Gottfried & Blicero

[jbor]

Just after that scene of Geli's vigil, the young visionary witch seeking in
the "golden" twilight omens of her lover's return (719-20), comes the last
goodnight of the old "myopic" witch, Blicero, and his own young lover,
Gottfried ('God's peace'). It is an inversion, or changing of the guard.
Between the two scenes, linking them together in fact, is an extended
reverie about the "steaming fumaroles" of Nature before "human
consciousness", a time of "Titans" when there was

     an overspeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona
     about the earth's body that some spoiler *had* to be brought in before
     it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out
     to multiply, to have dominion. God's spoilers. Us. Counter-
     revolutionaries. *It is our mission to promote death* ... holding down
     the green uprising ... (720.23)

Those pronouns, as always, are telling. And Blicero -- "Dominus Blicero" --
frail and failing in the final days, has been just such a "crippled keeper",
has held dominion.

So now to Gottfried, moving "image to image, room to room" like his twin
sister Katje had so many pages before (92.24/113.4 up), and his soulful plea
that Blicero not die. "(But he will.)" (721.25): Such is the glib retort the
narrative offers the boy's prayer, but it is an inevitability which both men
also feel and know. Here, finally, the reader is given an insight into
Gottfried's character, his psyche, his parents and upbringing, and his
devotion to Blicero, all of which have been sketched in only ever so faintly
before.

How premonitory that passage describing their coupling seems now, that
epiphany about homosexuality and preterition:

     Blicero's seed, sputtering into the poisoned manure of his bowels . .
      . it is waste, yes, futility . . . but [...] there have to be these
     too, lovers whose genitals *are* consecrated to shit, to endings, to
     the desperate nights in the streets where connection proceeds out of
     all personal control, proceeds or fails, a gathering of fallen -- as
     many in acts of death as in acts of life [...]
         (722.1)

And afterwards, Blicero to Gottfried:

     "Can you feel in your body how strongly I have infected you with my
     dying? I was meant to: when a certain time has come, I think that we
     are all meant to. Fathers are carriers of the virus of death, and sons
     are the infected [...]
         (723.30)

The spectre of AIDS hovers, palpable, impossible. What must Pynchon think of
those words today?

Blicero's scathing monologue, his vision of the Deathkingdom of man, is both
an echo of the previous passage about the Titans and a relinquishment of the
control which he has aspired to and wielded, a renunciation in fact of the
type of witchery Geli seeks to invoke. It is also an admission of his love
for Gottfried, or, even more poignantly, an acknowledgement that he is loved
by the youth. What's more, he is "*suddenly asking*", he is actually giving
Gottfried a choice; as spring's rebirth, and the "green uprising", silently
reclaim the fragile remnants of the last, lost war:

     It all poises here. Passageways of routine, still cogent enough,
     still herding us through time . . . the iron rockets waiting outside
      . . . the birth-scream of the latest spring torn across rainy miles of
     Saxony, route-sides littered with last envelopes, stripped gears,
     seized bearings, rotted socks and skivvies fragrant now with fungus and
     mud. If there is still hope for Gottfried here in this wind-beat
     moment, then there is hope elsewhere. The scene itself must be read as
     a card: what is to come. Whatever has happened since to the figures in
     it (roughly drawn in soiled white, army gray, spare as a sketch on a
     ruined wall) it is preserved, though it has no name, and, like The
     Fool, no agreed assignment in the deck. (724.19)

The narrative becomes a tableau, then a coloured image on a card and then a
faint monochromatic line drawing on a crumbling wall before it recedes away
to nothing, to whatever the reader wishes to make of it.

Slothrop is last captured in a photo with The Fool too, "an English rock
group" (742.12 up).

The Fool in the Tarot is the wind that gives and releases life: dynamic,
chaotic, elusive. It does not carry a number even though it appears to have
double numeration. It is present behind every other of the cards in the deck
and is the link of the circular chain that they all form. It can signify the
entry or exit into a new cycle, the beginning of a whole new life. The
creative Fool wants to taste and feel life in order to progress; the
frivolous Fool clowns around, skipping here and there to avoid involvement.
The card might indicate travel, absences that can produce forlorness, breaks
of affection, irrational impulses, maladjustment, childishness, self-deceit,
or expiation. The Fool is like a life-force buried deep within ourselves,
urging us towards individuation, welling up from our unconscious and
unsettling the prejudices and beliefs we hold. It is often a leap in the
dark, entailing risks and paradoxical situations:

     One of the most important demands of The Fool is that you live life.
     That is to say, you do not rely on book knowledge, but acquire
     knowledge through experience of all sorts, both agreeable and
     disagreeable. Thus The Fool is purely impulsive and does not pass
     judgement. This can mean that The Fool in you maneuvers you into the
     most complicated situations, or into emotional circumstances that are
     hard to assess.
        Our conscious mind can pass judgement and say, "That is no good."
     The Fool simply says, "Be content to experience it and to profit by it!
     Live it and feel it. Nothing is bad, and everything I bring is usable."
     For The Fool is a factor that does not pass verdicts and, above all,
     has no guilt feelings ... [Hamaker-Zondag 131-2]

Way I read it, the scene's close on this card is an invitation to the reader
to put the book aside and reassess what it means to live and be human on
this planet. It is both open-ended and an ultimatum. If enmity and
alienation persevere then the Deathkingdom will prevail and continue to
prosper. Unless the reader can face Blicero the Nazi and see herself or
himself reflected there; unless she or he can admit kinship with this man,
some deep-felt human communion; then there is no hope. The demand Blicero is
making of Gottfried here is no longer one of submission, but of acceptance.

best