Gottfried & Blicero

[Dave Monroe]

... yeah, that Father/Son thing, a Crucifixion of sorts going on, that crossroads,
indeed, Gottfried ("God's Peace") "has a decision to make."  "Why is he suddenly
asking ...?" echoing "Father, why have you forsaken me?"  Making Enzian the Holy
Ghost?  Or even the Rocket 00000?  And note that "one-way flow of European time" just
prior, followed by Blicero's "I want to break out--to leave this cycle of infection
an death," and the subsequent "It all poises here" (V724/B844).  And, in light of
recent uses/mentions of Nietzsche here, that "Will Blicero di no please don't let him
die.... (But he will. 'You're going to survive me'" (V721/B840) ...

... but on The Importance of Being Masculine, which, now that I think of it, need not
necesarily be the same thing as "be[ing] men" ... it's interesting here that Blicero
dominance (Dominus Blicero) and Gottfried's submissiveness do indeed seem mapped onto
that Male/female, Masculine/feminine ((c) Jean-Luc Godard) binary.  No matter how
long-standing and deeply-rooted those associations might be, it's not necessary, and,
certainly, not essential, to make them.  And it still seems Significant, esp. as it
comes so shosrtly after the first passage, that those Moon colonists, "they are all
men" ...

At the end of Part 3, just after Clive Mossmoon "feels himself rising, as from a
bog," it is mentioned that, "here inside the Operation," "There is no lower self."
"The issues are too momentous for the lower self to interfere."  (Keep in mind Dale
Carter's discussion of the emergence of a new postwar subjectivity here, "Appendix 2"
to his The Final Frontier).   "Even in the chastisement room at Sir Marcus's estate,
'The Birches,' the foreplay is a game about who has the real power, who's had it all
along, chained and corseted though he be, outside these shackled walls" (V616/B718).
(Hm ... cf. not only Michel Foucault's discussion of Greco-Roman homosexuality as
being not only structured by, but primarily a matter of power relationships, but also
Gilles Deleuze's essay on the masochistic contract, which actually places the
masochist in control of the relationship--The Importance of Being Harnessed ....)

"It wasn't always so.  In the trenches of the First World War, English men came to
love one another decently, without shame or make-believe, under the easy likelihoods
of their sudden deaths, and to find in the faces of young men evidence of
otherworldly visits, some poor hope that they may have heplped redeem even mud, shit,
the decaying pieces of human meat."  "... while Europe died meanly in its own wastes,
men loved.  But the life-cry of that love has longed sinced hissed away into no more
than this idle and bitch faggotry.  In this latest war, death was no enemy, but a
collaborator.  Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and
the real and only fucking is done on paper...."  (V616/B718, folllowed shortly
therafter by Richard M. Nixon's epigraphic "What?" (source?))  Comments?  Am curious
(an interesting word to use in this context) ...

Paul Mackin wrote:

> I read "important they both be men" to mean that at this critical
> point Blicero does not wish to use Gottfried for a girl (image him as a
> girl or woman), the implication being that at other times such might be
> the case. Perhaps the seriousness and finality of the present occasion
> require that Gottfried be allowed his true biological male identity. Also
> it will accommodate a father/son relation. But I'm no sexpert.
>
>                                 P.