토머스 핀천의 『브이.』와 역사의 종말

Reading the End of History in Thomas Pynchon's V.

The purpose of this paper is to read Thomas Pynchon' s V as a narrative describing the end of history. In V. we had two distinct protagonists, Stencil and Profane, each of whom seemed to embody one of two basic tendencies in the novel. Herbert Stencil is the paradigm of the response of a hysterical, paranoid projection of the plot into everything. This is an extreme form of historicization, and has some understandable motivations to make sense of history, but clearly Stencil steps beyond any common-sense rationality. Benny Profane, his polar opposite is anti-paranoid, seeing no deeper patterns or continuity. He just goes with the random flow of events, as in his technique of yo-yoing up and down on the subways of New Yark. Both characters are trapped in the same system but they react to their sense of powerlessness in opposite ways, one synchronic, the other diachronic. Two main protagonists, Profane and Stencil do not change throughout the story. Profane travels aimlessly on the streets, Stencil remains in the Hothouse, getting out of being inert. To them, the World progresses into inanimance. But at the edge of inanimance, Fausto is shown the necessity of illusion. He think that having illusion is inescapable and necessary for us to live in the world. Except him, most characters in V. read history only as a multi-dimensional death-wish. The Hegelian world-spirit disappears in the world they describe. Pynchon inscribes the end of history, an evacuation of the human in the midst of rising inanimance and the coming of death by historical cancellation in V.