Site Reading by David J. Alworth

Author:David J. Alworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

4.2. Interior view of a Maltese bomb shelter. Photo © 2010 Darrin Zammit Lupi, Reuters/Corbis.

Here Fausto approaches the denouement of his confession. While it is difficult to make sense of this scene, partly because it is so gripping and so odd, it does seem that Pynchon means to situate an act of disassembly within a context of ruination in order to express particular anxiety about war, while developing the more general theme of blurred boundaries and indistinct limits that appears throughout the novel. As they take apart the Priest, the children are motivated by something like wonder, which turns to cruelty but never to disgust, and Fausto is moved by pity to act when the children depart: “At the time,” he declares, “I only knew that a dying human must be prepared. I had no oil to anoint her organs of sense—so mutilated now—and so used her own blood, dipping it from the navel as from a chalice” (V., 382). On the one hand, then, she/he forms a striking composite of human flesh, prosthetic devices, precious stones, and perhaps even an interior made from the materials of arts and crafts and decoration, a rococo latticework of silver and silk. On the other hand, she/he is akin to “a dying human.” The ontological status of this figure is therefore uncertain, yet her/ his social status is clear: she/he is a casualty of war, a victim of bombardment. “These children knew what was happening: knew that bombs killed,” Fausto rues. “But what’s a human after all? No different from a church, obelisk, statue. Only one thing matters: it’s the bomb that wins” (V., 367). His fundamental point—that bombs impartially pulverize humans, non-humans, and human–nonhuman hybrids—recasts World War II into a conflict between bombs and everything else: whatever does not fall from the Luftwaffe or the Regia Aeronautica and explode on impact. If you can build a bomb powerful enough, he suggests, then you can destroy cities, islands, archipelagoes, the whole world. Such a scenario might have seemed implausible in 1942–43, but it seemed imminent in 1963, the year V. was first published. Indeed, 1963 sits squarely within a period in American culture, running from the mid-1950s (when Stencil reads the confession) to the mid-1960s, that was, as Paul Boyer puts it, “pervaded by the nuclear theme.”42

Thus, to borrow Daniel Grausam’s terms, this scene conveys “the horror of a fully thermonuclear war,” or the fear of what Pynchon himself called “our common nightmare The Bomb,” even though nuclear weapons are never “explicitly revealed or named.”43 More generally, though, this scene depicts a ruin—a site that, as Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle have recently argued, “has blurred edges in more ways than one”—while smudging the boundaries of several interrelated distinctions.44 Is the Priest human or nonhuman, man or woman, holy or wicked? Are the children innocent or culpable? Is Fausto reliable or unreliable? And the war itself, “that ongoing, vast—but somehow boring—destruction of an island,” is it a devastating trauma, a thrilling spectacle, a

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