From Rock to Ruby to peace, love, and marraige

[Terrance]

Paola is a puzzling figure.

She is disguised here, Ruby, but is she in disguise, as
others in the novel are, as the more historical characters
in the Stencil Stories are? Disguise, like Skin, decays, and
is a kind of  enfetishmnet in V. So Weissmann's disguise is
not comic, is not buffoonery. To condemn him for his sexual
practices is not to condemn homosexuality or cross-dressing,
but as a trope in P's fiction, his sexual acts are perverse
and symbolic of evil. But Paola is able to assume a
different personality not through actually changing her
appearance so much but by allowing others to form a
different view of her through the manipulation of her
esoteric and enigmatic and uncertain History and Herstory
and background. Her age and her nationality are variable
because she "could be any age she wanted." And "you
suspected any nationality, for Paola knew scraps it seemed
of all tongues." Paola's Maltese heritage allows her this
versatility, she is FREE to shape her identity so that she
can be both Paola and Ruby. Although Paola is the opposite
of V. in many ways, Winsome, at least, perceives in her a
passivity which makes him think that she, like Pig, is the
product of a "decky-dance. " Is she? Why do all the men want
her? Why do they fight over, search for her, hunt her, lust
for her? Why does their lust transform them into Pigs?
Winsome's imaginative view of
Pig Bodine is generally correct, but his view of Paola is
questionable because, as Winsome has also noted, Paola is
"an enigma," and as such cannot be described accurately.
Also, Winsome is a romantic hero and like his wife, he lusts
fro adultery. Pig also covets Pappy's wife. Pappy tells
stories about the girl to his mates. He shylarks her into
the States. Profane blows her off.  Pig tries to rape her
and Profane saves her, but he blows off Fina too and he
can't save her from being raped. Now, Profane thinks to
become a romantic hero to Winsome's wife, but she's married
he says and besides, the beer spilled on the rug is
Tristan's sword. What is Tristan's sword? It's self-imposed
chastity, and it is suicide. Suicide? The alligators, the
Herero? Passion triumphs over desire and Death triumphs over
life. 
So now, Paola works as a prostitute under the assumed name,
Ruby.  Is this about Monk or Miles or Sphere? Sure I guess
so, but  Hell, I don't think Sphere is such a sympathetic
character, but I'll get to that. It just seems to me that P
may allude to all sorts of historical men and women, but
this may not have all that much to tell us about the
characters and their fates. So the critique leveled here
against Hollander is often at odds with his work which is
under the tapestry and not a Sunday crossword puzzle applied
to the fictional top-side or the tapestry itself. The
critique here of any mention of religion, particularly the
RC religion, is also at odds with what has been proposed
here. Allegories ass, Christian parable? Puleeeez! As my
teacher, a Chicago man who found himself unfairly depicted
as a character in fiction said,  "it's easier to criticize
than to understand."  On Sphere, it's  very tragic actually,
so he is one of the most sympathetic character in one sense,
but not for his "existential stoicism." That "keep cool but
care," is not what it seems in my opinion. Anyway, Paola has
chosen to name herself and her choice of name, like Sphere's
ivory sax, denotes an inanimate object, matching her view of
the prostitute, that "a whore isn't human." With Sphere she
is human, his "sympathetic magic," his "kindness," but that
magic, as magic will, persuades without Reason, and is
perhaps, as all magic is, like the magic that turns the
bread and wine to the body and blood of Christ for Roman
Catholics, persuasive to precisely that extent that it
defies Reason. Passion is condemned by the Church because it
is sinful in its morbid excess, it is  beyond good and evil,
life and death, it transcends all social conventions, all
law. But Christ's Passion is celebrated by the Catholic for
exactly this reason,  it is free of all human responsibility
(although at times men blamed other men for Christ's Death,
Judas and the Jews, this was a violation of the Passion) and
frees all men from the responsibility of the sins of Adam.
More on this later. McClintic Sphere's concern for Paola
helps her through that period of conflict and fracturing
that Fausto feared might parallel his own. Fausto writes to
Paola that he fears she might suffer a "fracturing of
personality such as your father has undergone." 

This fracturing of personality is so important to P's
fiction we can't say enough about it. The postmodern lit
critters have done a good job of distinguishing this
fragmentation from  the modernist alienation. Although my
own opinion is that P sails between these critical Scylla
and Charybdis and gets the reader Home, although not without
the loss of most of his men and women. "May you be only one
Paola, one girl: a single given heart, a whole mind at
peace," exactly what Paola wants  "just a little peace." She
leaves Hod, after all, for exactly this reason, and we find
her working in  the sailor's grave, although she's not a
Beatrice,  and  after living in a different place under a
different name, after re-establishing her identity, she
returns  returns home to Hod. Why does Pynchon send her home
to Hod? Paola, I think,  counters V.'s necrophilous
activities through a final re-assertion of loyalty and of
marriage,  of life over death, of life over the inanimate.
V, on the other hand, the street's own time, her habitat a
State of siege, the Catholic Church corrupted, it's
congregation of tourists in love with death beyond good and
evil, moves through stages of increasing inanimateness to
dismemberment and Death bereft of any possibility for
Rebirth. It is Paola, the girl, the young Maltese, who
"lived proper nouns." "Persons, places, No things" who is
the complete opposite of the what the Church has become, the
opposite of V.  V. descends to final oblivion. Paola, who
receives her comb, her emblem, is able -to transmute that
symbol of death into one of life through the greatest of
these, charity and love and marriage:


	"Like any other wife." 


"I will sit in Norfolk, faithful, and spin. Spin a yarn..."  

Jane, a committed feminist, has just left the building, but,
but unlike Penelope, Paola waits and spins  only after she
making her own voyage.


Where do Pynchon's sympathies lie? Paola's actions  may
serve as the sympathetic model against which the actions of
the characters of her generation can be measured. Paola
finally fulfills her father's wish that she be "one Paola,
one girl: a single given heart, whole mind at peace."

It is Paola's having a sense of "the way it should have
been" between her husband and herself that provides a
standard to live by, a standard deliberately considered and
chosen Freely.

see *Love in the Western World* by Denis De Rougemont

"Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence; and
likewise also the wife unto the husband." 

What's that Jane? 

The wife hath power of her own body! 

Well how else can she ever be free and have a little peace
after a long voyage home.