Safe Sex is No Fun

[Dennis Jones]

John Burgess wrote:
>Guess it's just my reading, but each instance of sex in GR -- though I 
>might exclude the Pudding sequence, but I might not -- seems to be a 
>direct confrontation or refutation of the violence that pervades the 
>background.
>>
>I'm still pondering Pudding's S/M, though... it took a few readings to 
>supress the gag-reflex, and as his particular proclivities are so alien 
>to mine, I'm having a hard time getting my mind into his.  As he says 
>it's what he needs, though, I'd suggest that coprophagia is, for him, 
>also life-affirming.
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 Yes, quite so. Actually it was via coprophagia that I came to GR. Perhaps 
I'd better explain. It was in the course of reading Paul Ferris's(?) "The 
Great War & Modern Memory", where he refers (in glowing terms if I remember 
rightly)  to TP's understanding of the plight of war survivors, and quotes 
the Pudding sequence in GR. For him, Pudding's  turd chewing sessions  can 
be seen as desperate, and ultimately fatal attempts to re-enter a kind of 
lost paradise of shared nightmare - a rather extreme manifestation of a 
yearning expressed by many WW1 survivors who mourned the loss of a unique 
intimacy that was born and left behind in the mud, shit and putrefaction of 
the front. The smell and taste of shit is Pudding's madaleine, his memory 
trigger. Perhaps it's not just Lady Death being worshipped here but a kind 
of love too. >
>       d.j.