GRGR(5) War and sex

[Paul Mackin]

On Tue, 29 Jun 1999, ginnetti wrote:

> One theme we might wish to discuss is the conflation of war and sex (not
> that this is new at this point, and not coincidentally introduced
> through Roger and Jessica) particularly through the description of war
> in sexualized terms.  I think of Slothrop and his possibly psychokinetic
> misogony, Pointsman and The Book, and then Pointsman's fetishization of
> conditioning. . . and so on.  Of course, the Pointsman passage here is
> taken to its extreme in the next episode.

Aren't we actually already on the 'next' episode, the oven episode that
is.

An interesting change from V. is that the sex/war/colonial stuff now
has a much more predominant weighting toward the homoerotic in it. Did P
discover or come to see a greater power in this kind of love? A way to
create characters who are, well, somehow greater works of art (one 
of which Weissman certainly is) extending up to and including Clive and
Sir Marcus at the end of part 3. The situation doesn't approach Proust
where about nine tenth of the cast gets outed in the course of the book.
Not that either author short shrifts straight sex. What of the girls as
Jessica said. 

By any chance does what Weissman feels for Gottfried represent some
kind of romantic ideal that slowly  degenerates throughout, to a state of
boring bureaucray (bitchy faggotry) toward the end of the book? The WWI
of Pudding in the trenches  having long since been cast aside. 

Perhaps I'm putting too much emphasis on it. But however P does it this
episode for me reaches the heights in the writing I love.

			P.