V-2nd - Chapter 8 - Section IV - Stencil's soliloquy - paragraph 2

[Michael Bailey]

"What a joke if at the end of this hunt he came face to face with
himself afflicted by a kind of soul-transvestism.  How the Crew would
laugh and laugh."


(because that's what they do?  ah, but they have a kind side don't
they?  "we're a real mean team, but we can love," as Mott the Hoople
said in "All the Young Dudes"  but Stencil doesn't know them that
well)

so, is Stencil still on his pilgrimage?  He got shot in the sewer but
even then didn't take up arms.
But we know he is going to heist the dentures --
is that tantamount to some explorer stealing the ruby from the holy statue?


He's willing to consider that V. might be "himself afflicted by a kind
of soul-transvestism."
That would imply
a) men and women have a similar involvement in history (if you tickle
us do we not laugh?)
b) or also perhaps that Stencil would have to face the limitations of
his ability to organize the data?

still, in that event she would be different to him - but not enough!
He'd be a laughingstock.

He's not willing to consider any kind of metempsychosis - the actual
V. doesn't need to counterfactually be the same from data point to
data point.
rather, "his quarry fitted in with The Big One, the century's master
cabal, in the same way Victoria had with the Vheissu plot [which,
shucks, there really wasn't a Vheissu plot at all...it only existed in
the mind of the British Foreign Office]
and Veronica with the new rat-order [which only existed in the mind of
Father Fairing]"

what I extract from that is that it's a delusion, a rathouse...

but by saying that, I withhold sympathy from Stencil, place him in the
normal distribution of types, while asserting my own cathedral of
interpretation (Stencil qua Brit with the colonial karma mucking about
in the comparatively innocent former colony) which I'm pretty sure
anyone on the P-list can discern a normal distribution of
rat-droppings in...my own place outside the pattern...hee hee...

"divilish sly" (the Major, in Dombey and Son, IIRC)

...and asserting the "ultimate Plot Which Has No Name" --- kinda like
the old dudes in GR who wowed themselves thinking of calamities about
to happen, getting a frisson from that?  or is that more of my
rat-house?



-- 
- But you can wade in the water
and never get wet
if you keep on doin' that rag (Grateful Dead, "Doin' That Rag")