GRGR(6): End of the Advent service

[rj]

Jeremy, Gary, David:
> and suddenly "back in the story", we read "But on the
> way home tonight, you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit." I think
> "you" is Jessica, "him" is Roger.

> Don't know who "you" is here--nothing to rule Jessica out, but it has to
> be consistent with the long section on 134 which goes into 2nd person <snip> I'd argue for the generalized *you* which reaches through
> Jessica and Roger to the reader or others potentially in this situation

> Sure, "you" is the reader, and "him" is the baby.  That's the clear part.
> But by making the "you" mean Roger, J. has hit on a very good alternate
> understanding, and it fits very well: Roger IS a baby, all full of need for
> Jessica.  Jessica HAS (and will even more so later on) turned away from that
> baby, that chance to be define apart from the War and enter another realm,
> and "settles" into her War identity (and thus settles for the nutria).

Yes, there are all these possibilities, "combinations and permutations"
as Pudding would have it, but co-existing simultaneously: Jessica's
nostalgia for her childhood faith (128.12); her frustration with Roger
"inside his paper cynic's cave" and concern over how much longer she'll
have the energy or patience to "bring him out", or whether she even
*wants* to (126.33); these singers of faith in this church; soldiers and
women all over south-east England, all the singers who have ever sung;
us and our songs. The metaphors run *both ways*.

I'm struck this read by how much of Jessica's perspective we do get in
the narrative so far; and by how perceptive she is (re. Slothrop in
particular 53.4, 87.2-16). I find it harder to pinpoint Roger's pov in
the Advent section, however. The narrative "you" is always either
Jessica, or Jessica and Roger, never *just* Roger? This is important, I
think, because without her he's empty, a different person altogether.
Love and statistics are absolute incompatibilities.
But Rog and Jess together, mind-to-mind: he is what *she* makes him.

Another thought. Is the female sensibility of so much of the sequence
(the Wrens at work; children and domesticity -- "offal in gland pies,
Household Milk, broken biscuits", the "bed-going complaints" and
teeth-cleaning rituals; the mildewed wedding dresses; mothers and babies
back from the Evacuation "for the holidays" despite Mr Morrison's
gravity and warnings; grandparents listening to the Radio Doctor; NAAFI
girls at the Stage Door Canteen; the vapid soprano; Liberty's wispy
gown) down to Jessica -- a continuance of her almost forlorn meditation
of "What about the girls?" It would explain the stream-of-consciousness
style, floating from one image or intuition to the next so
idiosyncratically. And if it is Jess, are we being sucked in by *her*
barely-suppressed hysteria and sentimentality here (say, at 131.25, or
135.1-7, or the last paragraph) ... ?

best