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

[jbor]

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

> 
> I agree... but when reading Maudougen's story you are told outright that it
> has been "Stencilized."  Here you get a confession.  Even more, quotes from
> a diary... a primary record.  So I think the natural reaction is to believe
> everyword of what the 'almost priest' writes in his apologia.

But Fausto has cut and diced the earlier journals and then interleavened
them with some pretty self-indulgent reminiscing. I'm struck by the passage
where Fausto writes: "Now memory is a traitor, gilding, altering. ..."
(319.20) And then he goes on to address Paola directly. But I agree that the
diary entries themselves are different from the rest of it: spontaneous
records, Fausto himself the only intended audience at the time of their
writing.

The "memory is a traitor" bit reminds me of Eigenvalue's meditations on the
crests and folds of history where he conjectures that "*we*" are "conned
into a false memory, a phony nostalgia" for the past (256.3), and also the
"five million different rathouses" of history in New York passage at 225.27,
which seems to be a detached narrator speaking. Certainly seems to be a
theme latent or developing in all of that .... A deliberate foregrounding of
the myth of historical objectivity .... A shift towards a type of
postmodernist perspectivism .... ?

>
> This letter was bothering her back when she was McClintric's Ruby....

Yes, I'd forgotten about that. She's continually worried about Fausto, and
McClintic, not realising where he lives, keeps telling her to go see him.
But I'm not sure that she has actually received the letter yet when they're
arguing about it endlessly. (291-4)

> So what
> is her reaction to it... She is worried about him... but again, I agree with
> you that she wasn't fooled... or didn't care about the confession.  I guess
> we never really learn what her end of the letter is...

I get the impression that she shows the letter to Stencil virtually as soon
as she's received and read it. This might either be a betrayal of Fausto or
it could be that the letter has been the trigger for her decision to go back
to Malta and see her dad, and she is merely trying to con some willing dupe
into taking her there. I'm leaning towards the latter interpretation now. I
think that the letter might have been the incentive for her to rejoin the
WSC, become Paola again, and leave McClintic. It certainly helps to explain
why she leaves McClintic so suddenly after all, and renders a real pathos to
their star-crossed relationship.

best