GRGR(5) War and sex

[ginnetti]

Paul Mackin wrote:

> 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.

Well, I try not to keep banging the same drum, but I think TRP is more
consciously engageing Joyce in GRGR than in V.  These two episodes in
particular remind me of some thematic mainstays within the Wake.  One might
look at pp. 21-23 or the bottome of p.15-16 in the Wake (the prankquean
episode and beginning of the mutt and jute episodes)*.  To my ear TRP's prose
even sounds like Joyce

"[The Book] was sold him on the sly, in the dar, during a Luftwaffe raid (most
existing copies had been destroyed din their warehouse early in the Battle of
Britain).  Pointsman never even saw the seller's face, the man vanishing into
the hoarse auditory dawn of the all-clear, leaving the doctor and The Book,
the dumb sheaf already heating up, moistening in his tight hand . . . yes it
might have been a rare work of erotica, certainly that coarse hand-set look to
the type. . . in cipher, the plaintext listing shameful delights, criminal
transports.  . . . And how much of the pretty victim straining against her
bonds does Ned ointsman see in each dog that visits his tenst stands. . . and
aren't scalpel and probe as decorative, as fine extensions as whip and cane?"
GRGR 87.37--88.8

Granted there is more happening in this passage than references to
Joyce--lot's more--but I'm wondering if TRP is suggesting yet another way of
reading a bit of his text.  As if reading The Wake that is.  The punning, the
autoerotics, the texts talking about German invasions, texts taking on a
religious significance. . .

IMHO don't think the comparison is a stretch, but what really interests me are
the implicatons. . .

*For those interested see http://members.xoom.com/Sinkest/finneganswake.htm a
bulky hypertext-anotated version with the pages in question


--Justin