V2nd - chapter 11 - more examples - Bastardized?

[Ian Livingston]

> 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."

Hence, too, The Maltese Falcon. I do believe we have to include
Hammett in the discussion of Malta and things Maltese. Surely Stencil
is a soft-boiled pastiche of Spade in some ways, yes?

On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."