V2nd - chapter 11 - more examples

[Michael Bailey]

alice wellintown wrote:

> Fausto can not draw the comparison. If the reproach is implicit, if
> his Confession, Self-Accusation, is also a Judgement of the Generation
> of 1957(?), Fausto doesn't know this is the case. But the parallels
> are too many for us readers to ignore and the distance and irony the
> implied author maintains here, more so than the mood (the texture, the
> setting, the feel) and tone and diction and allusive ambiguities, are
> what carry that weight, that implicit and ironic weight.

right, then, some kind of characteristics anyway.

While I'm fascinated with the idea that knotted into the Fina episode,
Godolphin's confession to V., and Chapter 11, are interesting ideas
pertaining to the Church, as an amateur reader all I'm prepared to do
is occasionally wave my arms and invoke an hypothetical
"ecclesiastical history read"
("chapter 11 examines limitations on the priesthood or priestly
impulse such as celibacy, the role of a priest in a war situation, and
restriction of the priesthood to males" eg)

But the main thing that occasionally my blur resolves into here is
Fausto laying it out for his daughter.

In a way, I associate Fausto's confession with war memoirs of the
intellegentsia.  People who were drafted into the conflict but were
actually built or trained for something else, the vivid memories they
carry, the diaries they kept, the disparity between their talents and
their duties...

Fausto, who's been able to produce essays on Hopkins and de Chirico
that he still likes, and refers to himself as a man of letters, brings
his talents to bear here specifically for his own posterity: he
addresses his own muddled legacy to her (not completely his own fault
- he didn't start the fire)


 > She's so
> heavy. Of course, Paola is not so heavy as V and the WSC only wants
> You/ wants You (Paoloa) so bad/ Itz drive in then mad/ and so the
> implicit reproach an admonishment, the slippage to inert crystal souls
> and aborted children, of LSD in Prairie's formula, to the outhouse
> cute meets on the boarder of Mexico, to Hope and her Child, a
> Super-Girl who is Saved and may yet Save the Day, is taken down, parts
> assembled and dismembered and innocence lost but Grace never
> extinguished.
>

But she's grown up enough to marry, and sophisticated enough to hold
her own in conversation at the Rusty Spoon.  Roony's a nut, but her
self-possession is more than a match for his schemes or Pig's lechery.
 Fausto's letter is written in knowledge of the innocence and grace
you refer to, and I conjecture that a sense of worry for her adds to
missing her and wanting her to come back. Perhaps he's decided she
will be most moved by his writing to her as to an adult.

But in any case, something to note is how a parent may utilize the
written word to alter the course of a child's life...(it happened to
Stencil too)