GRGR(5) War and sex

[Paul Mackin]

On Wed, 30 Jun 1999, ginnetti wrote:
> 
> Well, I try not to keep banging the same drum, but I think TRP is more
> consciously engageing Joyce in GRGR than in V.  These two episodes in
> particular remind me of some thematic mainstays within the Wake.  One might
> look at pp. 21-23 or the bottome of p.15-16 in the Wake (the prankquean
> episode and beginning of the mutt and jute episodes)*.  To my ear TRP's prose
> even sounds like Joyce
> 
> "[The Book] was sold him on the sly, in the dar, during a Luftwaffe raid (most
> existing copies had been destroyed din their warehouse early in the Battle of
> Britain).  Pointsman never even saw the seller's face, the man vanishing into
> the hoarse auditory dawn of the all-clear, leaving the doctor and The Book,
> the dumb sheaf already heating up, moistening in his tight hand . . . yes it
> might have been a rare work of erotica, certainly that coarse hand-set look to
> the type. . . in cipher, the plaintext listing shameful delights, criminal
> transports.  . . . And how much of the pretty victim straining against her
> bonds does Ned ointsman see in each dog that visits his tenst stands. . . and
> aren't scalpel and probe as decorative, as fine extensions as whip and cane?"
> GRGR 87.37--88.8

Well I can certainly see the Pointsman enterprise including "The Book"
obtained clandestinely  as some kind of erotica, the earlier
(dog)body snatching, the orgasm-accompanied expermentation as quite a
dirty secret, one he would greatly prefer to have kept hidden. In
this way it is  like the goings on in Phoenix Park even though P takes
nothing like the pains J did to obscure matters.

			P.