grgr5 what about the girls?

[rj]

Keith W:
> As when
> Jessica asks "What about the girls?", there's always another angle that
> needs to/can be looked at.  Such is life (sigh). 

Indeed. And it is Jessica's lone and plaintive note so far which is all
that there is to disclose the absolute dispensability of "the girls" (in
the abstract sense rather than in the personal, sexual sense of Jessica
or Maud Chilkes as immediate, warm, furry objects) for Rog and Ned, in
the War, and, more generally, in the world of which they are a part.
Jessica's perspective (not to mention the characters' obsessions with
bananas, rockets, infantile erections and all things pointy and
parabolic) brings home the total phallocentricity of all of the
epistemologies which are jostling for social and political control in
this sometime traditional historical novel to this point. These are
*male* epistemologies, burgeoning, thrusting, parrying, raping,
vanquishing. And Slothrop creeps Jess out the most because his mooted
bizarro-kingdom (the ultraparadoxical 'power' he appears to have)
seemingly conflates sex with specifically *female* death.

But, Katje's entrance, "as she moves deliberately nowhere longlegged
around the rooms", signals another species of control, another
epistemology, the demesne of the "vaginal "O" (?)" as Keith lovingly
phrases it, perhaps. To cite the immortal words of little Patty Benatar,
Katje's the one for "using sex as a weapon," and use it good she does.
Her version of 'control' (albeit a passive or anti-control, perhaps, the
control a victim or hostage can exert over her captor) is possibly more
long-lasting and thoroughgoing in the text than even the good Dr
StrangePoint's imo.

best