V2nd - Chapter 11 - the tone

[Mark Kohut]

uh, wow, Yes.............


----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sun, November 21, 2010 7:47:50 PM
Subject: Re: V2nd - Chapter 11 - the tone

What's Fausto's motivation for these Confessions?  They're adressed to Paola.  
"What kind of monster are you?' he asks, jokingly, affectionately.  In trying to 
explain himself, he's also hoping Paola will be different.  He confesses to save 
her soul.

(p. 335):  "[selling one's soul] isn't so much to pay for eyes clear enough to 
see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect,the fiction 
of a humanized history endowed with 'reason.'"

He's talking about himself, bitterly, as a fragmented person, but isn't that 
what V. is?  He sees no relation between his "selves" at various points in time 
[though personally, I don't think he really convinces us of this].  Pynchon (via 
Stencil) is more convincing in showing us the fragmented episodes that add up to 
V.  Are young Victoria Wren and Vera Meroving really the same person?  Fausto 
talks about the Maltese language, and its inability to convey abstract ideas.  
We can extrapolate that Fausto believes the true Maltese (Maltan?) is a whole 
person, continuous, un-fragmented.  The fragmentation results when foreign 
influences, and modernity are introduced, whether in the form of language, 
poetry, or bombs (which cause physical fragmentation too).

What does Fausto want for Paola? (p. 346):  "May you be only Paola, one girl: a 
single given heart, a whole mind at peace."

Is he too late to save her?  There's something about Paola that attracts any and 
all men (Pappy Hod, Pig Bodine, Profane, Rooney Winsome, McLintic Sphere, even 
Stencil).  Is it because they sense the single heart, the whole mind?  
Outwardly, she certainly seems fragmented.  1. Child of the Maltese rock, 2.  
Balloon-girl, playing at being an Italian dirigible, no longer wholly innocent 
or natural, 3.  Paola Hod, married to some skanky old Navy guy as a ticket to 
America, 4.Paola the barmaid, 5. Paola, the newest inductee into The Whole Sick 
Crew, 6. Paola, playing at being a prostitute named Ruby.  Why?

Still, there seems to be some sort of moral core to her that keeps her a 
continuous character.  She's as pensive and serious as her father (who likewise 
doesn't come across as fragmented).  Can native-born, indigenous types escape 
the fragmentation of modernity by virtue of some innate spirituality?  It's a 
patronizing assumption, but is that what P.'s driving at here?

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>Sent: Nov 21, 2010 2:28 PM
>To: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>, pynchon -l 
><pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: V2nd - Chapter 11 - the tone
>
>OK, yes to the subtlety of being subjected to Pynchon's irony. Is this
>not part of P's deep understanding of all our 'limits' including his?....
>
>An understanding of modernism for literature? That non-ironic omniscience
>in fictiondied in the last century when God did, as Sartre, I believe said?
>
>Yes to the fictional truth that Fausto's confessions are rationalizations. 
>THAT is a key part of P's point, right?...I mean, what is a Faust allusion 
>for, anyway? 
>
>
>
>----- Original Message ----
>From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Sent: Sun, November 21, 2010 1:58:34 PM
>Subject: Re: V2nd - Chapter 11 - the tone
>
>When I say he is an unreliable narrator I am not talking about the
>facts or the events that he narrates or even the themes. He is an
>excellent and reliable source of all of these, perhaps the best
>narrator thus far if we want to understand the facts of history and
>V's process (Eddins cited by Grant). However, the text and the implied
>author insist that Fausto is unreliable; he is subjected to Pynchon's
>irony. What comes out of his mouth has a double and often an opposite
>meaning that he doesn't understand. We do. This is what I mean by
>unreliable. Though Fausto, like Stencil and Adams, aware that first
>person Confession is inherently limited, subjective, unreliable,
>attempts to escape its limits and unreliability, he can not. His
>Confessions are rationalizations, attempts to purge or escape by
>confessing, but the text, the implied author, with ironic meanings,
>subverts his attempt.
>
>On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 1:31 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I say we do have a basically reliable confession. (Where we might be in doubt
>> are the same places Fausto IS in doubt!...as he doubts some history, and his 
>>own
>> continuous identity)
>>            A) All the vision stuff on Malta, matriarchy, etc...is very 
>Pynchon,
>> no?
>>            B) As a perspective on V., we get facts, events, stories.....IF
>> Fausto is
>> unreliable, then so are the V. stories...................
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Sun, November 21, 2010 12:56:26 PM
>> Subject: Re: V2nd - Chapter 11 - the tone
>>
>> Do we have a relaible Confession here? Why has P compromised its
>> reliability as he has with other Confessions, with several other
>> nattatives,  if we are to read this one as sincere apology, as honest
>> and faithful?
>>
>> Why does P draw the obvious parallel with the Stencilized narrative,
>> with Henry Adams's Education, if we are expected to learn the facts or
>> the truth from Fausto?
>>
>> Also, while Fausto characterizes Paola's mother as, "your poor
>> mother" and Fausto I as a poet, something we can accept because he is
>> drawing the relationships and the history for his daughter, his
>> comments about the art of writing a Confession, the pickle a living
>> young man is put in as he attempts to write a biography that is yet to
>> lived...and so on from that Preface to Adams's Education and on into
>> three of the most famous example in the genre, are commentary by the
>> implied author. So, a distance, an ironic distance is established
>> here. This is one reason I find the biographical readings quite
>> limited. That young P was an aspiring poet or man of the cloth and
>> turned to making rockets is all very fine to fill in the chinks, but
>> the armor is built of prose not scraps of biography. Can Paola
>> appreciate that quip about anti-climatic youth is wasted on the
>> apologia of a man who hasn't had a chance to sin? I doubt it. That bit
>> is for us.
>>
>> On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> Okay...I'll go with this basically but still say, simply, after
>>> Laura and Michael that as a chapter of confession
>>> the voice (tone) is more intimate than most other chapters
>>> and,a s a confession, the declarer's tone is one of guilt--
>>> or keen regret as Kaufman interpreted Nietzsche of No-Guilt fame..
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message ----
>>> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>>> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>> Sent: Sun, November 21, 2010 10:06:44 AM
>>> Subject: Re: V2nd - Chapter 11 - the tone
>>>
>>> Tone is probably a better term to use when discussing non-fiction
>>> prose. Like, what is Pynchon's tone in the Luddute essay or in the
>>> Introduction to 1984 and so on...how does he establish and maintain
>>> this attitude and how does the subject, occasion (it being 1984 or the
>>> anniversary of Orwell's novel or birth or whatever), audience,
>>> purpose, voice and tone (SOAPStone) influence the rhetorical success
>>> or failure of the piece. That is, as Wayne C. Booth notes, tone is an
>>> older term, not as useful when the work under consideration is a prose
>>> fiction, and less so when the work is modern. So distance and irony
>>> and norms (implied author) and morals are applied to prevent the kinds
>>> of confusion modern authors often deliberately and quite often without
>>> knowing it cause with the modern techniques they employ. It seems a
>>> waste of time to tell young Pynchon what he could have done better or
>>> how his techniques sometimes trip over one another--I'm sure at this
>>> point he has gotten over it and discovered that his Murphy's Law and
>>> his Law of the Excluded Middle are sometimes defeated by the
>>> principals of non-contradiction and the Law of Diminishing Return. The
>>> Biographical approach may prime a pump or swell a progress or two, but
>>> the parade of characters can never march down some thoroughfare into a
>>> theatre managed by The House of Pynchon. The Estate, as James Wood so
>>> aptly put it, is Melville's, and Pynchon its inheritor, must work with
>>> a spilled and broken world. Fortune's wheel turns; Melville's
>>> Romances, _The Ambiguities_, and _The Whale_, were reviewed with
>>> savage and bloody fangs,  Pynchon's with hungry eyes and sophistic
>>> sentimentalism.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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