Paola.1 spoilers

[Swing Hammerswing]

Paola is a puzzling figure.

She is disguised here as Ruby (not exacly the rock of G-Malta), a Jewel, as 
inanimate, if not more so, than McClintic's white Ivory Sax.  But she not in 
disguise as the more historical characters in the Stencil Stories are 
disguised, or as the nose doctor is, as  Z the "union" leader is, as Roony 
is, as the "artists" are, as the  tourists. 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/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.


I'm not sure what you mean by Paola being V,  Jay Bee Frame? She seems to be
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."  Passivity, now that's a major theme in this story, this 
book, this Pynchon guy, but is she the product of the decky-dance?

Why do all the men want her? Stencil is searching for V in history,

see Neumann, Erich. Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modern and Ulanove, Ann 
Belford. The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and Christian Theology.

Why do they fight over her, search for her, hunt her, lust for her? Why does 
their lust transform them into Pigs?

The novel opens with a search for Paola, it seems that V is already found. 
So Winsome's thinking that Pig Bodine (Winsome, like Pig and Benny is also 
described as having Pig-like characteristics when he obsesses about Paola) 
is a product of the decky-dance 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.

Pig, all the pigs are products of the decky-dance.  They are the new 
christians or atheists.

Also, Winsome is a romantic hero (Love in the Western Movie Street World)  
and like his wife Randy, he lusts for adultery.

Pig also covets Pappy's wife. Pappy tells stories about the girl to his 
mates. He Shylarks her into the States. Rach thinks the girl is sick. Well, 
she certainly is  in some trouble. McClintic Sphere's concern for Paola
helps her through a period of conflict and fracturing. A 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,"

reminds of Yeat's prayer for his daughter.

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 quite a Beatrice,  
and  after living in a different place under a different name, after 
re-establishing her identity, she 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, is 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, she is the opposite 
of the 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..."

but, unlike Penelope, Paola waits and spins  only after she making her own 
voyage.

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 also  *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."

It's the 60s after all and the Jesuits are insisting that 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.

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