GRGR (33) - The Glass Sphere

[jbor]

----------
>From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
>
> ... reminds me, speaking of subjectivity 'n' space, anyone here familiar
> with Joseph
> McElroy's Plus?

Brian McHale devotes a chapter to it, in *Constructing Postmodernism* I
think, or it might be the earlier one.

> But I'm not so sure just how
> "redeeming" Gottfried's launching, perhaps death, perhaps the death of the
> audience at the Orpheus Theater, perhaps the death of humanity (for starters),
is
> here ...

I think that there are a number of povs overlayed one on another here, let
alone the historical and allegorical interplay. It might be worthwhile to
start trying to tease them out. Gottfried's love is certainly redeeming on a
personal level for Blicero I think. And Gottfried's faith doesn't waver,
despite the doubt: "*Why is he suddenly asking . . . * (No question mark
though.) It was Jesus's faith in "God", or God's plan, which stopped Him
from fleeing back to safe haven in Tyre and Sidon when He could have, just
as Gottfried could easily have fled into the woods and stayed out of harm's
way, as David M. pointed out. Now let's say, just hypothetically, that "God"
didn't really exist back in ca 28 AD. Then what Gottfried decides to do in
the novel is exactly what Jesus decided back then. (An expiation of the sins
of the Reich? Those sins including the persecution of the Jews/the
Holocaust, absent though these may be from the text/Text?) Blicero thus
becomes the absent *human* father/God in the Gospels whom Pynchon has made
flesh. (Keep in mind also that in Mark it is with a kiss that Jesus is
betrayed by Judas.)

Let me try a bit of enthymeming here: Gottfried = God's peace; Weissman =
white/wise man (old sage, prophet?), Dominus Blicero = domination +
(in)sight; Pirate Prentice = Pilate apprentice? No?

Anyway ...

So, by putting his lover/son into the 00000 in that final launch before the
Allied push is Blicero perhaps "redeeming" the German V-2 program by
restoring its space exploration potentialities, returning the focus to the
"Wandervogel idiocy" of those rocket scientists in the meadow (Franz,
Wernher & co) and moving it away from the Nazi (and Allied) plan(s) for
world domination (which will actually entail world obliteration)? It's the
Schwarzgerat rather than the 00000 which the Grailseekers are really
seeking, isn't it? The 00000 is just another rocket; Jesus's cross just
another wooden crucifix. But if Gottfried can survive in space for those few
moments, transcend as Jesus did for those couple of days, then the course of
human history might be changed again, apocalypse might be averted, the sins
of humanity again deferred? If science is allowed to confer the illusion of
immortality and transcendence (celluloid, space colonies et. al.) now that
"God is dead" (c. Nietzsche) and personal mortality is certain and final
then is there a possibility that that "crippled" and "doomed" human
consciousness will be kept pacified for another swag of years?

I think that there is perhaps another option being depicted in the
Slothrop-situation (immanence, "the defection rate"), but it is the reserve
of "a few". And, only hopefully, enough, to keep "God's spoilers" (i.e.
"Us.") from their (our) 'victory'.

I have little doubt that we (the readers, and future readers) are that
audience at the novel's close, but it is the suspension of apocalypse rather
than apocalypse itself which Pynchon is playing on (even outside of the
"movie" of the historical almost-apocalypse we have been watching for the
last 758 pages or so). One can't really *depict* apocalypse, after all, can
one? But his warning is about just how close it is and has been in this
century.

Maybe it *is* a good thing that *GR* (and the Bible) aren't more
widely-read, and *understood*, after all ...

best