V.V. (15) The "Bad" Priest

[jbor]

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>From: "Samuel Moyer" <smoyer at satx.rr.com>

> 
> Yes... still it is Fausto's Apologia...but he wrote in his journal,
> "...until finally she cried, 'Oh the child.  I should have done what he told
> me...' ... The Bad Priest told me not to have the child..." (341).
>
> If we take his word for it, Elena had decided that night to have an
> abortion, but she met, by accident, Father Avalanche.
>
> Does anyone have doubts about the narrative of Fausto?  He seems to rely
> heavily on his perceptions based on different versions of his own person...
> then trying to retrace events through a diary where "The argument isn't
> recorded in any detail." (341)  The fragment I quoted above was remembered
> in the diary... maybe because it was a moment of intense emotion?  So did
> she say what she thought he wanted to hear?  Did he hear what he wanted to
> hear?

Thanks. There's no reason *not* to take it at face value though, or at least
no more or less than we take anything in Mondaugen's & Foppl's Stories or
Stencil's "impersonations" or his dad's diary or even the purportedly
"straight" or "authorial" narrative of the WSC's exploits at face value. But
you're quite right to question the "integrity" of Fausto's "confessions" as
well. Part of the point of postmodern fiction is to foreground the intrinsic
unreliability and subjectivity of *any* text: "There are no facts, only
interpretations," as Nietzsche has it.

But there is a palpable heightening in the dramatic intensity when you
consider the tenor which Pynchon has engineered in this chapter. It is
Fausto's "apologia pro vita sua" (306.2), and it is explicitly written for
the daughter, Paola, alone. It's almost as if he was (and still is, in his
selective excerpting from the diaries) wanting to offload some of his own
parental neglect onto Elena with this climactic revelation, trying to redeem
himself in his daughter's eyes by telling of the mother's intention to abort
and his own exaggeratedly "moral" reflex when he found out: "I would have
killed her, I think." (341.9)

I don't think Paola was fooled for a moment, though. She doesn't seem to be
the gullible type.

best