GRGR(3) 50.31 Love Pointsman Style

[rj]

s~Z:
> (50.13) 'And those who do let go at last: out of each catharsis rise new
> children, painless, egoless for one pulse of the Between . . . tablet
> erased'
> 
> This seems to me to be both a description of those who have successfully
> gone through the catharsis of treatment and the same children on whom
> Pointsman preys.  'How Pointsman lusts after them, pretty children.'
> 
> Yet when I look down at the first of the 'you' paragraphs I see a
> description of a girl who is arRIving at the bus station. So she is
> neither one cured nor one released prematurely. She may indeed be a
> little girl. These may be different children than the children arising
> out of catharsis,

OKOKOK. The *thought* of procuring one of Spectro's transmarginalised
foxes (stimulus) gets our Ned all hot and horny (response) so off he
trots to the nearest likeliest pick-up spot to grab himself a tasty
piece of crumpet and get his rocks off. He may or may not be successful:
satisfaction is less than guaranteed as habit has proved, but he *will*
get his rocks off either way. And, yes, he knows the "Arrivals schedule
by heart, by hollow heart." So, they aren't outpatients at all that he's
after. But the two things -- conditioning a human subject and having sex
with a human subject -- are for him one and the same. Sexuality and
science have become all wrapped up together in Pointsman's psyche; they
exist for him as manifestations of *control*. (I suspect s~Z might have
said all this at the beginning.)

The confusion of the two incidents in Pointsman's mind ("One of the
things Spectro said that night -- surely it was that night" 51.38),
their contiguity and juxtaposition in the narrative, makes the
connection at least significant for the text/reader, however. Maybe it
*is* some sublimated Freudian ego/moral conscience chastising Neddy from
within his own mind at this point -- the "you" section -- I can't see it
as either conscious or current internal monologue though. Authorial
projection of a character's subconsciousness isn't out of the question,
although it seems the problem here might be that expression of such
would be at a sub-linguistic level too, wouldn't it? Or else what we've
got's a Freudian interlocutor narrating, Poinstman's shrink perhaps.

Another problem, as s~Z pinpoints, is whether we accept a single or
separate denotation for "children". And maybe there is just a hint that
the scope of that reference to the "Lord of the Night's children"
(49.27) extends beyond the bomb blast victims in Spectro's wards and
"all over this frost and harrowed city . . . "(49.29) in fact; and
indeed further still, on to all of humanity, all of us "children"
(50.32) streaming in from places unknown, into "this city" (Death?).
Thus the switch to 2nd person to mark the metaphysical shift, the
universality of this fate. Don't know if I like this one though,
because, as with the opening, the specific terror (whether it be that of
the Blitz evacuees or the Holocaust death trains there, or these
stub-limbed bomb blast victims here) is appropriated, simply and
undiscriminatingly it seems to me, as a metaphor for human mortality.

And, yes, the "she" described at 50.40 may be a child, the drooping
knitted stockings and the "*little* heels" kicking in the previous
sentence seem to characterise Pointsman's assignations as such, but the
pronoun at that point is "their", so what we've got is a confusion
between the generic (i.e. Pointy's past and future sexual encounters at
the bus station) and the specific (this girl -- "she" -- resting her
head on her coat). So, yes, there is a *suggestion* that Mr Pointy's a
rampant pedophile, but the text stops short of a definitive announcement
of this as a (fictive) fact. 

Cagey. Another one of those 
> accusations, taunts, kiddings, fondlings, whatever they are, 
as Paul sez.

best