inevitable future against the possibility of that future also containing love, Adam's virgin. From Gravity's Rainbow: "The whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Throuh the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs."
[from the internet]
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