IJ study archive

Molly Notkin's interrogation (pp. 787–788)

quote

explaining in very simple childlike language to whomever the film’s camera represents that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother.

Context

This is the closest the novel comes to describing what's actually on the lethal cartridge, and the content is a lullaby about maternal death. Madame Psychosis, naked and (by trick lens) hugely pregnant, leans over the camera and explains "in very simple childlike language" that Death is female and maternal — that the woman who kills you is your next life's mother. The Entertainment's lure is thus a womb-promise addressed to an infant: not spectacle or violence but a soft cosmology of being killed lovingly and reborn, delivered in baby-talk to a viewer positioned as a baby. It's the purpose-as-artifact the theme claims as ours — a pleasure so total because it speaks to the deepest infantile want, the want to be taken back in, and it kills by granting it.

Quoted from

In anthology