Archive for: Matrilineality

If one is to find a single word to depict the novel V. by Thomas Pynchon, it appears to be the word chaos. The lack of order surfaces as a universal principle which is increasingly taking control of the world as we know it, manifesting itself in different ways throughout the entire novel. Chaos is seen in the absurd lives of the post-war contemporaries, in the half-truths resulting from the abundance of incomplete data creating overall paranoia, as well as in the growing tendencies towards the inanimate and the mechanical, which make the distinction between humans and machines almost completely blurred and anticipate a dystopian vision of future as a dark place inhabited by automatic creatures. In other words, the world of the novel V. is a place where the concept of truth becomes non-existent, where it is no longer discernible who or what is in control from who or what is being controlled, and where even the distinction between who and what loses its foothold. In such a chaotic and disoriented world, governed by information entropy and half-truths, the quest for meaning is possible only within the realm of fantasy. In fact, fantasy appears to be the only enclave of knowledge, the parallel world which allows both characters and readers of the novel to answer the fundamental questions of human existence or at least intuit what humans tend to call the truth. Accordingly, the novel V. brings up a question whether the world it depicts represents our future reality or the reality as it is and as it has always been.

In the text, matrilineality reads as the core theme in the opus of Italian novelist writing under the pseudonym of Elena Ferrante. In her first novel, L’amore molesto (1992), she has introduced a mother-daughter pair of characters: the daughter character has later developed into an ever growing network of female relationships all the way to the latest book of the so-called Neapolitan tetralogy. Interpretation is based on finding key characteristics that determine relations inside the matrilineal chain – like the daughter’s experiences in search of an ideal mother figure; her recognition of the existence of female history and the need for its reinterpretation so she can be liberated from the imposed patriarchal frame; becoming a mother and a wife and redefining these roles most often by deserting her family and/or her husband to live a life which is not constricted only to the private sphere etc. Thus a parallel is drawn between female characters not only within the text of the novel but also in terms of the entire opus of Elena Ferrante.