V.
1963
Jonathan Lippincott publishes Thomas Pynchon's first novel. It will receive the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best début of 1963. His editor was Faith Sale, wife of Cornell friend Kirkpatrick Sale and 1958 Cornell alumna. Preceding the publication, some letters between Pynchon and Sale about the editing process:"[...] I copied straight out of a World Almanac. Maybe they made a typo. Iaxaca I have never heard of, Oaxaca I have. Since O is pretty close to I on a linotype, my guess is that's what happened. Change it to O. Who cares, nobody's going to read it anyway."
"In V., Pynchon describes culture and reality as a complex coating of the (void of the) real: "We [...] paint the side of some Peri or other [....] We call it society. A new coat of paint [....] She can't change her own color" (V. 461). Godolphin's experience in Vheissu implies that it is only the coats of color that hold culture together and that to scrape off this color would only dispose of the real, which cannot be included in a symbolical or logical framework: "The inert universe may have a quality we call logic. But logic is a human attribute after all [....] What are real are the cross-purposes" (V. 484). It is not possible to assimilate the mysterious structure of the inert universe into culture, whose self-reflexive structure is best exemplified by Mondaugen's paradoxical message from outer space stating that "the world is anything what the case is" In this culture, the only way out is a way in, a medial position in which one can "keep cool, but care" (V. 366), a state of grace facilitated by a "feminine principle" (V. 209) that permeates the book and whose most prominent representatives are Paola and Rachel. Yet it is exactly this contruction and conversion of this female principle into male machines and technologies that underlies the universe portrayed in V."
Quoted from: Hanjo Berressem. "V.: V. in Love". Pynchon's Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text, University of Illinois Press, Urbana/Chicago, 1993: 53-81 (55).
The second translation of V.: 1966, French,
by Minnie Danzas. This cover is by far the ugliest ever of a Pynchon novel.
An advance copy of V., 1962. The text on the front reads: "J. B. Lippincott Company takes pleasure in sending you this advance copy of what will almost certainly be the most original novel published in 1963. No novel we have put under contract in the last decade (remember To Kill a Mockingbird!) has stirred up as much advance excitement and passion within the house. It has been called everything from "an 'off-Broadway' novel" to "the most important piece of fiction written since 'Ulysses". We have no doubt that this astonishing first novel by an immensely talented young writer will be controversial and much discussed from the moment of its publication in March 1963."
An advance copy of V., 1962. The text on the front reads: "J. B. Lippincott Company takes pleasure in sending you this advance copy of what will almost certainly be the most original novel published in 1963. No novel we have put under contract in the last decade (remember To Kill a Mockingbird!) has stirred up as much advance excitement and passion within the house. It has been called everything from "an 'off-Broadway' novel" to "the most important piece of fiction written since 'Ulysses". We have no doubt that this astonishing first novel by an immensely talented young writer will be controversial and much discussed from the moment of its publication in March 1963."