Last time Regeneration this time I swear.
Jun. 5th, 2006 02:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sub_divided(Can't some Veronica Mars fan or Hana Yori Dango fan or Ouran High School Host Club fan or, I don't know, someone who is in a fandom centered around the lives of ridiculously rich people take the c_o_f prompt Hey, doesn't _____'s family own a yacht? (I had to look up the spelling on yacht. I fail.))
Thing is, out of all the books I've read this month, for-class and not-for-class, Regeneration is the one most likely to appeal to the people reading this journal. (Or was it His Majesty's Dragon? It's a toss-up.) It's short, it's gay, it's full of witty repartee, it's Deep but not in an annoying way, and it flows. It's not an easy book -- protopathic? epicritically? false teeth? -- but it is an easy book to be carried along by.
Since I am going ahead with that paper about how avoidance of discussion is a major theme, not dissimilar to the greater "conspiracy of silence" surrounding the War, here are some quotes of characters not directly talking about homosexuality:
• "There were a lot of things I didn't tell them." (22)
• I suppose it's possible that someone might find being locked up in a loony bin a fairly emasculating experience?...That's what you Fruedian Johnnies are on about all the time, isn't it? Nudity, snakes, corsettes."
• "What the er snake might suggest is that medicine is an issue between yourself and your father-in-law?"
• "No." (29)
• If this is leading up to a joke about ladies' choruses, forget it. I've heard them all."
• Sassoon thought, we joke about it, but it happens. (33)
• "It suits him to attribute everything I've done to...a state of mental breakdown, because then he doesn't have to ask himself any awkward questions." (34)
• "I mean, there was the riding, hunting, cricketing me, and then there was the...other side...the one that was interested in poetry and music, and things of that kind." (35)
• Rivers percieved that he'd lead Sassoon unwittingly on to rather intimate territory. (53)
• "I read a book of his called The Indeterminate Sex."
• "I didn't seem to be able to feel...well. Any of the things you're supposed to feel...This book was a life-saver. Because I suddenly saw that...I wasn't just a freak. There were positive sides too. Have you read it?"
• "I don't know that the concept of an intermediate sex is as helpful as people think it is when they first encounter it. Obviously you have to admire the man's courage, and the way he's...opened up the debate." (54)
• "Ross is a close friend of Wilde's. I suppose he's learned to keep his head below the parapet." (54)
• "There is nothing more dispicable than using a man's private life to discredit his views." (55)
• "The first thing I remember is you listening to my chest." <-- Prior, who isn't gay but likes to tease. (67)
• "I don't usually include any..intimate details."
• "It's probably just as well. My intimate details disqualify me from military service." (70)
• "Lucky you. If you're stammer were the same as theirs, you might actually have to sit down and work out exactly what it is you've spent fifty years trying not to say." [This scene is followed by an extremely long Rivers POV spent looking out of the window at two young officiers who have partially undressed to roll around in the grass together, until they are scolded by the hospital staff and told to put their clothes back on.]
• It had to be done, though it seemed the [work] want more slowly after that, and there was less laughter, which was a pity. (98)
• "I did once think of asking you whether you'd fucked any of your headhunters." <-- Prior again, though this could be a general remark about behavior unfitting of an anthropologist. (99)
• Laynard hadn't thought he needed to provoke. Larnard had thought he knew. (106)
• "I don't see you as a father, you know." Looking up from in front of the fire. Laughing. "More as a sort of ...male mother. (107)
• "[Rivers] gets all the awkward ones." (121)
• "He's one of those...you can always tell." (137)
• "Do you remember Peter? ...you remember about him? Well, he was arrested. Soliciting outside the local barracks."
• "It's only fair I tell you that...since that happened my affections have nee running in more normal channels."
• "I'd hate you to have any misconception. About me. I'd hate you to think I was homosexual, even in thought." (199) <-- note that this is the only occurance of the world "homosexual" in the entire book, although possibly this is because at the time it was a scientific term, not well known to the general public.
• "They're sending him to Rivers...'Why?' To be cured, of course." (199)
• "They're all disappearing up their own arseholes up there."
• "Long as it's only their own," Lizzie said.
• "They're not all like that," Sarah said.
• "Biggest part are," said Madge. "Place I used to work for before the war, the son was like that." (200)
• "Friend of his -- a boy he knew at school and was very fond of -- in an entirely honorable, platonic, Robert-like way -- got arrested for soliciting...this abomidable thing must've been there all the time, and he didn't see it. He's very anxious to make it clear that...he has no such disgusting feelings himself." (203)
• I thought things were getting better."
• "It's not likely, is it, that any movement toward greater tolerance would persist in wartime? Afterall, in war you've got this enormous emphasis on love between men -- comradeship -- and everyone approves. But there's always this little niggle. Is it the right kind of love?"
• "One of the ways to ensure that it is is to make it crystal clear what the penalties for the other kind are." (204)
• "The whole atmosphere of the moment...the existence of a German Little Black Book containing the names of 47,000 eminent people whose private lives make their loyalty to their country suspect." (204) <-- shades of McCarthy zomg.
• "You're a friend of Robert Ross." (204)
• "If I can't conform in one area of life, then I have to conform in the others?...well, I can't live like that." (205)
• Probably why I never wanted you as Daddy...I've got you lined up for a worse fate." (210) <-- Prior on transferance of parental roles onto one's psychiatrist
• "I knew about the hero-worship, but I'm beginning to think it was rather more than that."
• "It happens." (243)
Annnnd some homoerotic or suggestive parts. None of them are blatant, but when there are so many you know it isn't accidental:
• He drew admiring glances, and not only from the women. (5)
• A flush of pleasure. "I think the front's the only place I've ever really belonged." (36)
• He cupped his genitals in his hands, not because he was ashamed of them but because they looked incongruous, they didn't seem to belong with the rest of him. (39)
• Now, waking up to find Rivers sitting beside his bed, unaware of being observed, tired and patient, he realized he'd come back for this. (40)
• Everything about Sassoon intimidated him...above all, his reputation for courage. Owen had his own reasons for being sensitive to that. (82)
• They'd done a series of control experiments on the glans penis, and and Henry had frequently expressed the desire for a reciprocal application of cubes, bristles, near-body water and pins. (48)
• It was possible to see the nape of his neck, defenceless under the stiff collar.
• Rivers said mischieviously, "Not bad-looking either." (117)
• "It makes it quite difficult to go on, you know. When things like this happen to people you know and...and love."
• "Wake up, Rivers. I thought you'd pounce on that."
• "I don't feel much like pouncing." (118)
These quotes are actually about different things, but it is not a coincidence that they could equally well be about homosexuality:
1. (page 116)
Then along came Sassoon and and made the war a matter of open debate, and that suppression was no longer possible...There are limits to the number of fundamental questions you want to ask in a working day that starts before eight am and doesn't end till midnight.
2. (page 98)
They'd been trained to identify emotional repression as the essence of manliness. Men who broke down, or cried, were sissies, weaklings, failures. Not men...Not that Rivers' treatment involved any encouragement of weakness or effeminancy.
3.
FATHER: [His mother]'s made a stool-arsed jack of him, if that's what you mean....He's neither fish nor fowl, and she's too bloody daft to see it. (56-57)
MOTHER: He's never been able to accept the fact that Billy was different. (58)
4. Prior again! ("You mustn't take everything Prior says seriously, he likes to tease." <-- Rivers)
"Not tonight, Wilhelm, I have a headache"
"Your room or mine?"
5. page 187
"Perhaps it would have been wiser not to tell him?"
Silence.
"After all, you must have had some idea of the kind of response you were likely to get."
"I can't keep it in all the time."
And here are some quotes I like, just because:
1. page 36
"You can't bear to be safe, can you?" ...He leant forward. "If you maintain your protest, you can expect to spend the rest of the war in a state of Complete. Personal. Safety."
2. page 30
A long silence.
Anderson said, "I'm going to start timing these silences, Rivers."
"It's already been done. Some of the younger men had a sweepstake on it. I'm not supposed to know."
3. [Prior came in the hospital unable to speak; a condition more common among service men than officers, Rivers says because officers have a more complex mental life and are less likely to be punished for speaking their minds]
"How long to convince that particular specimen of complexity that it hasn't got a broken spine?"
"How's your voice, Mr. Prior?"
Prior took a moment to register a direct hit.
"Fine. Problem over, I think I miss it. I used to enjoy my little Trappist times."
"Oh, I can believe that/ I've often thought how nice it would be to retreat into total silence now and again."
"What do you mean, 'how nice it would be'? You do it all the time."
4. page 66
"You know, you do a wonderful impression of a stuffed shirt."
5.
Ruggles said, "You mean he's running around the hospital bare-assed, frightening the VADS?" [VAD = volunteer nurse]
"No, he's wearing his other breaches. And your idea of what might frighten a VAD is-"
"Chivalrous."
"Naive," said Bryce. "In the extreme."
5.
"I believe the thought of my insanity is one of her few consolations."
7. page 107, guess which oft-maligned genre of fanfic I am thinking of:
"He didn't like the term male mother...he distrusted the implication that murturing, even when done by a man, remains female, as if the ability were borrowed, even stolen, from women."
8. page 83
"It's as if all other wars had somehow...distilled themselves into this war, and that makes it something you...almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice saying, Run along now, little man. Be grateful you survive.
Thing is, out of all the books I've read this month, for-class and not-for-class, Regeneration is the one most likely to appeal to the people reading this journal. (Or was it His Majesty's Dragon? It's a toss-up.) It's short, it's gay, it's full of witty repartee, it's Deep but not in an annoying way, and it flows. It's not an easy book -- protopathic? epicritically? false teeth? -- but it is an easy book to be carried along by.
Since I am going ahead with that paper about how avoidance of discussion is a major theme, not dissimilar to the greater "conspiracy of silence" surrounding the War, here are some quotes of characters not directly talking about homosexuality:
• "There were a lot of things I didn't tell them." (22)
• I suppose it's possible that someone might find being locked up in a loony bin a fairly emasculating experience?...That's what you Fruedian Johnnies are on about all the time, isn't it? Nudity, snakes, corsettes."
• "What the er snake might suggest is that medicine is an issue between yourself and your father-in-law?"
• "No." (29)
• If this is leading up to a joke about ladies' choruses, forget it. I've heard them all."
• Sassoon thought, we joke about it, but it happens. (33)
• "It suits him to attribute everything I've done to...a state of mental breakdown, because then he doesn't have to ask himself any awkward questions." (34)
• "I mean, there was the riding, hunting, cricketing me, and then there was the...other side...the one that was interested in poetry and music, and things of that kind." (35)
• Rivers percieved that he'd lead Sassoon unwittingly on to rather intimate territory. (53)
• "I read a book of his called The Indeterminate Sex."
• "I didn't seem to be able to feel...well. Any of the things you're supposed to feel...This book was a life-saver. Because I suddenly saw that...I wasn't just a freak. There were positive sides too. Have you read it?"
• "I don't know that the concept of an intermediate sex is as helpful as people think it is when they first encounter it. Obviously you have to admire the man's courage, and the way he's...opened up the debate." (54)
• "Ross is a close friend of Wilde's. I suppose he's learned to keep his head below the parapet." (54)
• "There is nothing more dispicable than using a man's private life to discredit his views." (55)
• "The first thing I remember is you listening to my chest." <-- Prior, who isn't gay but likes to tease. (67)
• "I don't usually include any..intimate details."
• "It's probably just as well. My intimate details disqualify me from military service." (70)
• "Lucky you. If you're stammer were the same as theirs, you might actually have to sit down and work out exactly what it is you've spent fifty years trying not to say." [This scene is followed by an extremely long Rivers POV spent looking out of the window at two young officiers who have partially undressed to roll around in the grass together, until they are scolded by the hospital staff and told to put their clothes back on.]
• It had to be done, though it seemed the [work] want more slowly after that, and there was less laughter, which was a pity. (98)
• "I did once think of asking you whether you'd fucked any of your headhunters." <-- Prior again, though this could be a general remark about behavior unfitting of an anthropologist. (99)
• Laynard hadn't thought he needed to provoke. Larnard had thought he knew. (106)
• "I don't see you as a father, you know." Looking up from in front of the fire. Laughing. "More as a sort of ...male mother. (107)
• "[Rivers] gets all the awkward ones." (121)
• "He's one of those...you can always tell." (137)
• "Do you remember Peter? ...you remember about him? Well, he was arrested. Soliciting outside the local barracks."
• "It's only fair I tell you that...since that happened my affections have nee running in more normal channels."
• "I'd hate you to have any misconception. About me. I'd hate you to think I was homosexual, even in thought." (199) <-- note that this is the only occurance of the world "homosexual" in the entire book, although possibly this is because at the time it was a scientific term, not well known to the general public.
• "They're sending him to Rivers...'Why?' To be cured, of course." (199)
• "They're all disappearing up their own arseholes up there."
• "Long as it's only their own," Lizzie said.
• "They're not all like that," Sarah said.
• "Biggest part are," said Madge. "Place I used to work for before the war, the son was like that." (200)
• "Friend of his -- a boy he knew at school and was very fond of -- in an entirely honorable, platonic, Robert-like way -- got arrested for soliciting...this abomidable thing must've been there all the time, and he didn't see it. He's very anxious to make it clear that...he has no such disgusting feelings himself." (203)
• I thought things were getting better."
• "It's not likely, is it, that any movement toward greater tolerance would persist in wartime? Afterall, in war you've got this enormous emphasis on love between men -- comradeship -- and everyone approves. But there's always this little niggle. Is it the right kind of love?"
• "One of the ways to ensure that it is is to make it crystal clear what the penalties for the other kind are." (204)
• "The whole atmosphere of the moment...the existence of a German Little Black Book containing the names of 47,000 eminent people whose private lives make their loyalty to their country suspect." (204) <-- shades of McCarthy zomg.
• "You're a friend of Robert Ross." (204)
• "If I can't conform in one area of life, then I have to conform in the others?...well, I can't live like that." (205)
• Probably why I never wanted you as Daddy...I've got you lined up for a worse fate." (210) <-- Prior on transferance of parental roles onto one's psychiatrist
• "I knew about the hero-worship, but I'm beginning to think it was rather more than that."
• "It happens." (243)
Annnnd some homoerotic or suggestive parts. None of them are blatant, but when there are so many you know it isn't accidental:
• He drew admiring glances, and not only from the women. (5)
• A flush of pleasure. "I think the front's the only place I've ever really belonged." (36)
• He cupped his genitals in his hands, not because he was ashamed of them but because they looked incongruous, they didn't seem to belong with the rest of him. (39)
• Now, waking up to find Rivers sitting beside his bed, unaware of being observed, tired and patient, he realized he'd come back for this. (40)
• Everything about Sassoon intimidated him...above all, his reputation for courage. Owen had his own reasons for being sensitive to that. (82)
• They'd done a series of control experiments on the glans penis, and and Henry had frequently expressed the desire for a reciprocal application of cubes, bristles, near-body water and pins. (48)
• It was possible to see the nape of his neck, defenceless under the stiff collar.
• Rivers said mischieviously, "Not bad-looking either." (117)
• "It makes it quite difficult to go on, you know. When things like this happen to people you know and...and love."
• "Wake up, Rivers. I thought you'd pounce on that."
• "I don't feel much like pouncing." (118)
These quotes are actually about different things, but it is not a coincidence that they could equally well be about homosexuality:
1. (page 116)
Then along came Sassoon and and made the war a matter of open debate, and that suppression was no longer possible...There are limits to the number of fundamental questions you want to ask in a working day that starts before eight am and doesn't end till midnight.
2. (page 98)
They'd been trained to identify emotional repression as the essence of manliness. Men who broke down, or cried, were sissies, weaklings, failures. Not men...Not that Rivers' treatment involved any encouragement of weakness or effeminancy.
3.
FATHER: [His mother]'s made a stool-arsed jack of him, if that's what you mean....He's neither fish nor fowl, and she's too bloody daft to see it. (56-57)
MOTHER: He's never been able to accept the fact that Billy was different. (58)
4. Prior again! ("You mustn't take everything Prior says seriously, he likes to tease." <-- Rivers)
"Not tonight, Wilhelm, I have a headache"
"Your room or mine?"
5. page 187
"Perhaps it would have been wiser not to tell him?"
Silence.
"After all, you must have had some idea of the kind of response you were likely to get."
"I can't keep it in all the time."
And here are some quotes I like, just because:
1. page 36
"You can't bear to be safe, can you?" ...He leant forward. "If you maintain your protest, you can expect to spend the rest of the war in a state of Complete. Personal. Safety."
2. page 30
A long silence.
Anderson said, "I'm going to start timing these silences, Rivers."
"It's already been done. Some of the younger men had a sweepstake on it. I'm not supposed to know."
3. [Prior came in the hospital unable to speak; a condition more common among service men than officers, Rivers says because officers have a more complex mental life and are less likely to be punished for speaking their minds]
"How long to convince that particular specimen of complexity that it hasn't got a broken spine?"
"How's your voice, Mr. Prior?"
Prior took a moment to register a direct hit.
"Fine. Problem over, I think I miss it. I used to enjoy my little Trappist times."
"Oh, I can believe that/ I've often thought how nice it would be to retreat into total silence now and again."
"What do you mean, 'how nice it would be'? You do it all the time."
4. page 66
"You know, you do a wonderful impression of a stuffed shirt."
5.
Ruggles said, "You mean he's running around the hospital bare-assed, frightening the VADS?" [VAD = volunteer nurse]
"No, he's wearing his other breaches. And your idea of what might frighten a VAD is-"
"Chivalrous."
"Naive," said Bryce. "In the extreme."
5.
"I believe the thought of my insanity is one of her few consolations."
7. page 107, guess which oft-maligned genre of fanfic I am thinking of:
"He didn't like the term male mother...he distrusted the implication that murturing, even when done by a man, remains female, as if the ability were borrowed, even stolen, from women."
8. page 83
"It's as if all other wars had somehow...distilled themselves into this war, and that makes it something you...almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice saying, Run along now, little man. Be grateful you survive.