Gottfried & Blicero

[jbor]

David M.

> So, imo, the 
> "extended reverie about the 'steaming fumaroles' of Nature" is all from
> Blicero's mouth.

I agree that Blicero's vision as portrayed in his final goodnight story to
young Gottfried is the same as the one depicted in this sequence, and it's
the same intimation that tree-hugger Tyrone and Empty One leader Josef
Ombindi seem to be feeling as well. It seems to me that there is a sort of
collective unconscious thing going on in this linking passage with Pan and
the Titans: Geli clears her conscious mind in order to conjure up Tchitchy;
Greta and Thanatz have broken through the pain/cruelty barrier to some sort
of purer state (dunno 'bout this one, will need to reread their last scene
again more closely); Gottfried in his innocence is still pretty much tabula
rasa; Blicero's in there; Enzian and co too. I do think there is a sense of
nihilistic apocalyptism in it which I am wary of ascribing directly to
Pynchon (in fact, I'd suggest Pynchon might be even more cynical than
Tyrone, Blicero, Ombindi et. al.), but it certainly seems that it is the
text generating this mystical epiphany rather than any single character. It
is a link passage too, however, and serves a structural function. And I
think that these are some of the characters in the novel who are depicted as
having had a glimpse beyond "human consciousness, that poor cripple, that
deformed and doomed thing." In other words, they have been able to transcend
subjectivity I guess.

It seems to me that the/a point being made is that the "green uprising"
proceeds regardless of man, and that that is a good thing. It recalls the
"Moss Creature" stirring back on 523-524 for Leunagasolin-sniffing Pavel &
co. And it is a motif repeated in the "seized bearings, rotted socks and
skivvies fragrant now with fungus and mud" -- the biological processes of
life, rust, decomposition, unicellular algaes etc -- these things are still
able to reclaim whatever mechanical destruction has been wrought by man. It
reminds me a little bit of the final paragraph of Zola's *Germinal*
actually. In this other magnificent historical novel from almost a century
before *GR* Etienne Lansou departs Montsou forever in seeming defeat, but
there is an affirmation of life and regeneration amidst all the tragedy,
despair and oppression of the working classes in the mining towns of
provincial France:

      Deep down underfoot the picks were still obstinately hammering away.
    All his comrades were there, he could hear them following his every
    step. Beneath this field of beet was it not Maheude, bent double at
    her task, whose hoarse grasps for breath were coming up to him, mingled
    with the whirring of the ventilator? To left and to right far away into
    the distance he thought he could recognize other friends under the corn,
    the hedges and young trees. The April sun was now well up in the sky,
    shedding its glorious warming rays on the teeming earth. Life was
    springing from her fertile womb, buds were bursting into leaf and the
    fields were quickening with fresh green grass. Everywhere seeds were
    swelling and lengthening, cracking open the plain in their upward
    thrust for warmth and light. The sap was rising in abundance with
    whispering voices, the germs of life were opening with a kiss. On and
    on, ever more insistently, his comrades were tapping, tapping, as though
    they too were rising through the ground. On this youthful morning, in
    the fiery rays of the sun, the whole country was alive with this sound.
    Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in
    the furrows, thrusting upwards for the harvests of future ages. And very
    soon their germination would crack the earth asunder.

Man contra Nature. I think that the warning of *GR*, the one that WvB
pooh-poohs in the opening epigraph, the one that hovers a bee's-dick over
our heads at the novel's close, is that man will one day invent and unleash
something so powerful that it *will* totally annihilate everything, that
there will be no "green uprising" to follow it. The reason rational
scientific man invents these ever more destructive mechanisms, the reason
man is so pro-death and anti-Nature, is because of this "deformed and
doomed" mind which assures him of his own mortality, his own personal
apocalyptic end, finite and certain. I think that this is why we need as
many myths of the afterlife as we can get, as many as Pynchon can cram into
*GR*, as antidotes to the "crippled ... human consciousness" which knows its
own doom, and so wants to take everyone and everything else along with it
when it goes.

best


----------
>From: "David Morris" <fqmorris at hotmail.com>
>To: jbor at bigpond.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: Gottfried & Blicero
>Date: Fri, Aug 18, 2000, 3:49 AM
>