V2nd - chapter 11 - more examples - Bastardized?

[Michael Bailey]

Fausto takes his discourse seriously.  "Word of the Father" indeed!

Had to read more than one passage a couple of times.  He just thinks
differently than I do.

I think Laura already made this point, but on 338-9, he's got this to say:
"But Fausto I was as bastardized as the others."

[why bastardized?  I kept wondering - it just didn't sink in right
away.  He is talking about language as if about a parent-relationship.
 Well, mother tongue and all that, I guess.  Still, the unexpressed
conflict that leaps out at me is that he consistently seems more
excited by words than by people.  Probably not Pynchon's main thrust
here, though, is it?]

"In the midst of the bombing in '42, his successor commented:
"Our poets write of nothing now but the rain of bombs from what was
once Heaven.  We builders practice, as we must, patience and strength
but - the curse of knowing English and its emotional nuances! - with
it a desperate-nervous hatred of this war, an impatience for it to be
over.
"I think our education in the English school and University alloyed
what was pure in us."

and so forth, coming out of the excerpt into an execration and a
rhetorical question:

"What monsters.  You, child, what sort of monster are you?"

1) from bastard to monster, a short rhetorical step but kind of a long
conceptual leap.  Better to think of this and probably much of the
chapter as the keening of a wounded survivor mourning his dead, I
think, than a rational argument.

2) apparently Fausto and Elena never actually wed, (do they?) - like
James Joyce and Nora Barnacle.  So, Paola is a bastard, technically.

3) and what of Fausto's own father?  Estranged from his mother because
of his participation in "June Disturbances", whatever they were...

http://www.allmalta.com/folklore/past02.html

apparently Malta's version of a General Strike attempt, in 1919.  "the
only occasion that Maltese blood was shed at British hands."  Really?
Got to get the back story on that!

So, I guess, old L'isle and his ermine arm had been kicked off of
Rhodes by the Ottomans after a tremendous siege that earned the
respect of Suleiman the Magnificent, and reluctantly took over Malta
which had been granted to them by "Holy Roman Emperor Charles V[2] in
return for one falcon sent annually to the Viceroy of Sicily and a
solemn mass to be celebrated on All Saints Day. Charles also required
the Knights to garrison Tripoli on the North African coast, which was
in territory that the Barbary corsairs, allies of the Ottomans,
controlled"

(so they got the island for a bird and a Mass per year, oh yeah plus,
slight codicil, they had to keep like a Gitmo base in Ottoman
territory...)

As might be expected, eventually the Ottomans (and their lesser known
kinsmen, the Footstools), laid siege to Malta.

 But L'isle's successor as Grandmaster of the Knights, M. Parisot
(also mentioned by Fausto, in the context of a"wind-haunted grave high
above the Harbour (p341) - Malta's version of Grant's tomb?) led them
as they held off the Turk.  (according to Wikipedia, "Voltaire said,
"Nothing is more well known than the siege of Malta.")


Hmm, anyway, the Knights of Malta ruled it until Napoleon took it by
treachery in 1798 on his way to Egypt.
Then the Brits blockaded it and in 1800 handed the French their ass
("zut alors, mon derriere!") and Maltese leaders
"presented the island to Sir Alexander Ball, asking that the island
become a British Dominion."

Kind of a sweetheart deal, too.  So, that's why no Maltese blood had
previously been shed.

"The Maltese people created a Declaration of Rights in which they
agreed to come "under the protection and sovereignty of the King of
the free people, His Majesty the King of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland". The Declaration also stated that "his Majesty
has no right to cede these Islands to any power...if he chooses to
withdraw his protection, and abandon his sovereignty, the right of
electing another sovereign, or of the governing of these Islands,
belongs to us, the inhabitants and aborigines alone, and without
control."


So, bastardized by a British education, perhaps, Fausto II elides the
importance of the popular uprising his father participated in -- like
a modern-day Dinesh D'Souza, perhaps, sees nothing to inspire in
attempts to throw off the colonial yoke (and here, in Malta, England's
yoke *was* fairly easy and its burden light, wasn't it?) -- and
apparently gets his goosebumps from contemplating the Knights of Malta
rather than the International Socialist Tradition.

At least he's not as rapt as Maratt, the "sour-mouthed University
cynic" who wrote (apparently in all sincerity):
"Britain and Crown, we join thy swelling guard
To drive the brute invader from our strand.
For God His own shall rout the evil-starred
And God light peace's lamps with His dear hand...."

But it was wartime and everybody had to pull together.

-- 
"Three things in life are important. The first is to be kind.  The
second is to be kind.  And the third is to be kind." - Henry James