GRGR(11): More on Webley

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

> Mike Crowley wrote:

> 
> Now how do we move from Webley Silvernail to the
> Brigadier, from cute dancing mice to shit-eating old men?
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> Michael J. Crowley
> ------------------------------
> 10 Park Hall
> crowley at arches.uga.edu

We follow Pointy on one level. Pointy is in one sense
Richard III--a dog in need of money and a Lab/WAR. He needs
money to fund his mad plans. Confronted with the extinction
of his program, "[Pointy] gained a great bit of Wisdom: that
if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is
nothing analogous in bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It
come down, as it must, to the desires of individual men."
Since Pudding has the bank, Pointy needs to control him,
control his desires. What does the old man desire?  He
desires to be demeaned, debased, and dead. Now if Pointy
kills him, who will take over the money? Can't risk it. So,
since Katje--pointy's dividend--is of no use in his Slothrop
plan at the moment, he casts her as the Domina Nocturna to
satisfy, if only symbolically, an Earnest desire for death.
Pointy directs the ritual, the test, the return of the
repressed, the stages or cells. The rituals in the seventh
cell (not sure of the allusion here, revelations?) involves
eating shit and golden cocktails and "when the [cane] cums
down." He eats the shit of the Mistress of Death--a ritual
of oneness with his fallen comrades. He drinks the piss in
remembrance of Passchendael. He is caned in the S/M ritual
to purify. Now when he speaks of Badajoz, he refers to the
Mistress as the Bride (again, an allusion to Christ,
perhaps) as the recipient of the hymn that proclaims Death
as the Bride, as Christ, I think?? The rats, one could say,
desire to live as humans. But no one is free of the cage of
the war, of the lab, of the big D, Except Slothrop. 

TF