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V.
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Chapters 11-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “Confessions of Fausto Maijstral”
Fausto Maijstral is Paola’s father. His Confessions are an autobiography, though in them he refers to past versions of himself as though they were different people.
At university, Fausto befriends the writers Maratt (the namesake of a key participant in the French Revolution of 1779) and Dnubietna (“our sins” in Maltese), who view themselves as “a grand School of Anglo-Maltese Poetry” (140). After university, Fausto joined a seminary. His training to become a priest was interrupted when he fell in love with Elena Xemxi (Maltese for “sunny”). Elena became pregnant and eventually gave birth to Paola. Fausto, Dnubietna, and an unscrupulous merchant named Tifkira survive the bombing of Malta, managing to escape to the neighborhood of Ta Kali.
Fausto describes being with Elena during the WWII Siege of Malta. Deeply in love, they stroll through town, eat, and watch children play. As the day grows cold, Fausto feels his anxieties mount.
Fausto blames his affair with Elena on the Bad Priest, who also has a sinister influence on the children who follow him through the streets and keep him under “surveillance” (157). Elena had her own encounters with the Bad Priest, who recommended that Elena abort her pregnancy.
Elena is killed when a German bombing raid blows up her volunteer ambulance. When Fausto hears the news, he blacks out. He comes to when he hears children playing in a cellar. The children are dancing around the Bad Priest, who is still alive, but caught under a fallen beam. The children rip off the Bad Priest’s body parts, which are revealed to be prosthetics. The Bad Priest is actually a young woman—possibly V. The removal of the body parts is interrupted by the arrival of “the sirens” (159). That night, Fausto performs the last rites for the Bad Priest/V., who soon dies wailing during the bombing raid. Fausto does not have all the correct materials for the rites so must make some substitutions. Later, Fausto asks himself whether his behavior was a transgression against God to not help the Bad Priest or stop the children. Fausto ends his account on August 27, 1956.
Stencil finishes reading the documents. He notes “a mysterious being named Stencil” (160) in Fausto’s stories, and he wants to travel to the Maltese capital Valletta with Paola. However, he is scared—this is where his father died.
Chapter 12 Summary: “In which things are not so amusing”
Back in New York, the Whole Sick Crew continues their decadent parties. Raoul, Slab, and Melvin stage an experimental play. The romantically distraught Roony and McClintic decide to get out of the city and visit a brothel. They collect McClintic’s friend Ruby, who turns out to be Paola, whose Maltese ethnicity allows her to present as different races because “nobody knows what a Maltese is” (161). Roony agrees to keep her identity a secret. They return briefly to Paola’s apartment, and, when Rachel calls, Roony tries unsuccessfully to invite her on the trip.
Esther is pregnant with Schoenmaker’s baby, so Slab convinces her to travel with him to Cuba to get an abortion. They discuss the morality of abortion before arguing about the Cheese Danish art. Esther hurts herself trying to damage one of the paintings. Slab tries to raise $300 to pay for their trip to Cuba. They wait for the rest of the Whole Sick Crew somehow raises the money for the trip.
Rachel realizes that she is in love with Profane and decides to call him. They meet in Roony’s garage, where they argue about Esther’s abortion until Rachel convinces Profane to share her concern for Esther. Then, they have sex.
Roony thinks about throwing himself out of the window as he considers the “sick” (166) nature of the Crew’s decadence, from which suicide seems to be the only real escape. Just as Roony is about to kill himself, Pig appears and stops him. They chase each other around the apartment until they collapse in a fit of hysterical laughter. Below, the police ready nets to catch any suicide attempt. Roony jumps into the net and is taken away to a mental health facility. Pig, remembering that he has “been AWOL for eight months today” (167), disguises himself as a woman and slips past the police.
At Idlewild Airport, Rachel and Profane rush to stop Esther from boarding the flight, but Esther manages to get away. Profane runs into Fina, who is flying to San Juan. She spits in his face and leaves. Profane curses his “woman problems” (168).
The media arrive at the apartment building where Roony tried to kill himself. Before being taken away to Bellevue Hospital, Roony convinced the police to arrest the remainder of the Whole Sick Crew (Charisma, Mafia, Fu, and anyone else playing under the blanket).
Paola tells McClintic everything about her father and Stencil. McClintic answers that there is no miracle cure or wonder drug or anything else that can fix any conflict in the world. Now, he lives life by the mantra “keep cool but care” (169). Paola is set to travel back to Malta in a week.
Chapter 13 Summary: “In which the yo-yo string is revealed as a state of mind”
Profane, Paola, and Stencil are traveling to Malta on an ocean liner named Susanna Squaducci (related to Italian slang for “harlot”). Profane feels as though his time in New York has come to an end, especially after arguing with Rachel and losing his job because he slept through a shift. The day after his argument with Rachel, Profane intervened to stop Pig raping Paola. After Pig’s departure, Paola tried to have sex with Profane, but he turned her down because he is “not looking for any dependents” (175).
Before setting off for Malta, Profane returned to the part of the city where he grew up. He saw many familiar faces from his childhood. A visit to his old house made him think of his mother, but his parents weren’t home when he tried to see them. For a few days, he drank with the Whole Sick Crew and Rachel, but this lifestyle felt wrong to him. Stencil convinced Profane to join the trip to Malta. Stencil explained that V. is a fearless traveler who has been to Malta, Paris, Nice, and Mallorca; she is also a master of disguises and has assumed many forms, from Sir Alastair Wren’s lover to an old fisherman. Together, Profane and Stencil stole the bejeweled dentures, hoping to offer them to V. as a “peace-offering” (180).
Chapters 11-13 Analysis
The Confessions of Fausto Maijstral are the only narratives of the past not conveyed through the interpretative perspective of Stencil. Fausto’s words are marked by an elegiac tone—unlike Stencil, who is digging into the past for mysteries, Fausto is searching for moral absolution, which is foiled by the chaos and misery of WWII, which dispels the ability to make meaning and moral calculus. In a way, The Confessions illustrate the devolution of the traditional realist novel into the postmodern palimpsest that Pynchon writes around it. Fausto’s early experiences are a traditional bildungsroman—a coming-of-age story akin to many 19th-century works: He mingles with iconoclasts in school, joins a seminary, and is forced to abandon this path when he falls in love and has a child. However, as his home endures a brutal siege and bombing campaign, the forward arc of narrative falls apart: Elena dies, and the pseudonymous Bad Priest and his army of tormented children break into Fausto’s story—a mysterious figure who literally comes apart at the seams and becomes another person altogether. Coherent characters recognizable as people leave Fausto’s Confessions, replaced by a heavily symbolic simulacrum, V., the MacGuffin at the heart of the novel.
The Bad Priest’s inauthentic body is only the latest example of the novel’s interest in the slipperiness of identity. Pynchon’s spy characters offer one aspect of disguise and self-abnegation, as they adopt false names to elude each other. A more intense case of this is Paola’s existence as brothel owner Ruby—an alias that relies on her racial ambiguity and ability to code-switch. Other cases of unstable identity abound: For instance, Hugh mistakes the engineer Mondaugen for his son Evan, a confusion that puts into doubt the ability of even nuclear family members to know one another. The most profound example of an identity that cannot be defined is of course the titular V., who is either one (or all) of a series of women, the mysterious codeword “Vheissu” (possibly a fitting pun on the German phrase Wie heisst du, or “What is your name?”), Venezuela or Mount Vesuvius, or none of those.
Profane’s tour of his old neighborhood explicitly illustrates the grasp the past has on the novel’s characters. Profane has bounced around like a yo-yo, unable to do anything but drink heavily and engage in unsatisfying relationships. He cannot hold down a job and he cannot find any purpose in his life. He decides to go home, hoping that remembering his childhood might give him insight into his present life. However, in a moment heavy with symbolism, when he reaches his parents’ house, nobody is home—a damning indictment of nostalgia as a tool of self-discovery. Profane is sure that the past was better, but his return to the physical terrain of his past reveals it to be just as empty as his present.
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