GRGR(3) 50.31 Love Pointsman Style

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy!

I wrote (in part):
> > I agree to a point.  It has never occurred to me
> that this passage
> > might be a description of Pointsman creeping about
> after discharged
> > "foxes".  I've read it as a fantasy that Pynchon
> *assigns* to the
> > reader, rather than to the dreamlife of Pointsman
> alone.

> then s~z wrote:
> So what about the first sentence of the ensuing
> paragraph: 'Yet for all
> his agonizing. . .' I read that to indicate that the
> prior two
> paragraphs were descriptions of Pointsman's
> agonizing.

and now I proceed to beat the dead horse:
I mean't to say that the fantasy material under the loose rubric "You"
here, and perhaps elsewhere in other contexts, is on the one hand
*attributable* to Pointsman but *assigned* to the reader, like
unpleasant homework.  As if to circumvent our impulse, when confronted
with difficult data about an unsavory character, to withdraw our sense
of identification with the character -- to take the easy way out and
see him as just another Other beyond the pale.  As if the author says
"Here, chew on this for a while.  Hell, sleep on it and get back to
me."  This seems to me to be the sorry little fantasy of a (certainly
closeted and probably only latent) pederast, coupled with his
apprehension of the war as a sort of shredder, into which soldiers are
dropped one after another like waste.  Frustrated that he lacks
Authority to use them before they die, as they will anyway.  A nasty
brown dream indeed, but perhaps not entirely Pointsman's own, or
perhaps not anything he has ever acknowledged to his conscious self.

This material tries to take us closer to the character than he is to
himself.  As I read it, these are not entirely Pointsman's 'night
thoughts', but data to which he may not, himself, have access. The
"you" is in part YOU.  We all know who we are by now....

Mark
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