GRGR(3) 50.31 Love Pointsman Style

[rj]

s~Z wrote:
> 
> (50.31ff) 'You have waited. . . '
> 
> Before and after the two paragraphs that begin at 50.31, Pointsman is
> referred to in third person.  Is Ed the 'you' in these two paragraphs?
> If so, who is the narrative voice? Is it the same voice switching
> persons? Why the switch to 'you?' And that St. Veraicon's Bus Station
> floor is a nice contrast to the True Image of our Lord and Saviour
> embossed on a Calvarific towel. Just as His sweat became the Imago on
> that towel, so the waste on that fake parquetry is the Word Become
> Flesh. Inasmuch as you do it unto the least of these you do it unto Me.
> Pointsman wants to fuck the least of these and stamp his imago on their
> tabula rasa. Alongside the cold rationality of Pointsman we get his
> domineering lust, the filth on the floor, spermy beds, gasworks, moldy
> coffee grounds, cat shit, pitted pale sweaters...and then he/you get/s
> an octopus/them. Makes perfect sense doesn't it? Dialectics at its/their
> most maddening.

The raising of Pointsman's priapism, poor strike-rate and masturbatory
excesses here seems to evoke his overweening Narcissism and the ultimate
sterility of his project; while also setting up his absolute certainty
of the right and imperativeness of his propagation of the Pavlovian
creed as some perverse pastiche of pathos.

I'm not sure whether he wants to fuck or bisect these Foxes. He
certainly wants to condition them to "his own brown Realpolitik dreams".
He's cruising the bus station in order to pick up one or more of
Spectro's discharged patients who are still shell-shocked, right? The
two second person paragraphs work to extend these predatory nocturnal
activities of Pointsman's beyond the specific evening of his dialogue
with Spectro. It could be Pointsman addressing himself tho' I don't
think he's quite so insighted and self-loathing, not yet at least. I
think it might just have to be attributed to some externalised
perspective, the 'imperial voice' of ol' TRP himself perhaps -- the
point seems to be that this 'research work' of Pointsman's is furtive,
clandestine and not wholly ethical, to say the least, so the other
characters wouldn't know of it, except for Spectro, who is smug and
solicitous rather than condemnatory so it's not likely him, but perhaps
Pudding's got a spy on Ned's tail, Osbie again? -- unless of course it's
the accusative voice of an unnamed outpatient who has felt the thrust of
ol' Pointy's scalpel once too often, or a particularly perspicuous
ticket cashier (cf the sentry at 45.14). 

Hopping aboard the soapbox again for a mo', I don't think this
indeterminacy is just a narrative game, a three-card monte; if it were
it'd be pretty shallow. Whenever it switches to the "you" mode there's
always this intrusive element, this sense that the text is breaking out
of frame and addressing the reader directly, kinda like we (as bourgeois
Westerners with enough available leisure time and shared acculturation
to read big fat portentous novels about 'history' and 'ideas' like this
one) are also disecting/fucking with the real mortal plight and despair
of victims such as these, a mirror up to our pedantry and precious
demurrals over this theme or that piece of imagery or the narrative
stance, an indictment of us for our complacency. It also seems to me to
be of a piece with the opening Evacuation sequence in some respects --
tone, pace, point of view, imagery, surreality, ominousness,
non-specificness. The dream-denizens here are almost the same as the
nameless faceless throngs there (later to be recast as Thanatoids,
perhaps.) The setting is slightly shifted too, I guess, but maybe
Pynchon just did a quick cut, edit and paste and what the hey. 

best