V2nd - Chapter 8 - wiser heads...

[Michael Bailey]

...wiser heads than mine have probably divined all along the
importance of Paola.

For me, she has mainly been the occasion for Pig to say, as he says
somewhere (not Chap 8)
"I've got a fish I'd like to give her."

But here, in Chapter 8, she occasions a sort of crisis of conscience
in Roony, doesn't she?
I mean, scoffing as he is doesn't necessarily mean that his confession
is invalid.
Something in Church bylaws about how the sacraments are still
efficacious even if given by a corrupt priest, right?
And in confession, it's a given that the person being shriven is a
sinner, so quite natural to lie.

And we know he is a decent guy at heart: would a true Nasty Norbert
find floor space for anybody?
Or be so easily deflected from his lustful plan?  So diffuse in his purpose?

If conscience has made a coward of him, that might actually be a positive thing.

The suggestion one might draw from this, in support of a general
thesis about how this book is primarily a hopeful one, is that his
decency, and Benny's, and even Pig's, when the chips are down and the
markers called, is something of a new development, and this
decky-dance a less poisonous one than earlier ones led by von Trotha
or the spurious vaudevillians in Egypt.

And his assumption of the worried spouse role, faked though it may be,
and transparent false as it is to Rachel, occupies him enough to
continue going through the motions - I don't want to belabor this (too
late...)

"Rachel wanted to know naturally enough if he'd spoken to the dentist
at all and Winsome said no."
The psychodontia conceit continues.   This is as counterfactual as the
alligator business, in a quieter way.  To the best of my knowledge,
confession to one's dentist is not common outside the pages of V.
It's hilariously difficult to try to talk at all during dental
procedures, isn't it?  I've collapsed in giggles in the dental chair
more than once trying to do so.
Perhaps this is part of the point.

"Eigenvalue had been busy lately holding bull sessions with Stencil."
I'm a little too young to actually have talked with anybody under the
rubric of "bull session" but have heard the term.  This was a species
of largely male conversation, supplanted by "rapping" in the late 60s,
and, I guess, "conspiring" thereafter?  "Bull session" wasn't
connotative of "bullshit" per se, but was spoken in a tone that one
visualized bulls in a fenced field, pawing the ground and displaying
their horns, or am I imputing a little too creatively?

"Roony wanted a woman's point of view."
So he's giving her 2 reasons, "methinks thou dost protest too much"

and on his way home, "...it occurred to him [that] Rachel might think
it was herself he wanted, not her roommate."
In a Freudian sense, he's sublimating his urge (the fairly explicitly
violent Vheissu-like urge to ravage, actually) toward Paola first into
sex with Mafia and then into the "confession"




-- 
- "After all, Salaam and Shalom are only slight different spellings of
 a word that means the same thing in Arabic and Hebrew.
Which translated into English means peace be upon you." - Norman Spinrad