V2nd - Chapter 8 - wiser heads...

[alice wellintown]

It is well known that Balzac had two literary careers--the first,
under a pseudonym, writing blood-and-thunder romance novels and the
second, under his own name, as the creator of La Comedie Humaine, the
vast chronicle of "contemporary life in all its complexity." But, in
between these outpourings of fiction, he wrote a work of
nonfiction--The Physiology of Marriage--that brought him his first
fame as a writer and introduced his now familiar worldview in which
passion is held in check by social advantage and blind innocence is
the greatest danger to well-being.

As forgotten today as Stendhal's much more ardent On Love is renown,
The Physiology of Marriage coolly examines the economics and power
relationships of seduction and love. Balzac proposes that marriage and
the selection of a wife be treated as a science, and examines topics
ranging from moral education to methods for foiling adulterous
relationships. For all of its apparent misogyny, the Physiology is
surprisingly evenhanded in its rough treatment of both men and women
(and is said to have been written with the collaboration of two
women). Though addressed to a male audience, the book's lively attack
on the stale institution of marriage made it most popular with women
readers of its day.

"'Policy' in marriage consists of taking advantage of all
opportunities offered by the laws, by the system of our morals, by
force, and by cunning, for preventing your wife from doing the three
things that practically constitute the life of love: writing to her
lover, seeing him, and speaking to him."--from The Physiology of
Marriage



On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 1:27 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Roony is a poor man's Stencil, searching for an elusive woman, Paola, to give his life meaning.  Stencil wants to find her to find V. Pig wants to screw her.  Is there some hint that she's an heir to V.?  In chapter one, it's mentioned that she can pretend to be a different age, a different nationality. Her last name, Maijstral, sounds like mistral.  She's sad, somber, and elusive.  If V. is the driving force behind (or associated with) some nameless catastrophe of the 20th century, Paola, Maltese and female, is also associated with it, as its victim.  She'll resurface in an odd situation later, but still as a victim (though possibly a muse).
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
>>From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
>>Sent: Oct 7, 2010 8:56 AM
>>To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>Subject: V2nd - Chapter 8 - wiser heads...
>>
>>...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
>
>