Re-Stenciling Lesbian Fetishism in Pynchon's V (Thomas Pynchon) (Critical Essay‪)‬

V. is an important text for anyone interested in recent attempts to theorize female fetishism. "V. in Love," the last overtly "Stencilized" of the novel's historical chapters, tells the story of the abortive love affair between a fifteen-year-old dancer, Melanie l'Heuremaudit, and a mysterious patroness identified only as the lady V. Viewed from the perspectives of the members of Melanie's theater circle, this relationship is the object of numerous pseudo-Freudian speculations connecting fetishism, narcissism and lesbian desire. Eventually these speculations are mirrored both in the musings of the story's ambiguous teller, Herbert Stencil, and in the commentary of the unnamed narrator who appears to supersede Stencil's narratorial role in the final third of "V. in Love." By the end of the chapter, which depicts Melanie's death by impalement the night of her premiere, the relationship between the young dancer and V. has been implicated in a grand conspiracy between lesbianism, fetishism and death: This provisional explanation of the chapter's events has received convincing, and contrary, interpretation from critics operating within different veins of poststructuralist thought. Hanjo Berressem accepts the authority of this passage and treats it as support for his argument that Pynchon's novel "fictionalizes Baudrillard's vision of a fully simulated subject." According to Berressem, "V. in Love" is a nightmarish dramatization of Baudrillard's history of the body, whereby the semiotic progress of the fetish's "staged castration" is revealed in the reduction of the woman to a mannequin, or a pure signified of sexuality (53, 58). (1) Alec McHoul and David Wills, on the other hand, reject the historical progression implied in the narrator's commentary, relying on a Derridean understanding of the fetish as a deconstruction of natural origins, "a supplement, both replacing and adding to" (182). By their reading, the discourse on fetishism in "V. in Love" precludes any attempt to pinpoint V. as a stable term in a male/female binary. Both of these interpretations, however, miss--either by preserving the psychoanalytic focus on fetishism as an exclusively male perversion, as does Berressem, or by neutralizing the gendered perspective on fetishism entirely, as do McHoul and Wills--the challenge Pynchon's portrayal of lesbian fetishism poses to the psychoanalytic prohibition of women from fetishistic practices. Published in 1963, V. anticipates by nearly twenty years the theoretical project to define a distinctly female fetishism.