474
RICHARD WASSON
Stencil in his place: that
is,
in the third person." He cannot even
say "I" and so becomes an object even to himself. The techniques of
masks and dramatic voice lead not to greater awareness, but to a
sharply divided self acting out a fantasy that makes the self more in–
animate.
Of course Pynchon is aware that a writer must use something
like a dislocation of personality if he is to write it all, but he has
Fausto explain eloquently and forcibly the proper use of such de–
vices, the proper awareness of their limitations. Like Homer in
The
End of The Road,
Fausto requires a precise use of fictional devices,
accompanied by a sense of their consequences and limitations. The
convention of different selves
is
only a convenient artifice for de–
scribing changes in personality that take place in linear time; in–
stead of postulating continuity of self, one simply gives different
proper names to different configurations of self in time. But even
with this device "we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in
little installments." But as long as we recognize the price of this
fiction, it is worth it. "It isn't so much to pay for eyes clear enough
to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect,
the fiction of a humanized history endowed with 'reason.''' In short,
fiction for Fausto is a mythoplastic razor which reveals the nature
of other fictions, of other metaphors. With his contemporaries
Pynchon endorses a skeptical use of fiction.
But more specifically than any of the writers of his generation,
Pynchon rejects the notion that myth can be used to order the chaos
of history. Stencil is not alone in his attempt to force
himself
into a
past "he didn't remember and had no right in." The book abounds
with fools who
want
to
read pattern into history. But, as we might
surmise from Fausto's
list
of historical fictions, the point of the book
is to reveal the inadequacy of
all
metaphors of history, whether they
be cycles, waves, spirals or still points. Pynchon makes this point best
in those sections of the novel which deal directly with the espionage
activities of Stencil's father, Porpentine, Bongo-Shaftesbury and count–
less others. His immediate targets are of course the conspiracy theo–
ries of history which dominated the cold-war mentality, particularly
during the McCarthyite fifties. Richard Poirier aptly says, "'plots'
are an expression in Pynchon of the mad belief that
some
plot can
ultimately take over the world, can ultimately control life to the
