V--2nd, Chapter 11 p.324 A room is all that is the case

[alice wellintown]

In that famous Preface to Henry Adams's Education he alludes to JEAN
JACQUES ROUSSEAU's famous Confessions. Both have been compared with
the most famous, in the mode, perhaps,  Augustine's Confessions. The
Confession for a Cat-lick like Pynchon, is Heuristic; one tries to be
like Christ, uses a rule of thumb or golden rule or golden screw maybe
to make limited sense of the machine (Man is a machine--a complex
organism or complex, even devine architecture), the workings of God's
grand design, but never learns, or better, never attains the state of
grace in this World; it is, as Fausto initmates and as Henry Adams
never tires of explaining, not possible, not even in the Western sense
of a Telos (Aristotle): Rousseau's decision to structure his story
teleologically makes it impossible for him to ever finish his text,
unless of course, he can, at the same time, disconnect himself from
the life that it Confesses.


Jean Jacques was a very great educator in the manner of the eighteenth
century, and has been commonly thought to have had more influence than
any other teacher of his time; but his peculiar method of improving
human nature has not been universally admired. Most educators of the
nineteenth century have declined to show themselves before their
scholars as objects more vile or contemptible than necessary, and even
the humblest teacher hides, if possible, the faults with which nature
has generously embellished us all, as it did Jean Jacques, thinking,
as most religious minds are apt to do, that the Eternal Father himself
may not feel unmixed pleasure at our thrusting under his eyes chiefly
the least agreeable details of his creation.

As educator, Jean Jacques was, in one respect, easily first; he
erected a monument of warning against the Ego. Since his time, and
largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself,
and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of
education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the
clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure.

The manikin, therefore, has the same value as any other geometrical
figure of three or more dimensions, which is used for the study of
relation. For that purpose it cannot be spared; it is the only measure
of motion, of proportion, of human condition; it must have the air of
reality; must be taken for real; must be treated as though it had
life;—Who knows? Possibly it had!

  February 16, 1907.

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 9:09 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>  alice wellintown  wrote:
>> Grant sez to check out Alaine Robbe-Grillet. Makes sense to me.
>>
>
> I was just trying to think of his name.
>
> Also the confessional angle: a bird, or maybe a gargoyle, has perched
> on my shoulder and keeps telling me this is an important theme in the
> book: Godolphin, Stencil, Eigenvalue, and now poor Fausto.
>
> Not being brought up Catholic, it's always held a certain amount of
> fascination for me.  I remember asking one of my buddies as a teenager
> about it.  He didn't seem nearly as interested in it as I was: he said
> you just say something like "forgive me Father, I have sinned," and
> they tell you to say some Hail Marys.
>
> Then of course I got into riffing on blessed is the Fruit of the Loom,
> and I think he was, not exactly offended, but put off.
>
> But I still imagine sitting in a confessional and telling all the
> stuff I feel bad about, and what would the priest do?  I guess it's a
> little more formalized than that, and there are people waiting in line
> behind you.
>
> But I think there is a fundamental need for something like confession.
>  You can get sanity checks from your friends and family, and that's
> valuable.  If you're in school, the feedback from your teachers helps
> you figure out some of the tough questions and so forth.
>
> So the formal church confession could be a prototype of this sort of
> action - deconstructed to a form of primate grooming even, if we are
> into that sort of not-very-flattering analogy.
>
> Stencil's father confessed into his journal, I guess - and there's
> some kind of mutuality intended.  My friend's feeling about it sounded
> to me (although I realize he was probably downplaying it) like the
> interplay of gravity between a person and the earth: I jump up and the
> earth's gravity pulls me down/he confesses and feels better - in
> return, when I land, the earth is jogged a zillionth of a
> centimeter/and the Church feels a minuscule outpouring of grace (about
> as much as the world is moved by my mass when I jump) -- or so I
> pictured it and maybe still do...
>
> Whereas, Fausto confesses to Paola and I think that is actually
> efficacious upon her to some degree, causing her to act differently
> going forward.
>
> But, again, this is a long, detailed confession.
>
> And written, if that makes a difference...???
>