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

[jbor]

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

> I missed the Memory is a traitor bit... Yeah, the guy comes off so honest,
> you want to believe every word and I think I did my first go around... Now I
> have to go back and compare to Eigenvalue... This line of thinking is
> interesting... What about Foppl's 1904... Goldophin and Vheissu...?

Yes, I think there are ramifications for their stories and those of the
other narrative protagonists (eg the Stencils, Signor Mantissa, the Gaucho),
for the ways these stories are perceived and acted upon, and for elements
within the various stories which perhaps contradict the perspective/s the
story-tellers are trying to project.

I've always seen the "Space/Time" thing as Pynchon foregrounding a paradox
of physics, but the _War & Peace_ connection you make is excellent too, and
the crests and folds of Profane's newspaper are just like the crests and
folds of history as Eigenvalue ponders them, and it's as if one of these
crests has propelled Benny into the job Anthroresearch Associates and that
sudden revelation about human history courtesy of SHROUD. Profane's "pure
chance" approach to life keeps leading him into situations like this which
force him to take a long hard look inside himself and to begin accepting
responsibility for himself and his actions, and which demonstrate the
social/historical imperatives and what's at stake, which is deeply ironic.
The more he fights against involvement the more he becomes entangled.
Whereas the progression for Stencil seems almost the reverse of this.

> Does
> Fausto mean to tell Paola that he made the choices he did because he was not
> free to choose otherwise...

Yeah, I think that's certainly part of it. It's an apologia for his life,
almost like a deathbed confession, which might be why Paola is so worried
about him. Partly he's apologising *to* her, and partly he's apologising
*for* himself, explaining why he did what he did and evaluating/justifying
the "integrity" of his motives. It perhaps has parallels with Sidney
Stencil's approach to "The Situation", all that Machiavelli stuff, van
Wijk's metaphor of acting as a counterweight of the clock mechanism "to keep
an ordered sense of history and time prevailing against chaos" (233) which
cfa highlighted recently, etc.

best

(ps Have never read Marius or Butterfield but E.H. Carr's 'What is History"
and Ved Mehta's 'Fly and the Fly-Bottle' probably did the trick for me!)